Fey-lin a 56 Million Viral Vid Juggernaut

Saturday Night Live is notorious for taking a once-funny bit and running it into the ground, and it looks like Tina Fey’s spot-on impersonation of V-P candidate Sarah Palin is no exception. Fey-lin is a bona-fide franchise for SNL, boosting television ratings and becoming a guaranteed viral video hit machine. Take a gander at the eye-popping playcounts for the Fey/Palin sketches from just NBC.com:

Hillary/Palin – 7,784,386
Palin/Biden – 5,817,812
Couric/Palin – 5,764,667
Cold Open – 3,820,210
Palin Rap – 2,554,176
Cold Open Backstage – 404,151
Bush Endorsement – 355,623

Total – 26,501,025

And that’s not all. These numbers don’t even take Hulu’s plays into account, and as AdAge points out, Hulu streamed four times as many videos as NBC did in November, so its addition will be significant. And if that weren’t enough, according to web analytics firm Visible Measures, there are more than 200 different SNL/Palin videos (news clips, official and unofficial versions) floating around the web that when added to the playcounts from NBC.com have generated 56 million viral video views.

Thankfully, there’s only a couple of weeks left until the election, so Fey-lin fatigue won’t be as severe as it could have been (though I’ll bet somehow SNL executive producer Lorne Michaels is trying to squeeze a feature film out of it before Nov. 4).

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