Who sent the massive traffic to the Barney Frank YouTube video?
Personal Democracy forum has an interesting breakdown of the referrals that led to the video of Barney Frank arguing with a crazy heckler. Though major news sites like Huffington Post drove about 200,000 referrals, individual accounts on sites ranging from Facebook and Twitter drove the majority of the million+ views to the video
Your more “professional” journalistic sites also put up big viewing numbers, for sure. The Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan’s blog, and Wonkette combined for about 200,000 referrals. But views from social media sources built on people-to-people sharing — primarily Facebook, with 95,000 views, but Digg and Reddit too — outnumber those from “news” sources in the end. Social media, according to YouTube, contributed about 229,000 views to the Frank video.
According to YouTube, here’s the breakdown of that data:
[...] liberals were able to use tools like Twitter and Facebook to drive over a million views to a Barney Frank video, and in a matter of days were able to use multiple Web 2.0 tools to raise [...]