1 Million View Online Democratic ‘Mashup’
By Jim Kuhnhenn
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON – An experimental online “mashup” – a build-your-own Democratic presidential debate – attracted more than 1 million viewers in the past 10 days, many of them young people drawn to the interactivity of the Internet.
The most popular participant was not even a candidate.
Comedian Bill Maher, who asked one of four questions posed to each of the eight candidates, attracted viewers 42 percent of the time. He quizzed the hopefuls about the Ten Commandments, marijuana legalization, the relative dangers of sugar, coal dust and terrorism, and the climate-changing impact of cows.
Yahoo, HuffingtonPost.com and Slate.com conceived the format as a way to give online viewers the ability to build a debate with video blocks of each candidate answering different questions on education, health care and the war from PBS host Charlie Rose. A “wild-card” question came from Maher.
The debate was taped two weeks ago and the three Internet sites posted the video on Sept. 13. Viewers can choose the candidates they want to see and hear, match them against a rival, ignore those who don’t interest them and compare and contrast.
“We started off doing this as a public service,” said Neeraj Khemlani, vice president of programming at Yahoo and producer of the debate. “It was in my mind, ‘Let’s go and try to help undecided voters.’”
As of this weekend, 1.1 million people had clicked on the debates. Of those, 429,000 were between the ages of 18 and 34, according to data compiled by Yahoo.
Passive television watching is still the preferred method for most debate viewers. An Aug. 19 Democratic debate on ABC’s “This Week,” for instance, attracted an audience of more than 2.8 million.
Still, organizers of the online debate say its audience is more engaged and that the format puts the content in the viewers’ hands.
On average, each mashup viewer watched 4.4 video streams for a total of seven minutes, an unusual amount of time on the Internet, where clips on the YouTube video-sharing site typically run two minutes or less.
Maher’s questions were designed to catch the candidates off guard. He asked Clinton, “Why should Americans vote for someone who can be fooled by George Bush?” He asked Bill Richardson if voters are fickle “spoiled brats.”
“People love the fact that they saw the candidates being genuinely surprised,” said the Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington. “That’s something that really works online – the fact that their answers were completely unpredictable.”
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