President Obama gave his final State of the Union address last night. Like his addresses from the two previous years, it was streamed on the official White House YouTube channel. Much to the collective disappointment of casual observers, and I’m sure the collective relief of all those involved, the YouTube stream chat was disabled.

The stream, unsurprisingly, drew solid numbers and impressive growth. When Obama was introduced, it was to an internet crowd of 143 thousand viewers. Just twenty minutes later, the crowd had blown right past 200 thousand, eventually peaking at 246 thousand viewers. Both the likes and dislikes experienced steady growth through the night, but the likes were consistently twice as high, and sometimes as much as eight times higher. This may be because young people are less likely to watch events on television and more likely to watch YouTube streams, and young people are generally more fond of President Obama.

https://plot.ly/~vbonanni/313

It’s interesting that the graphs look so predictable. Steady, fairly consistent growth occurred throughout the speech, with a very heavy drop off at the conclusion. The likes and dislikes didn’t appear to react to the issues addressed in the speech, but increased at a steady rate throughout.