Do adjust your set: viewers flock to YouTube over TV to see Obama | Social Signal

Alex posted yesterday about YouTube views as a proxy for the relative support for political candidates. According to this piece at TechPresident, the same may be true of the relative support for new and old(er) media:

About 3.8 million people have now watched Barack Obama's Philadelphia address through the campaign's official YouTube channel, which has over 40,000 subscribers.... Aside from the Obama channel, which promotes videos through blogs, news sites and supporter networks, another 520,000 people watched excerpts of the speech uploaded by random YouTube users. Taken together, the total YouTube viewers for Obama's speech over the past week beat all the cable channels combined. Last Tuesday, about four million viewers tuned into one of the three cable channels to watch the speech.

Today's wisdom has it that social media is potential Kryptonite to newspapers. Maybe TV news should be worried, too.

One last bit of perhaps overly wishful thinking from this former speechwriter: could the phenomenal YouTube success of Obama's speech mean new life for the ancient art of oratory? True, the social media that can save your next quarterly earnings report has probably yet to be invented - but for something more inspirational, online video could well be the next bully pulpit.