On the heels of what many have called one of the greatest speeches in history, Senator and Presidential Candidate Barack Obama's video of the speech has been seen over 4 million times and as of this writing dominates YouTube. Early this morning it was the number one video with just over 2 million views, but also there were different copies of the same video posted on YouTube by different channel owners.
Five of the top ten videos this morning were the Obama speech, and a whooping 15 of the top 20 in the "News and Politics" section of YouTube were all the same speech. As of this writing, Obama still rules the News and Politics section of YouTube with 9 of the top 20 videos and if one counts the Iraq Speech video, 10 of the top 20 on YouTube's News and Politics section were Obama videos.
I've not seen this kind of video view performance by a candidate since Ron Paul and that wasn't one speech, it was a combination of supporter-made videos and appearance videos. This, for Obama, is all for one speech, his presentation called "A More Perfect Union".
Now, one would think that the number of videos of the same Obama speech on YouTube would stop there, but not so. I clicked over to the second page of top-viewed videos in the News and Politics section, and saw that another 11 of the top 20 most-seen videos on the second page of the "News and Politics" section were the Obama "A More Perfect Union" Speech. That means of the top 40 videos as of 11:43 AM, PST on March 20th, 2008, 22 of the top 40 videos in the News and Poltics Section were of the Obama speech.
That's amazing.
It means not only that there's a hunger to see the speech, but to see it repeatedly and for people who did not have a chance to see the orginal telecast to view it for the first time. The speech is drawing so many views that we should start looking at it as a television show unto itself, with a nielsen rating. That rating today, starting from 2 AM to now, would be about a "5" share because I estimate that about 5 million people have seen this on YouTube alone. And that does not count the Barack Obama website or any other video distribution company that has a file of the video in its system. So we could safely say that the speech ranks a "6" overall. Not bad for an online version of a 37 minute speech.
Plus, that does not include the ratings for the actual television version of the speech.
But it also means that Senator Obama's message is out and that it's being warmly received. From this perspective, it must be reported that Senator Obama objective of causing a new level of dialog about race has been achieved and with rousing success.
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