Obama vs. McCain: The Ratings War

If you read the news last week, you probably saw that presidential candidate John McCain's speech was watched on TV by a record-breaking 38.9 million people, roughly 600,000 more than the number of viewers who tuned in to watch Barack Obama's acceptance speech a week earlier, according to Nielsen.

But Nielsen's numbers don't tell the whole story. Television is one thing, and the internet is an entirely different beast. Online, speeches from Obama and Biden have so far garnered 3.7 million viral views while McCain's and Palin's speeches have been viewed 2.4 million times, according to Visible Measures, an online video measurement group.

It's hard to dismiss the significance or power of broadcast television, but it's also negligent to exclude the significance of the internet. All told, there were 7.8 million DNC viral videos viewed, across 278 different video placements, compared to 3 million RNC video views online in 265 unique video placements, according to Visible Measures. Of course, the discrepancy could be attributed to plain old demographics -- the McCain support base just prefer television to online video.

by Betsy Schiffman for Wired.com

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