10 years — The ten most visited speeches (Part 1)
These are the ten most visited speeches on Speakola, according to Squarespace analytics.
The speeches aren’t necessarily the ones I’d have expected to win a popularity contest when I started the site.
I discovered that all time classic speeches like MLK’s ‘I Have a Dream’ or Mandela’s ‘An ideal for which I’m prepared to die’ or Churchill’s ‘We Shall Fight on the Beaches’ have such an online footprint with news organisations that are so much bigger than Speakola (say NPR or YouTube or Time or the New York Times) that these speeches don’t get huge numbers of hits on Speakola. Instead, it’s speeches that have a nearer to exclusive home with Speakola, or are harder to find elsewhere that do the best.
Anyway, here is the ten, with a quick comment on each:
#1: Speakola homepage, 775,395 views
No surprises that the home page gets the most traffic. I chose the categories on a bit of a whim back in 2015. I’m not sure they’re perfect, certainly a lot of the ones I have ffiled in ‘Debates & Ideas’ perhaps should be in ‘Political’ but it’s given some structure and I usually know where a speech should go. I planned to have a ‘Speech of the Week’ that rotated on the home page, and for good SEO I should rotate it a great deal more.
Here is the countdown of the ten most visited speeches, outside of the home page.
#10. Bal Gangadhar Tilak: 'Freedom is my birthright', 1st anniversary Home Rule League - 1917, 77,537 views
This one was delivered in April 1917 in Nashik, India. Tilak was an Indian nationalist, social reformer, and independence activist. It’s a speech that is a progenitor to many of the great freedom /independence speeches, and the goal Tilak was seeking was home rule.
Freedom is my birthright. So long as it is awake within me, I am not old. No weapon can cut this spirit, no fire can burn it, no water can wet it, no wind can dry it. I say further that no CID can burn it. I declare the same principle to the Superintendent of Police who is sitting before me, to the Collector who had been invited to attend this meeting and to the Government shorthand writer who is busy taking down notes of our speeches.
This principle will not disappear even if it seems to be killed. We ask for Home Rule and we must get it.
#9. Matthew McConaughey: 'There are three things that I need each day', Oscars acceptance - 2014, 92, 816 views
The most popular Oscars speech on the site. I think it’s loved because McConaughey has a neat three dot point structure. ‘One, I need something to look up to, another to look forward to, and another is someone to chase.’ He then comes straight out and talks about looking up to God, and I think Google searching Christians love a good God reference and that has made the speech popular. He also finishes with a nugget of self-help reflection, which is neat and not particularly hackneyed.
And to my hero. That's who I chase. When I was 15 years old I had a very important person in my life come and ask me 'Who's your hero?' I said, 'I thought about it and it's me in ten years. So I turned 25 ten years later and that same person comes to me and goes, 'Are you a hero?' I said, 'Not even close!' She said why and I said, 'My hero is me at 35.' You see, every day, and every week, and every month, and every year of my life, my hero is always ten years away. I'm never going to be my hero. I'm not going to obtain that and that's fine with me because it keeps me with somebody to keep on chasing.
#8. Denzel Washington: 'Without commitment, you’ll never start, but more importantly, without consistency, you’ll never finish', NAACP Image Awards - 2017, 96,928 visits
Another short, neat speech motivational blast that people can embibe in a minute and isn’t up on another colossal site. Great use of repetition, beautifully delivered. It’s Denzel Washington (who gives us a gold medal performance for referring to oneself in the third person).
Without commitment, you’ll never start, but more importantly, without consistency, you’ll never finish. It’s not easy. If it were easy there’d be no Kerry Washington. If it were easy there’d be no Taraji Henson, (corrects himself) P Henson, it it were easy there’d be no Octavia Spencer. But Not only that, if it were easy there’d be no Viola Davis. If it were easy there’d be no Mykelti Williamson, no Stephen McKinley Henderson, no Russell Hornsby, if it were easy there’d be no Denzel Washington.
So, keep working, keep striving, never give up, fall down seven times, get up eight.
Ease is a greater threat to progress than hardship.
Ease is a greater threat to progress than hardship.
So keep moving, keep growing, keep learning.
See you at work.
#7. Denzel Washington: 'Number one: Put God first', Dillard University - 2015
Denzel again. God again. This one was delivered in the months before Speakola launched and was one of the first contemporary viral speeches I added. Just like Matthew McConaughey’s above, Washington tells the Dillard class of 2015 that he’s going to share three ideas, and just like McConaughey, number one is all God. I do think Christians like motivational speeches that celebrate God, and that explains the popularity of this one. And he’s an excellent speaker, (he’s Denzel Washington!) rolling out the ‘fail big’ and ‘you can’t take it with you’ classics that populate the commencement genre.
Number two: fail big, that’s right. Fail big, today is the begining of the rest of your life and you can be just – be very frightening. And it’s a new world out there, it’s a mean world out there. You only live once, so do what you feel passionate about, passionate about. Take chances professionally, don’t be afraid to fail, there is an old IQ test [that] was nine dots and you had to draw five lines with the pencil within the nine dots without lifting the pencil.
The only way to do it was to go outside the box. So don’t be afraid to go outside the box. Don’t be afraid to think outside the box. Don’t be afraid to fail big, to dream big, but remember, dreams without goals, are just dreams. And they ultimately fuel disappointment.
#6. For George Harrison: by Eric Idle, 'He paid for the movie The Life of Brian, because he wanted to see it' - 2002, 100,065 visits
This was a speech at the Hollywood Bowl in 2002. I call it a ‘eulogy’ but it was seven months after Harrison died in November 2001 and part of the Beatle’s posthumous inductiuon into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame. The event wsa a Harrison celebration, and Idle’s speech has that vibe. But it’s also just beautiful, one of the great tributes. A thrill in the early years of Speakola was that Eric Idle retweeted me and pushed this speech out himself, and it ended up being a Twitter hit that was picked up on the front page of Reddit. On one night in July 2016, 100,000 people visited Speakola. Squarespace says that the total for this speech is 100,065 so maybe I’ve rounded up with that memory. I’ve sent many a direct message to Eric Idle trying to get him on the podcast, but to no avail. It’s very possible Pythons don’t do podcasts, or more particularly, they don’t do mine.
I think he would prefer to be inducted posthumorously because he loved comedians – poor sick sad deranged lovable puppies that we are – because they – like him – had the ability to say the wrong thing at the right time – which is what we call humor.
He put Monty Python on here at The Hollywood Bowl, and he paid for the movie The Life of Brian, because he wanted to see it.
Still the most anybody has ever paid for a Cinema ticket.
His life was filled with laughter and even his death was filled with laughter… In the hospital he asked the nurses to put fish and chips in his IV.
(No video or audio)
The total number of visits to Speakola across the ten years is 6,540,237 and total out of 8.4 million page views.
I’ll post Part 2, the top five most visited speeches, by the end of the week.
Thanks to new paid subscribers ⭐ Terri, ⭐ Michelle Callinan, ⭐ Jules Beatty, ⭐ Mary Besley, ⭐ Kim Hollands, ⭐ Anthony Fogarty, ⭐ Peter Stevenson, ⭐ Tim Nethercott, ⭐ Jennifer Crowe, ⭐ RMalt,
And new Founding Member ⭐⭐⭐ Ruth Robinson.
You might enjoy my personal writing efforts over at Good one Wilson
Here are the ten most visited speeches this week!
