While Barack Obama had a lot of success spreading his message virally on the Web before he was elected president, his victory speech is on its way to becoming one of the fastest-spreading viral videos of all time. The official campaign version of the video on YouTube (embedded below) alone has been watched 1.9 million times in the past two days. But more than 500 different versions and clips of the speech have spread across the Web and been watched more than 6.8 million times.
According to Visible Measures, which tracks video views across YouTube and more than 150 other video-sharing sites, by 11 AM ET on November 5, there were 100 versions of the video that had been watched 620,000 times. By 5:30 PM, the number had grown to 2.2 million views across 160 different videos. By 11:30 PM, it was 4.9 million views across 250 videos. Finally, at 9:30 AM this morning it was 6.8 million views across 500 videos. (These numbers are charted above. They do not include any livestreams or views on the sites of the broadcast networks except for NBC.com, so this is just a subset of the total views of the speech).
When big, historic events happen, people are increasingly going to turn to the Web to watch it. Just look at the interactive chart below from TubeMogul, which shows the daily views on YouTube of official Obama and McCain videos. The Obama’s campaign always did a good job spreading its message through YouTube, but daily views were typically under half a million. On Election Day, that number rose to 3 million, and then kept on spiking the day after to 3.9 million, largely pushed by views of the victory speech.
More people watched the speech live on TV than they have so far on the Web (60 million households, according to Nielsen’s), but the Web is where events resonate and grow. At this rate, it won’t take long will it take for the Web video numbers to eclipse the TV numbers.
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It was truly amazing to see his speech live on the big screens in Times Square (NYC) and it doesn’t surprise me how much buzz this video has generated. All the taxis were honking and everyone was cheering. If you have that much fervor in real life, it’s a no brainer people will want to see it online.
You are kidding me, right? Give it a break, guys. He’s a good speaker. Hooray. Will he succeed as president? No.
LOSER!!
“Will he succeed as president?”
We don’t know yet. We don’t know what any president is going to do once they get to office, considering their jobs as politicians involve quite a bit of lying.
L
OMG, that tubemogul spike is incredible! Amazing that none of the sites I was visiting went down on election night. Must have been lots of behind the scenes preparation to insure circuits were not melting.
Yeah, I saw it in Grant Park, Chicago and have re-watched it online… it’s a video you can stand to watch more than once.
(I actually liked McCain’s concession speech even more… have to say.)
No doubt making a video go viral was the reason to run for presidency… ;p
And of course when it is posted on sites like TechCrunch, it becomes exponential or something ever more steep.
Take that “evolution of dance”
Erick, is it really so shocking that this video has been watched so many times? Do we really need a story about it?
This isn’t a “viral” video. The video (the speech) was aired on every major Television network in the country and world-wide; it was referenced in every major newspaper around the world — this is very much mass-mediated.
It is not “word-of-mouth” or “viral” when it is in all of our TV sets, on the front page of all of our newspapers and world-wide news.
Viral … seriously?
I agree Martin, especially when its published on Obama’s own web site. The essence of viral marketing is that it is passed on by others, not thrown in the faces of people wherever they look.
It does seem like TechCrunch doesn’t understand what the words and phrases used in “Web 2.0″ mean.
part of the reason why his victory speech gets 2M views is because YouTube featured it in its homepage
But I have to admit that Obama takes advantage of the Internet pretty good. That’s my President!
you can’t MAKE a video “viral”. just because your video is watched a lot does not make it “Viral”!!
Please swiftly place forehead to your keyboard, allowing the keyboard to stop your momentum. repeat.
Hi all: Matt Cutler from Visible Measures here. I wanted to weigh in on the issues of ‘what is a viral video?’ and ’should we care about this one?’ -> on the first, I’d agree that view counts alone don’t make a viral video… but hundreds of unique copies (not embeds!) of a video do. I look at viral video campaigns all day long — we have a database of over 100 million videos after all — and I’ve never seen any piece of content come close to 500 placements in under 36 hours. I’m not saying it hasn’t happened… I’ve just never seen it! By any objective measure, this speech is not just a viral video, but a landmark viral video.
As far as ’should we care?’, that’s obviously much more subjective. As an independent third-party measurement company, we try to stay out of evaluating the relative value of any particular video — whether it be a Nike ad featuring Kobe Bryant or a high-profile political speech. Instead, we focus on the numbers and honestly enjoy sharing new discoveries with our clients and blog readers. And make no mistake about it… the Obama speech is so far — ahem — a viral video phenomenon that has few, if any, peers. From where I sit, that’s worth talking about.
Thanks for weighing in on this!
Matt
Visible Measures
This video is probably NEITHER extremely viral nor not viral at all. Virality is the rate at which one viewer leads to new viewers. If each viewer leads to more than one new viewer (viral factor >1), the video will experience exponential growth. There is still a growth benefit if each viewer leads to between zero and one new viewer, but the video won’t experience exponential growth. However, there is a way around this for videos whose viral factor is less than one: seeding. If the powers that be (YouTube, NBC, etc.) give a video an advantage by seeding it to a large audience, the video can grow tremendously without actually being very viral. My guess is that the Obama video is an example of this - massively seeded and not very viral.
Obama’s figures are impressive !!
don’t post data from fake metric companies again Erick….its lame…you are taking data from this guy, Matt Cutler here:
http://flickr.com/photos/teamcutler/134430313/
It’s like getting kicked in the nuts Erick…NUTS.
Awesome.
If you liked that one, you should have seen my Halloween costume this year. Actually… probably not.
Matt
where is the pic?
Lol nice flickr pic
- Spend 20 million of vc money to create visible measures
- Hire a lot of executives to wear wigs
- Pay an exec to create a graph that is a slash mark….priceless
/ <—– slash! That’s my frakkin graph of Obama views.
Obama’s a great speaker. The quality of the video uploaded is an important point to note!
Btw
Check out http://www.jobstaxi.com
New Jobs. Last.fm. Zappos.com. Gaia Interactive. Jigsaw. Slipknot. Web Giant Media
Race, gender, culture, human psychology, intellectual whirl and biases alltogether put great impact atleast on the voting day!
Other than being a nice guy………..BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA is a communist leaning socialist.
He will leave us in IRAQ for another year because the surge worked….he lied abou this
He will raise taxes on EVERYONE….he lied about this
He will make friends with ENEMIES like we did in the Clinton years and they will come back to our nonbackbone philosophy and kill more americans
He will make government bigger, handout checks to bums that don’t work calling it a tax cut when they pay NONE
The press will give him a pass for 8 years probably because they feel a “shiver up their pant leg” like Chris Matthews.
Again he is a human being…seems nice…understands our problems…which is easy we all do….but his policies and solutions SUCK.
WELCOME to THE UNITED COMMUNISTS OF AMERICA! God help us….
..
Ahahaha! You are too funny, man. Too funny.
God is helping us, what makes you think God is not in charge. If you cannot trust the man, just trust God and relax. Life is so short stop wasting your time worrying about things you don’t fully understand. It could be possible things will work out just fine and if they don’t, well at least you would not have been wasting your life the hold time worrying. Scripture say’s “Lean not unto your own understanding…..” Love You!!!
Receiving 100k views on any youtube video can be done in less than 4 days.
Once you reach 100k youtube takes care of it to make it viral.
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
Obama’s cool, but this video is way cooler!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovRF5MpxDYY
hahahahah… watch this video
MR.CRIMINAL