Popularity of Colbert Video Shows the Power of Blogs

Posted on May 15, 2006

Not many people usually watch the White House Correspondents Association Dinner. Most people have probably never even heard of it. But that all changed earlier this month when comedian Stephen Colbert's speech from the WHCA Dinner was placed on YouTube where everyone could watch it. The speech, which poked fun at not only the Bush administration but the media as well, was seen over 500,000 times on YouTube alone before C-SPAN, the copyright owner, asked YouTube to remove it. C-SPAN then placed the video on Google Videos. Red Herring says the Colbert video topped Google Videos as well and has been one of the most popular videos in the short history of Google Videos.

Thanks to video sharing tools people can now watch hilarious or important sketches or dialogue they may have missed from talks shows or news broadcasts. When one of these video clips is interesting or funny enough -- and thousands and thousands of bloggers are writing about it and linking to it -- they sometimes start to viral out through the blogosphere. This is what happened with the video of Colbert's performance at the WHCA. Fox News reports that ISPS are concerned bandwidth problems could arise if video sharing continues to grow in popularity.