Inside YouTube Search: Looking Back at a Major News Week

May 12, 2011

Last week was a major week for news involving the President, with Obama delivering two starkly contrasting, yet incredibly popular speeches.

We already analyzed how popular his correspondents' dinner remarks have been -- and since then, they've been viewed roughly 8 million times total. The official White House version of his address on the death of Osama bin Laden, which he delivered the following night, has been viewed over 5 million times.

Today, we've gone back and looked at last week's search data for some perspective. Searches around the world for "Obama" on YouTube so far this month were at their relative highest since January 2009, when the President was inaugurated. The term "bin laden" is the top rising U.S. search on YouTube of the past thirty days, and if you look back at searches for "osama" globally over the past few years, weekly interest essentially charts like a hockeystick:



In the United States, searches for "osama" spiked higher than searches for "tsunami" did in March, making this one of biggest news stories in terms of U.S. interest so far this year.

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