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How Much Time Do We Spend Watching YouTube?

Written by Felicia Williams September 27, 2006

Don't sit to close to your computer screen, YouTube is become the new eye straining, brain rotting past time of America.

I spend alot of my life watching YouTube, but I never thought to take the minutes and string them together to quantify the number of hours that I have sat watching the swirling plasma on my computer screen.

This article, posted today on the Wired blog Monkey Bites, prompted me to do just that:

Here's a stunning stat one of my co-workers found at The Bivings Report today: "Since its establishment last year, people have spent a total of 9,305 years watching YouTube videos."

This got me thinking. I wanted to see how much time we've all wasted on each particular YouTube phenomenon.

I did some rough math, averaging the length of the videos in channels that have clips of varying lengths and using the standard of 525,948.766 minutes per year. Also, some videos are posted multiple times by different users. Whenever I encountered that scenario, I went with the most popular version.

So far, YouTube users have spent an aggregate total of:

6.39 years watching "White & Nerdy."
14.26 years watching geriatric1927.
14.75 years watching lonelygirl15.
17.71 years watching "Real Life Simpsons Intro."
93.31 years watching funtwo shred on the guitar.
378.99 years watching Evolution of Dance, YouTube's most-viewed video.

After reading this post by Michael Calore, I went into my YouTube account to see what my total user damage. At this current moment The Daily Reel has watched 2,040 videos. Don't believe me??? The numbers are on TheDailyReel profile on YouTube:

So let's so the mean of the videos we are watching is about three minutes a piece. Since some are a minute (or so bad that I can't mentally bare another minute), and some are eight minutes or more, I think that three minutes per video seems accurate.

A computer-generated drum roll please.......

That means The Daily Reel has spent 102 hours or 4.3 days watching YouTube videos in the past two and a half months. I'm sure we could have watched a few more, but we had some writing and research to do.

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Slacking off...

Posted by Matt Brown at September 28, 2006

Wow, you guys are like way behind. How can we trust you as the premium web content providers if you've only spent 4 days out of 9,000 or so years watching YouTube?

I only bring this up because a viewer rating submission function might be in order. If someone submits something cool or if enough people submit something cool, you could adjust your site without worrying about possibly missing anything.

Just a little slack

Posted by Felicia Williams at September 28, 2006

Your right that number does seem a little weak. But, this tally is exclusive to time watching YouTube videos. There are over 30 other video sharing sites to be found and we also spend ample time on Revver, Google Video, iFilms, Vimeo, and Daily Motion, and the like. I would have done a grand tally, but I that would have cut into my time watching videos.

Thanks for the idea about the viewer ratings!

102 degrees and rising

Posted by Jason at September 28, 2006

102 hours? wow its like you work at G4 tv or something. (my band leader, James Mercer, gives me a real-life, actual-factual drumroll). i'll be here all night.

The Daily Reel