As we've said many times in the past, the viral video audience votes with its mouse. And if viral video views are any indication of voter intent, Michelle Obama's star is on the rise. In fact, her address at the 2008 Democratic National Convention has attracted more views than Hillary and Bill Clinton's combined.
After conducting a series of head-to-head viral video match-ups earlier this week focused on Olympic stars, we set our sites on the just-wrapped-up Democratic National Convention. To keep things interesting, we decided to look past the headline Obama/Biden ticket and focus instead on the supporting cast: candidate-first-lady Michelle Obama, runner-up nominee Senator Hillary Clinton, general spotlight-dominator and former President Bill Clinton, and last-minute-special-guest-appearance Senator Ted Kennedy.
Each has a compelling case for attracting online audiences. Ted Kennedy made an inspirational speech in his first public appearance after undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumor in June. Michelle Obama was the least known of the group with perhaps the most to prove. All eyes were on Hillary Clinton, as the Democratic party faithful held their breath to see if she would truly support the party's nominee. And Bill Clinton is Bill Clinton, after all. Could he shake off the animosity of the primaries and embrace the new leader of the democratic party?
While the confetti has barely finished falling in Denver, we of course are curious to see which speeches online audiences prefer. Somewhat surprisingly, Michelle Obama's speech won in a proverbial viral video landslide, collecting more than 1.2 million viral in just three days. Perennial runner-up Hillary Clinton came in, well, second place, with almost 590,000 views. The silver-lining (pun 100% intended) for Hillary is that she edged out her famously over-shadowing husband, who garnered 45,000 fewer views. And despite virtually universal praise for his speech, local-hero Ted Kennedy ran a distant fourth with under 290,000 views.
What do you think tipped the balance in favor of Michelle?
Next week, we're looking forward to switching our attention to the 2008 Republican National Convention, paying close attention to McCain’s out-of-the-box vice president pick Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska and the first female undercard for the Republicans. Depending on our workload, after everything has wrapped up we might compare the Obama/Biden speeches versus the McCain/Palin speeches. If you want to take a guess on which ticket will prevail, we encourage you to leave a comment below.
If you have any videos or subjects you would enjoy seeing highlighted in one of our Visible Match-ups, please let us know. We’re happy to put our 95+ million video Viral Video Database to work for you and share the results. Also, if you'd like to see some similar analysis against your own viral videos (or your competition's!), please contact our client team.
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The data used in this post was collected from our Viral Reach Database, a constantly growing video repository of analytic data on 95+ million Internet videos from 100+ video-sharing destinations.