Will Barack Obama's Inauguration Video Become the Most Watched Clip of 2009?

According to YouTube, the BarackObama.com channel has 147,438 subscribers -- this in addition to those who subscribe to the President-elect's Change.gov weekly online address.

Change.gov is a high traffic web site; in its first round of user-submitted questions to the President-elect's transition team, over 1,000,000 online votes were cast (users could "upvote" questions they liked, similar to the process used on social bookmarking sites like Reddit and Digg).

Despite its high traffic, however, Obama's most recent YouTube address (posted on December 24th) has only received 88,245 views as of this afternoon. Now, this low number of views can be attributed to the decreased overall activity online during the holiday season -- millions of Americans are on vacation, traveling, seeing family before work resumes in the new year.

Based on the fact that the Inauguration itself will be a historic event (and widely covered by mainstream television and radio outlets), one can safely assume the amount of traffic to subsequent Barack Obama inauguration clips will be significant. After Obama's acceptance speech, for example, many clips on YouTube of this event received 1,000,000+ views as supporters and bystanders alike desired to "relive" the moment.

It will be interesting to see if the Obama administration remains as tech savvy in 2009, and if the administration will be able to keep the collective attention of an increasingly fractured and A.D.D. Internet audience.

Although already infinitely more Web friendly than previous administrations, the Obama transition team (and presidential administration) will need to find novel ways of driving traffic to its YouTube channel and Change.gov property in the months after the inauguration. Higher online participation with citizens will result in fresh ideas, a possible boost in public morale, and potentially a faster return to stable economic conditions in the U.S. and abroad.