While the 2008 Republican National Convention viral video race may still be too early to call, initial results from our Viral Reach Database indicate that Sarah Palin is well on her way to becoming a viral video star. She came out of the gate Wednesday night with what was, by most accounts, the speech of her life, which, in just 36 hours after her acceptance of the Republican vice presidential nomination, has accumulated more than 1.3 million viral video views. That's 10x as much as the RNC runnerup: Rudy Giuliani, who has 128,000 views.
Two of the more prominent early speakers at the convention, American beer-distributor Cindy McCain and frustrated-grammarian Laura Bush, both spoke on Monday evening and have together accrued nearly 129,000 views total. Our figures suggested Palin's speech was on track to pass Mrs. McCain and Mrs. Bush's combined total in less than 24 hours online. It has – by a longshot.
Palin’s online video magnetism could be part of a larger narrative for the RNC: women speakers – Sarah Palin, Laura Bush, and Cindy McCain – have so far produced almost 83% of online video views connected with the convention. This is includes GOP headliner John McCain, who spoke last night.
Look for our political convention roundup on Monday, when we'll be unveiling the results of our Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin ticket analysis and the next ruler of the free world... of viral video! Just kidding. But we're not done with the politicians yet. We'll be tracking the triumphs and the meltdowns of the campaigns as they trudge down the final stretch to November 4. And, as always, if you have any matchups you'd like to see, or if you have videos of your own you'd like us to track, please let us know.
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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.
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Post updated on 9/5/08: the data presented here was refreshed on 9/5 to reflect the latest data from our Viral Reach Database. All numbers that were updated are now presented in italics. The chart has also been updated.