When I pointed out that Reagan still bested Obama in the Nielsen ratings below, I immediately recieved several emails noting that the Nielsen figure isn’t a good barometer for popularity as it doesn’t include the 18 million webstreams that were open during the inauguration. Add the two together and Obama easily bests Reagan. (That’s just one figure — the numbers of webstreams I’ve seen reported are all over the map.)

Aside from the fact that no one had the opportunity to watch Reagan’s swearing in from their computer at work in 1981, you might look at their relative popularity in proportional terms. So 41.8 million people watched Reagan’s swearing in to Obama’s 37.8 million. But according to the 1980 census, the population of the U.S. was 226.5 million compared to over 300 million now. According to my back of the envelope math, even if you add in the webstreams Reagan still narrowly bests Obama in terms of percentage of the country that watched the inauguration. And that assumes that all of those webstreams came from within the United States. I would find it very hard to believe that a significant percentage of them weren’t international, whereas Nielsen ratings only measure domestic televisions.

Yes, I realize that there are a million variables here. (Nielsen’s statistical models, people that watched in classroom/institutional settings, etc.) Theoretically some statistician could eventually come up with some complex model that convincingly demonstrates that a larger percentage of Americans did in fact watch Obama’s inauguration. But the take away here is simply that even though the media worked overtime this week to convince you all the hoopla means Obama’s relative popularity is unprecedented — it’s not.