The first online video election

After two years of intense campaigning and ubiquitous media coverage, the 2008 U.S. elections are now over. The U.S. elected a new President, Sen. Barack Obama, and many new senators and representatives Tuesday.

The election was historic for so many reasons, but what's important for our coverage is how much online video played a part in the process. It served as democratizer of information, a propaganda tool, a citizen journalism apparatus, and a funny diversion from the other three.

Whatever the purpose or goal, people viewed a simply astounding amount of election-related online videos, especially about the two presidential candidates. Many reports indicated a five-fold growth in the traffic to election online videos over the 2004 presidential election season.

divinity Metrics analyzed online video traffic across more than 200 platforms for the 400+ days since the candidates announced their intentions to seek the Presidency, and the results are very telling about the eventual outcome.

Though Republican Presidential candidate John McCain made inroads in online video in September and streamed more videos from his campaign site than his opponent, 3.2 million streams compared to 2 million for President-elect Obama, McCain was way behind in total number of videos viewed over the course of the election.

According to divinity's statistics, Obama-related online videos were viewed 889,108,102 times and McCain-related ones were viewed 554,876,413 times since July 2007. Obama had huge spikes in views per day following several news-worthy events, including the win in the Iowa caucus, the "Yes We Can" speech, and his nomination acceptance at the Democratic National Convention. But what's even more telling, based on the overwhelming focus by voters on economic issues, is Obama's online video attention following the meltdown on Wall Street. Obama-related videos were viewed at least 4 million times a day throughout the month of October. His largest day, nearly 8 million views, came after a 777 point drop on the NYSE Oct. 15.

McCain, on the other hand, gained the most attention from his stalwart performances in the debates. He also saw large gains in online video views following the economic woes; however, and based on last night's results, that probably wasn't positive attention.

It's not altogether surprising how much more online video views Obama generated, given his campaign's focus on younger voters and new media campaign strategies. But the sheer number of presidential election online videos viewed says something about the medium, and its growing importance not just in elections, but in mass communication in general.

Now that all the guesswork is over, my thoughts turn to Inauguration Day and live streaming of the event, which, if these numbers are any indication, should be incredibly popular in the online video space. I'm sure media companies and content delivery players are already planning how to handle the sure-to-be record traffic for the event. 

- Pete

See the divinity Metrics chart showing how individual events affected presidential online video views here