Candidates@Google: Ron Paul, and Democratization of Digital Content

Tex MacCrae’s post on Lew Rockwell’s blog shows a TubeMogul chart of a Ron Paul video that was filmed as part of the Candidate@Google series, and asks the question, what happened to cause this surge in viewership?

Even though the video has been on YouTube since mid July, we see the huge jump only yesterday (9/9/07).

It appears that last week’s Republican debate sparked the fire. In the debate, Ron Paul gained a great deal of interest from his energetic battle with the former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee (Ron Paul’s website claims that “Media has exploded for Ron Paul since his breakthrough debate with Mike Huckabee over the war in Iraq.”). This buzz may have led to the alleged visit to Paul’s office today by the 60 Minutes camera crew, and Paul’s appearance tonight on the O’Reilly Factor.

What is certain is that the video in question gained quite a bit of buzz on - and then from - such websites as Digg.com and Reddit.com – enough popularity to make it onto the front page. Digg shows the Candidates@Google: Ron Paul video was “made popular” Sunday morning. What does it mean for something to be “made popular” on Digg?

Become popular. Once a submission has earned a critical mass of Diggs, it becomes “popular” and jumps to the homepage in its category. If it becomes one of the most popular, it qualifies as a “Top 10”. If a submission doesn’t receive enough Diggs within a certain time period, it eventually falls out of the “Upcoming” section.

Once the video hit “critical mass” Sunday morning, the video views took off, and the TubeMogul viewership numbers reflect that. If you go to the Reddit video homepage, the Ron Paul video is still on the front page (as of 9/10/07).

Ron Paul’s presidential campaign is no stranger to grass roots activism. But while this is an example of the democratization of digital media that has gained him so much internet momentum, the splash that caused this wave was a traditional media debate. It was only after the debate that internet users voted this video to today’s prominence.

If you’ve got 65 minutes to spare, here’s the Ron Paul video:

1 comment September 10th, 2007