One other individual who stood out among these more viewed videos was Philip Franchina, better known by his stage name Philip DeFranco. He is an American video blogger (known as vlogging), who rose to popularity with low-tech, sarcastic videos consisting primarily of monologues directed toward the camera.
DeFranco’s popularity is not as a newsmaker himself, but because people wanted to hear his opinions on contemporary topics of the day in his self-produced videos. Those topics run the gamut from pop culture to politics.
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For the first half of 2011, nine of his videos were among the most watched news clips. One of the most popular videos was DeFranco’s January 12 monologue on former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, Apple and truTV. (Warning, the video contains adult language.) A month later on the February 7 edition, he gave his opinions about Super Bowl commercials, AOL’s acquisition of the Huffington Post and the flu vaccine among other subjects.
In June 2011, DeFranco switched the tag of his vlogs from “news & politics” to “entertainment,” thus taking them out of the news ranking. (The person who posts the videos determines how they are categorized. If DeFranco had continued his tagging as a news video, more of his videos would likely have appeared on this list.) A few observers, such as Robert Slonaker of Yahoo! Voices, have credited DeFranco’s success to the way he mixes humor with information and to his videos’ fast-paced format.
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