Breaking news: Barack Obama is taking off like a rocket in the video-sphere, judging by the number of views his YouTube channel has garnered in the last 48 hours. Just take a look at our chart: After slowly rising in the last week to about 100,000 views, his site has shot through the roof, passing 400,000 in the last day. Everybody else is relatively flat.
I’ve got various inquiries out, but the only answer I have at the moment is that YouTube’s launch of “YouChoose” has generated a surge of attention and when people come to YouChoose home page they are picking the one candidate they are most interested in to check out. I guess it helps to be a fresh face…(though we are checking to see if YouTube would know if a bot was just hitting the Obama page to make it appear views were skyrocketing).
But speaking of fresh, the anti-Hillary 1984 “Vote Different” video is also really hot on YouTube at the moment, with more than 300,000 views, triple what it had garnered when I reported on the mystery behind its maker, ParkRidge47. The video is currently at the top of Technorati’s most popular videos list (172 links in the last 48 hours), and bottom-feeder Matt Drudge just linked to it, which is generating all kinds of mainstream media attention too.
San Francisco Chronicle reporter Carla Marinucci did a nice story on the unauthorized ad in yesterday’s paper, and the comments from political professionals are revealing. Simon Rosenberg of the New Democratic Network gets it exactly right: He told Marinucci that the ad shows that “anybody can do powerful emotional ads … and the campaigns are no longer in control. It will no longer be a top-down candidate message; that’s a 20th century broadcast model.”