Sarah Palin has been nothing short of a gift from viral video heaven for the folks behind Saturday Night Live. In just over a month, SNL has featured the Alaskan phenom on four memorably hilarious nights of presidential campaign “coverage,” propelling Tina Fey onto the comedic A-list. SNL has seen so much success that they’ve spilled over to Thursday nights. And it all continues to pick up speed.
In terms of viral video, the SNL/Sarah Palin franchise is a goliath. So far, using our Viral Reach Database, we’ve identified 200+ different SNL/Palin videos that, in aggregate, have accumulated more than 56 million (!!) viral video views. Every skit appears to have become an instant classic, as millions of viral video viewers have watched the introductory Palin / Clinton Press Conference, the epic Couric Interview, the spot-on Palin / Biden Debate, the Real Palin, and the Palin Rap.
The two most recent skits – the Real Palin and the Palin Rap – graced by the presence of the vice presidential candidate herself, were met with what seemed like surreal anticipation. And not without reason. SNL saw its highest ratings in 14 years.
While it’s too early to gauge the full viral video impact of Govenor Palin's performance on SNL this past Saturday, we watched as the incremental view counts for the Palin / Clinton press conference videos spiked noticeably a few days after the Real Palin clips appeared.
The average incremental viral video view count leading into the real Palin’s SNL debut was floating around 175,000 per day. While there wasn’t much activity on the day of the show (since it’s on around 11:30 pm), by the time Monday (day 2) rolled around, the incremental view count surged past 800,000 daily viral video views. Talk about a halo effect! We can't help but notice that this is similar to the increased view counts we reported for the Wario Land: Shake It experience. Fun!
At this rate, SNL stands to be the #1 show not just on TV but on the viral video Web as well. So while Tina Fey may not want to play the tenacious hockey mom from the North for very much longer, we have to believe that the network and SNL producers are secretly hoping for a McCain / Palin miracle on election day. :-)
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The data used in this post was collected from Visible Measure's Viral Reach Database, a constantly growing video repository of analytic data on 100+ million Internet videos from 150+ video-sharing destinations.