Videos Mentioning Obama or Romney Top 2 Billion Views

The U.S. election is heating up, and we’re not just talking about the humidity in Tampa. Since April 2011, when Romney officially entered the race, close to 600,000 videos mentioning Obama or Romney have been uploaded to YouTube, and these videos account for close to 2 billion views.

Topping the list of these videos is baracksdubs’ “Barack Obama Singing Call Me Maybe,” which has racked up over 24 million views in just a few months.



Political pop song parodies are on the rise in general. In the past month, this Gotye parody titled, “Obama That I Used to Know” and a more humorous One Direction parody about Romney have both crossed the million view mark and hit the YouTube Trending Videos list.

It’s not just light-hearted fare that have people tuning in. Since the primaries began, there have been more than 100 million views of official presidential candidate videos on YouTube.

In fact, in just the last 30 days, people have spent more than 20 cumulative years watching official videos of Obama and Romney (that’s two years longer than Justin Bieber has been alive).

And new uploads from Obama and Romney’s official YouTube channels are gaining traction quickly, with videos receiving hundreds of thousands of views within a few days of upload. The latest video on Obama for America’s YouTube channel has received over 217,000 views in just 24 hours. And since Mitt Romney announced Paul Ryan as his running mate, he has seen a surge in both channel subscribers (a 300% increase since the Ryan announcement) and views. Their first video together, “America’s Comeback Team” has racked up over 1.1 million views in two weeks and is the second most-viewed video on the Romney channel:



We’ll be tracking the political trends on YouTube until Election Day. To keep your finger on the pulse of political video, and to watch up-to-the-minute live and on-demand coverage from the campaign trail, visit the YouTube Elections Hub at www.youtube.com/politics or follow YouTube Politics here.

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Blockbuster Battle: Spider-Man vs. Batman

In anticipation of this summer’s biggest blockbuster films, the world watched trailers for The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises over 100 million times. With all of the fanfare surrounding these superheros, we wondered who would win if they squared off against each other in a good old fashioned popularity contest. Would Gotham’s hero rise against the amazing webslinger? Would Peter Parker get the best of Bruce Wayne?

We found some really interesting data when we looked at global searches for “Spiderman” and “Batman” videos in the weeks leading up to each film’s box office debut. See the graphs below to discover which superhero was the most popular among fans.




Global searches for “Spiderman” (red) snuck ahead of “Batman” (blue) by just a bit when The Amazing Spider-Man hit theaters on July 3. But search interest in the caped crusader significantly overtook Spidey after The Dark Knight Rises premiered on the July 20.

India is the only country where "Spiderman" drew more search interest than "Batman" -- and that’s likely due to Bollywood star Irrfan Khan’s role as Dr. Ratha.

So there it is - Batman wins over Spider-Man. But if the data doesn't do it for you, here's extremely rare footage of the two superheroes duking it out for all to see.

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'Gangnam Style' is Your International Hit of the Month

Only in 2012 can an off-the-wall music video from South Korea become a hit in the U.S. in a matter of just a few days. This month, Korean pop singer PSY's "Gangnam Style" surprised many by quickly climbing to the #3 spot on YouTube's music video charts.

Below you can track the number of views per day this video has registered around the world since it was posted:



North American interest in Korean pop music has been on the rise for some time now and it's not entirely uncommon to see a popular music video spread across the Pacific.

YouTube searches for PST's single hit their first peak in Korea on July 26, but searching in the U.S. and Canada for "gangnam" really started to spike a week later. Globally, the video began drawing the most attention this past weekend, and "gangnam style" is one of YouTube's top rising searches of August.

The video, which blends Korean and English, has been drawing over one million views per day, and is currently one of our most shared videos in South Korea as well as the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore, Taiwan, Belgium and Sweden.

Naturally, we've already started to see lots of parodies/homages as well. In the past two weeks, nearly 1,000 videos have been posted with "gangnam" (in English) in the title. And we can only hope they all feature the same dance...

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Early Trends for the London Games

Great ads, amusing parodies, and dry wit; the 30th olympiad has already brought us a microcosm of YouTubeness. "Olympics 2012" is a top rising search in the U.S. from the past 30 days and sports fever has spread across diverse genres.

We're only a few days in, but those first few days and last week's build up have delivered plenty of trending videos all over the YouTube map. First, and not surprisingly, many top brands have produced special ads for the games, some of which have been frequently shared and embedded.

The spots in the playlist below, which includes ads from Nike, P&G, Adidas, and more, have been seen over 15 million times total.



One of the most popular single videos to come from London this week was filmed not inside the games themselves, but from outside, where a dry and very funny Olympic worker expresses her enthusiasm about the start of competition. The clip already has 1.2 million views to date.



In the music genre, some of Team USA's top athletes created home-made lip-sync videos that spread quickly as the games kicked off. Below Women's Soccer "sings" some Miley Cyrus while U.S. swimmers take on Carly Rae Jepsen. Together, these videos have over 4 million combined views.


We'll be tracking all the trends coming out London over the next two weeks. Stay tuned!

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