Gangnam Stats

At time of writing, Gangnam style has 2,082,054,675 views. About 2 billion, for a 4 minute long video. That seems really big, but I can't really understand that number.

In total, 4 minutes * 2 billion is 133 million hours or 15,220 years. If people live about 80 years, we've collectively dedicated the entire life of 190 people to watching gangnam style.

But you wouldn't watch it while you were asleep. Apparently the average person spends 90,000 hours at work in their lifetime. So, watching Gangnam style on youtube was the equivalent of the life's work of 1481 people.

Because each frame of the gangnam style video has been watched 2 billion times, each frame of the video has been watched for 964 days, or 2.6 years. (This assumes the video is 24fps).

At time of writing, wikipedia has 2.7 billion words. If each person who watched Gungnam style instead wrote 2 words in wikipedia articles, we'd over double the size of our online encyclopedia.

Gangnam style is probably the most impactful thing PSY will ever do. Its also possible that being in PSY's video is the biggest thing many of the cast and crew in that video will ever do. The old chess-playing men in the video are in there for about 5 seconds, which is a total of 316 years of collective viewing time. Will I affect 316 human-years of impact in the world? I hope so - but I don't know.

Gangnam style isn't the biggest thing ever though. Google has 52,000 employees and has been around since September 1998. If google's employees have been growing linearly (which they haven't), the number of hours spent watching Gangnam style amounts to about 15% of the time googlers have spent building their company. You could argue that Larry and Sergey have been 7 times more impactful than PSY on the lives of their employees alone. (I'm sure the number of hours spent on google search - or saved by it is much larger again.)

The time spent watching Gangnam style is the same amount of time spent by employees building Google from September 1998 to November 2004. Google's search engine wasn't too bad in 2004 - and that was made possible in the same time that we've collectively watched Gangnam style.

Obviously impact isn't measured in the hours of time people burn watching your dance videos, but its still interesting to think about.

And no, the 2 billion views haven't all been from me.