Mitch McConnell Ad Wildly Popular With Whatever Bot He's Paying For YouTube Views

Here is Mitch McConnell's new campaign ad, which an ABC blogger describes as having "the feel of a trailer for a movie by Michael Bay," but which looks to us like nine million other "Morning In America" knockoffs, only with a lead character stolen from a Dr. Seuss book. Yet there must be something magical in its combination of soaring generic music, generic shots of everyday generic Americans, and boilerplate McConnell droning about how Obama exploits the poor, hates the middle class, and coddles the rich, because the video became incredibly popular last week, getting over half a million views in its first day. In fact, the Washington Post reports, that explosion in pageviews may be quite literally incredible:  

The two-minute web video, titled “The American Ideal,” was launched Thursday morning. At 4 p.m. Friday, it was listed as having 651,021 views. Just 16 minutes later, it had 1,036,039 page views. The growth slowed significantly after that; by Monday morning it was at 1,072,850 views.

None of McConnell’s other videos have gotten anywhere near this amount of traffic, and the short trailer version of the video has only 1,098 views.

We would add that the video has, as of Tuesday morning, a whopping 1,079,891 views -- and we would guess that a substantial chunk of those 8,000-odd new views were driven by that WaPo story. Some "viral sensation" -- maybe it was just one of those 24-hour viruses, HA-HA!

So it's starting to look like Mitch McConnell's "viral video" was mostly being "watched" by Newt Gingrich's imaginary twitter followers. 

Did the video really go viral? “It doesn’t have the characteristics of an organic viral video,” said Eugene Lee, Founder and CEO of ChannelMeter, a YouTube analytics site. A viral video, he said, would have more pickup in social media and would accumulate views steadily rather than spiking quickly and then dropping off. He suggested that it was a “paid buy” -- this article from the Daily Dot explains how YouTube views can be bought.

McConnell’s campaign attributes the sharp increase in views to an innovative social media strategy and the presidential campaign quality of the video. The video also was promoted in some Web ads and mentioned on campaign news blogs, but it hasn’t gotten much traction in the traditional media or cable news.

You may also be astonished to learn that the actual activity on McConnell's Facebook page doesn't seem to reflect a million-plus people watching the video, smiling, and forwarding it to every turtle fancier they know:

The post on McConnell’s Facebook page announcing the video has 239 likes and 66 shares. Another post directing visitors to the video on his campaign website is far more popular, with 5,307 likes and 533 share. A subsequent post announcing that the video hit the million-view mark has over 621 likes and 62 shares. Twenty-two people have clicked on a Bit.ly shortened link to the video. A Google search for the video’s unique marker (found at the end of the url) turned up 21 different links. By comparison, a Google search for a video of Michael Buble singing in the New York City subway, which has 441,272 views, finds 360 links.

Somebody needs to tell Alex Jones about this, because finally he could call attention to a real false-flag operation.

[ ABCNews / WaPo ]