It has been exactly a year yesterday since GANGNAM STYLE was released by PSY. As I was doing this piece, the video had 1,743,631,346 hits. The most watched YouTube video of all time is not in English (the most spoken first and second language worldwide), it is not mandarin, which is the world's largest first language at roughly 12.5 percent of the globes population. But rather Gangnam style is in a language that is spoken by only 76 million people (as a first language), 1.14 percent of the globes population. And you can bet that the vast majority of the 24.5 million people in North Korea have not seen the YouTube clip, because of the oppressive regime that means a lack of internet connectivity. And an oppressive regime, oh, we said that. I bet that the folks would rather have freedom than the internet.
Google bought YouTube in late 2006 for 1.65 billion Dollars, not long after the company was founded on Valentines day in 2005. I went onto the YouTube website to get an idea of views/hits/uploads. Amazing, check it out: Statistics. The factoid that blew me away was: "Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube, that's almost an hour for every person on Earth, and 50% more than last year" More interesting is that in the Google first quarter results there is not a single mention of the word YouTube. Because it probably still costs them a lot (a huge amount) and probably does not make them that much. Yet. Results on the 18th of July, two days time. I can tell you that I am pumped for them!!