Readers may have noticed that I take an interest in which of my videos seem to be most popular — more of an interest than readers themselves take, judging by the few comments on my Top Five Videos posts. Fine. But maybe you’ll find this interesting.

It just occurred to me to compare videos posted at roughly the same time featuring competing presidential candidates. The results are interesting — OK, they’re interesting to me. But I’m going to share them anyway. If you’d like to look at the raw data to draw your own conclusions, my videos are listed chronologically, with the most recent first, at this link. For the most popular, with the most-watched first, click here. But here’s what I’ve noticed glancing over them just now:

• The cleanest comparison you’re likely to find of this sort among the Democrats who were still in the race at the time of our primary is in these three videos I posted the same day (MLK Day). They feature Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama speaking at King Day at the Dome. All are of poor quality, but of roughly equally poor quality. The Obama one is probably worst, because I was the farthest away when he was speaking. But what interested me was that the Obama video was watched 390 times, the Clinton video 150 times, and the Edwards clip 16 times. That’s a bigger margin than the actual vote. I wonder how the demographics break down? No way to tell.
• Before you start feeling bad for Hillary, though, remember that my "Hillary’s Heckler" video is still my most- watched ever, at 17,019 views. You have to wonder, though — are people watching it because they like Hillary, or because they like to see her heckled? Difficult to tell. I will say that if you try reading the comments, it won’t make you feel better about the electorate.
• The only presidential candidates to make it into my all-time Top Ten are Hillary, Stephen Colbert, Jeri Thompson (you might object that she wasn’t technically a candidate, but that would be ungallant of you, and besides, neither was Colbert), and Joe Biden. Ol’ Joe got there in spite of the wretched quality — it was from my phone. Oh, I forgot — John Taylor Bowles. You may have forgotten Mr. Bowles. He’s the Nazi party candidate. Make what you will of the fact that all three of the clips I put up from the Nazi rally at the State House a few months back are in my Top Five, which means having more than 10,000 views each.
• Fred Thompson (that’s Jeri’s husband) may be out of it technically, but here’s an interesting fact. I attended a Thompson event and a Huckabee event on the same night, shooting video at both. I posted them at the same time. The Thompson video was of markedly poorer quality, because of the angle and distance (I was right up against the platform at the Huckabee deal). As I reported at the time, and as you can see on the videos, the energy level was much higher at the Huckabee event — a phenomenon borne out in the voting on primary day. But that has nothing to do with page views — the Thompson video has 1,396 views, giving it Top Twenty status. The Huckabee clip was only watched 172 times. Go figure.

That’s all for now.

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