WASHINGTON — As a follow-up to the State of the Union address, President Barack Obama sat down with YouTube for a live half hour conversation on Thursday (1.27) to take viewer questions from the public and speak with Steve Grove, head of news at Google’s video site.
Also in the capital, Vice President Joe Biden sat down with Yahoo!’s Anna Robertson for a 30-minute interview, where she asked community generated questions.
Unlike YouTube, which streamed the Obama interview live and in its entirety, Yahoo! chose to edit the interview into 11, 1 to 3-minute segments which were published the following day.
The Biden interviews drove over 3 million page views and over 800,000 video views. The most popular clip is the one in which the Vice President addresses a spoof about him on the Onion.
The Obama interview has driven 200,000 views on YouTube.
“We Don’t See a Huge Benefit” In Going Live
For an explanation for Yahoo’s approach to taped vs. live streaming, we spoke with Anna Robertson on Tuesday (2.1) at The Washington Post where she was a participant in the Beet.TV Online Video Journalism Summit.
A veteran of ABC News, Robertson heads original video for Yahoo! News. She explains why the Web is more suited for on-demand consumption of news programming versus live streaming. She says, “we don’t see a huge benefit in going live.”
Robertson says that news is one of the most popular video categories at Yahoo!, with four of the top ten video in December being news.
Yahoo! is ranked by comScore as the Web’s most popular news destination with over 90 million unique monthly visitors.
Andy Plesser
