Universal Music Group reaches earth's population on youtube

It sounds pretty over the top but if you log on to Universal's Music Group youtube account right now you will find their videos have been viewed a whopping 6.9 billion times.

6.9 billion is approximately the Earth's entire population, which will reach 7 billion next month. Now of course, not everyone in the world has seen this youtube account, but the sheer volume of individual video plays marks a milestone in online viewing statistics for a single brand.

If I take the length of an average video at, lets say, 3 minutes, and multiply that by 6.9 billion, we come to approximately 20.7 billion minutes of content consumed.

You can argue that youtube views are not entirely accurate. Why? Obviously one person can watch the same video several times, and that can count as a hit. But still, to get 6.9 billion hits requires a huge audience. Video libraries like Hulu are the way forward for content distribution, and consumers will want more online and digital content as we move into 2012.

Some of you will read this and think what about youtube itself? I won't contest the fact that youtube as a platform has racked up an astronomical amount of views, but youtube didn't start out as a media library producing its own content. In fact, it's the content that Universal offers through youtube that audiences keep coming back to. It just goes to show that a platform so diverse and open to a global audience will have a far larger viewership than any national TV network.

Universal Music Group on youtube, Official Website