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Zach Galifianakis brought the ferns, and President Barack Obama opened a new avenue of presidential communication.

The president urged young people to sign up for the new health care plan through an appearance posted Tuesday on the comic website Funny or Die, bypassing the news media and even previous favorites like TV talk show titans Jimmy Fallon and David Letterman. Instead, he chose to be a guest on Galifianakis' "Between Two Ferns," the digital short with a laser focus on reaching people ages 18 to 34.

The video reached 1 million views within three and a half hours of posting and was adding more at a pace of 1 million per hour in the middle of the day, according to Funny or Die. The website was briefly the number one source of referrals to Healthcare.gov, the Obama administration said, with some 19,000 people navigating directly from the video to the health care website in the first few hours.

"Gone are the days when your broadcasts or yours or yours can reach everybody that we need to reach," Obama press secretary Jay Carney said to broadcast journalists at the White House press briefing Tuesday.

With 4 million viewers, Obama exceeded in six hours the typical audience he would get by appearing on television shows hosted by Letterman, Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert. That doesn't count the ancillary views clips of the interview aired repeatedly on CNN. And the video was a topic on Howard Stern's radio show. By nighttime, the video had more than 8 million viewers.

As hip as Fallon and Kimmel may be in some circles, their audiences skew older a median age of 52.7 for Fallon and 56.2 for Kimmel during the last week of February, the Nielsen company said.

For Web entertainment, it's a moment that rivals Emmy or Golden Globe nominations for Netflix's "House of Cards." And in presidential annals, it breaks form much like Richard Nixon did with his awkward jokes on television's "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In."

In the clip, Galifianakis peppered Obama with awkward questions, including whether he'd locate his presidential library in Hawaii or Kenya.

"What's it like to be the last black president?" he asked.

"Seriously?" Obama said. "What's it like for this to be the last time you ever talk to a president?"

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Obama Pitches His Health Care Plan on Funny or Die

Representatives for the attendees did not respond to requests for comment or declined.

Others at the fundraiser included Mayor Bill de Blasio, the city's first lady Chirlane McCray, and First Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris.

(Read more: Goldman, SAC among de Blasio's Wall Street backers)

"There are some things I can't do by myself. Congress has the power of the purse. We cannot deal with infrastructure on the levels we need to without Congress," Obama said, according to remarks released by the White House on Wednesday morning. "I can do some things on immigration, but I cannot make sure that we have an immigration system that potentially could grow our economy by an extra trillion dollars without Congress' help."

"And so that's why all of you are here today. My argument is very simple: Tony is rightwe have all the cards we need for America to compete," he added.

"And when you travel outside this country, what's always remarkable to me is the degree to which people view us still with envy with respect to our economy. They marvel at our resiliency. They marvel at our dynamism. They marvel at low natural gas pricesthey really marvel at that. They marvel at the degree to which we can attract talent from around the world. They marvel at our university system, which is unmatched. But to realize all our potential that's sitting there right now, we've got to have a Washington that functions better."

The event was Obama's second of the evening. Hours earlier, he appeared at the home of venture capital investor Alan Patricof at a fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee. The Greycroft founder's event also cost a reported $32,400 to attend.

Obama's job approval fell to 41 percent in March from 43 percent in January, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. The rating marks a low for the president.

(Read more: Democrats more vulnerable ahead of elections: NBC/WSJ poll)

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Obama feels the Wall Street love at swanky event

President Obama is expected to call for a change to labor rules so that more workers get overtime.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney)

The administration will point out that some convenience store managers, fast food shift supervisors and office workers may be expected to work 50 or 60 hours a week without overtime, and that their hourly pay rate may actually be less than the $7.25 an hour minimum wage.

Currently, most hourly workers must be paid time-and-a-half if they work more than 40 hours a week. Most salaried workers do not need to be paid overtime, unless they earn less than $455 a week.

But that works out to $23,660 a year, which is less than the federal poverty level for a family of four.

The $455 threshold for overtime hasn't been raised in 10 years, since President Bush upped it from $250 a week. It would be $553 today if it had gone up in line with inflation.

The administration hasn't said where it wants to set the new threshold to require overtime.

Share your story: Do you often work more than 40 hours a week without overtime pay?

The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank, recently proposed raising it to $970 a week, or $50,440 a year, so that anyone earning less than that must be paid overtime. EPI said that would only return the level to where it was in 1975, adjusted for inflation, and would raise the pay of 10 million salaried workers.

Related: Surprising near minimum wage jobs

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Obama wants to expand overtime pay