The chances are you didn’t attend Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. The chances are you were watching it on television instead or, as many people did, watching the live stream on the Web.

Sanity And/Or Fear

There have been a number of political rallies of late, mostly by people on the right-wing, with the Tea Party in particular managing to get millions of people out to Washington DC to show their support for a certain kind of politics.

But this was different, this was the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, and it was designed to bring people from all sides of the political spectrum together to show that they can unite for the greater good. Possibly.

250,000 people actually showed up to the rally led by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, but million watched at home, many on the Internet.

An Online Video Hit

According to official figures released by Comedy Central, 2 million people watched the rally live on the broadcast station. An additional 575,000 watched the event live on the Web, which equates to more than one-fifth of the total viewership.

The rally wasn’t as big an online event as the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama, maybe, but the percentage who watched on the Web is impressive nonetheless.

Millions of others have no doubt watched highlights of the rally after the event, and there are clips galore on the Web, including the Sanity Song from Auto-Tune the News.

Conclusions

Politics has always had a home on the Internet, but it’s no longer just the place for people on the extremes to air their often bizarre views. Instead, thanks to online video, those who inhabit the mainstream middle-ground where the sensible decisions are made can get involved in a big way.

[Via GigaOM]

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