Meteor Videos Set Online Viewing Record

How did you watch the videos of the meteor that lit up the sky over Siberia last week If you’re like many people, you went straight to YouTube, where dozens of amateur videos were uploaded soon after the rare occurrence.

The most-viewed of all the videos, uploaded by the cable channel Russia Today, has received more than 26 million views. On Tuesday, an online measurement company, Visible Measures, reported that the meteor videos had collectively topped 138 million views on the video-sharing sites it tracks, like YouTube and DailyMotion. Visible Measures declared that the meteor was “the fastest video event ever to reach 100 million views.”

That’s a testament to the growth of online video and to the unique qualities of the “video event,” as the measurement company put it. According to NASA, the meteor weighed about 7,000 tons; as Andrew E. Kramer reported in Tuesday’s New York Times, it was “the largest known celestial body to enter Earth’s atmosphere in 100 years.” The astonishing shock wave that accompanied it injured more than a thousand people.

Thanks to YouTube and sites like it, viewers around the world could see the meteor from dozens of angles. Visible Measures counted more than 400 uploaded videos of the meteor, though some of those may have been duplicates.

Television networks quickly pulled together highlight reels of the videos for their newscasts, further extending the reach of the amateur videos. News Web sites like CNN.com and NYTimes.com did the same thing. But Visible Measures does not count news Web sites, so the fact that the amateur videos topped 100 million views by its count shows that many Web users like to see the source material for newscasts.

“Velocity is a big factor with massive onli! ne events,” the company said in a blog post Tuesday. “The more urgency people feel to be part of the conversation and to be a part of the moment, the more views a video event will generate. We saw the same story play out with Kony and Stratos.”

Kony was a campaign by a nonprofit group to raise awareness about Joseph Kony, the head of the Lord’s Resistance Army, an African guerrilla group. Videos related to the campaign topped 100 million views in six days last year. Stratos was a daredevil’s record-breaking jump from the stratosphere, sponsored and televised by Red Bull. Videos related to the jump topped 100 million views in five days.

“But the meteor had something those campaigns didn’t,” Visible Measures said. “We all had to watch it, in shock, ae and terror.”

The company’s data showed that the meteor videos gained 73 million views on Saturday, one day after the incident gained worldwide headlines. That one-day total was a record, the company said. “Kony previously held that record with 41.3 million views in a single day. Red Bull’s Stratos comes in a close third with 40.9 million views.”