Barack Obama's speech on race earlier this week has been playing absolutely huge in the media in the US (for a good list of stories on the subject, check out Real Clear Politics). As would be expected, the Obama campaign immediately uploaded the whole video - some thirty seven minutes of it - onto YouTube. It has now been watched more than 200,000 times.
I have to confess, the success of the video has surprised me a bit. I had completely bought into the logic that YouTube was a pop corn medium - light, fluffy and not very filling. Most successful political videos (or videos full-stop, in fact) on YouTube are a couple of minutes long at most. But here is a speech of nearly forty minutes, delivered direct to camera, that has been accessed by thousands and thousands of people in only a few days. I still suspect the general rule holds, but if nothing else, it illustrates what an unusual election cycle this is and how Barack Obama's candidacy has caught the public's imagination.
(My take on the content of the speech is on my personal weblog, here).
My numbers might be a bit out... this copy of the speech (for some strange reason, the official Obama campaign seems to have uploaded it twice) has been viewed a staggering 2.8 million times.