BY Nancy Scola | Friday, August 21 2009

Now that that Barney Frank "trying to have a conversation with you would be like arguing with a dining room table" video has broken 1 million views on YouTube after just four days, time to have a peek YouTube's new Insight statistics tool.

And here's an interesting tidbit: the numbers bear out that the clip of the colorful confrontation at a New Hampshire town hall has been rippling out through social media and sharing sites. 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.

(Without more access to the numbers, of course, it's tough to know from what type of sources the rest of the views are coming.)

As a point of comparison, take the five-week old video of Representative Mike Castle's run-in with so-called "birthers" at a Delaware townhall. The Drudge Report contributed 310,000 of that video's 831,000 views. Rush Limbaugh, Wonkette, Speigel, Huffington Post, the New York Times, and FoxNation put up another 94,000, for a total of about 404,000. YouTube attributes another 100k to "viral/other" sources.

The numbers suggest that, in the end, we're seeing the ability of average folks to share a video in a couple clicks compete with the distribution reach of those in the business of news.