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Michelle Obama's Speech Gets More Online Views Than The Entire RNC Convention

This article is more than 10 years old.

In the campaign for digital eyeballs, Michelle Obama is the clear winner. Based on data provided by Visible Measures, an online video analytics company, the first lady’s speech was watched 2.6 million times in the three days following its airing. By comparison, the top ten Republican speakers combined for just 2.1 million views during a comparable measurement period.

At noon EST on the Friday following each convention, the company took a tally of online views garnered by each of the party's major speakers. To be clear, Visible Measures' methodology means that the first lady's speech has a two day head start over that of her husband, which aired barely more than 12 hours before the company took its measurement.

Regardless, the Democrats appear to have a distinct advantage in overall numbers, more than doubling the Republicans video impressions with 5.4 million views. Matt Fiorentino, Visible Measures' director of marketing, pointed out that party demographics likely play a large role. Democrats, he says, are "traditionally younger, more tech savvy, more into social media, and expect media to be on-demand. They go online and watch speeches whenever it works for them."

Though Nielsen hasn't yet released last night's ratings, the Democratic convention's first two nights handily beat the Republicans in more traditional viewing metrics. In spite of Wednesday's NFL opener, the DNC attracted 26.2 and 25.1 million viewers during the first two evenings, compared with the Republicans' respective 22.3 and 21.9 million. The final night of the RNC, which included Clint Eastwood and Mitt Romney's speeches, drew 30.3 million viewers.

Michelle Obama's speech included a number of personal anecdotes from early in her relationship with the President, including many that emphasized the couple's humble beginnings:

...to me, he was still the guy who'd picked me up for our dates in a car that was so rusted out, I could actually see the pavement going by through a hole in the passenger side door...he was the guy whose proudest possession was a coffee table he'd found in a dumpster, and whose only pair of decent shoes was half a size too small.

According to Visible Measures, the speech generated over 60 video clips. The Atlantic reported that her remarks became something of a viral hit in China where the country's version of Twitter, Sina Weibo, retweeted links to the speech 9,000 times.

Fiorentino expects clips of President Obama's remarks to easily exceed 500,000 views today, though it likely won't catch up with the first lady's  numbers. Clint Eastwood's speech, for example, climbed past 1.5 million views by the end of last Friday.

Though the President didn't quite eclipse his wife's performance, he can still take solace in the fact that Mitt Romney's remarks appear to have been completely overshadowed by the Eastwood debacle. The Republican candidate's acceptance speech attracted nearly one-tenth the President's number of online views.

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