When History Can Be Viewed by All

A Washington Post photo Friday of Alexander Ovechkin in triumph moments after his latest heroic score included in its caption the note that the goal had garnered “more than 100,000 YouTube views.” Indeed it has.

More than a million, in fact. Easily. 

I had good fun Friday night with a couple of Caps’ communications staffers tallying up just how many views of the video had been acknowledged in the accounting metrics of the Web. YouTube not only tells a visitor what the site’s most popular videos are, and how often an individual clip has been viewed, but it offers illuminating details in an Honors for this video tab. It is there that we learn of a remarkable breadth of designations for the video as “Most viewed” and “Most discussed” around the world. More specifically, as of Saturday morning’s second cup of coffee the video clip had garnered designations including:

•  The #2 most discussed sports video of the week in Canada;
•  The #6 most viewed sports video in Russia;
•  The #1 Top rated sports video in Canada;
•  The #6 most discussed sports video in all of YouTube.

Now then, when it comes to tallying total hits, we’re tasked with making some educated guesses and some loose fly-by additions, but here again YouTube affords some telling data. For starters, there are more than 40 individual uploads of the Ovi Outlandishness there, many of them garnering thousands of views each. The most commonly viewed of them as of this morning had earned just under 570,000 views. Nearly a thousand people took the time to make comments about it, too.

But the second-most commonly viewed version of the clip had more than 200,000 views in its own right. And if you scroll down the Statistics and data tab for the most viewed version, you’ll notice that a blogger buddy of ours with a Polish-sounding last name has a site responsible for more than 300,000 referrals, if you will, to Ovi’s latest YouTube craze.

Again, we’re tallying merely the views accounted for it at YouTube. The Caps’ site has its own version of the feat, with tens of thousands of views. And NHL.com does as well. Moreover, both at YouTube and NHL.com the goal Wednesday night has quickly become amalgamated within “Best of Alexander Ovechkin”-themed videos. Those would somehow need to be accounted for if you were interested in determining just how popular a video moment our no. 1 left wing authored this week.

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Admin note: Most of the YouTube videos have been of the TSN feed from Canada. We thought we’d also highlight Joe B‘s call from the local Comcast SportsNet broadcast. Click the HD link for an even better picture.