As a follow-up to Matt Compton's post last week on YouTube viewership of Barack Obama's "race speech," it's worth noting that the numbers just kept growing in the intervening days. Ari Melber of The Nation reported yesterday that total YouTube downloads of the speech have reached more than 4.3 million, more, it appears, than the estimated 4 million viewers who watched the speech live on cable television.

Though there was probably some overlap between cable and YouTube viewers, it's still pretty amazing that perhaps 8 million people watched all or significant portions of a political speech that didn't emanate from the Oval Office or a Joint Session of Congress. If Obama does ultimately win the Democratic presidential nomination, you'd have to figure that his acceptance speech in Denver is going to set some viewership records through multiple media.