david j. garcia

It happened more frequently in Provo, but I’ve observed the phenomenon everywhere I’ve lived over the past couple of years: impromptu YouTube viewing parties, where groups of friends and family gather around to share their picks out of the site’s countless videos. Funny, bizarre, educational, entertaining, or uplifting—YouTube has it. And it seems that the way to find the best videos is through recommendations. It truly is a user-driven social computing experience, but the connections seem just as likely (or even more likely) to happen between people in the same living room as online through comments or video responses.

One thing I’ve always found interesting is the sheer amount of time investment represented by the view counts on even the most mundane videos. I’ve made some completely unscientific assumptions about the relationships between recorded “views” and actual time spent watching a given video, and came up with the following trivia:

First, my own personal upload: “Inside the BYU bell tower”. Now, assuming fifteen of the views came from me checking my own links and view counts, and assuming only two-fifths of the remaining people actually watched the video, that’s still at least half a man-hour, at just over two minutes per viewing, devoted to watching this one simple video on YouTube. That’s enough time for two people to save fifteen percent on their car insurance.

Now, what about something of a larger phenomenon, but certainly not one that everyone’s seen: “Unicorn vs. Narwhal.” It had 147,332 views at my last check. For this one, I’m going to assume that every one of those led to an actual viewing, because you kind of have to be seeking this one out, and every time I’ve watched it there’s been a viewing party gathered around, to boot. At 4 minutes, 24 seconds, this video has been watched for a total of 648260 minutes, 48 seconds. That’s 10.8 thousand hours, or 450.18 days, or about 15 months. To put it in perspective, in the first fifteen months of life, an average human has gone from an eight-pound (or so) newborn to becoming a complex toddler. That’s what they did with fifteen months. We collectively watched Unicorn vs. Narwhal.

Chris Crocker’s infamous “Leave Britney Alone” rant (sorry, no link on this one: I really don’t want to encourage that sort of behavior in any way) has 21.68 million views, just from her original post. On this one, we’ll assume it takes six views to be equivalent to anyone actually watching all 131 seconds. That’s still 15 man-years devoted to this one. Yes, I double-checked the math. I’ll let you figure out how the equivalent of 15 years of someone’s life could be better spent. (I’m using all 24 hours in a day, not the “working” man-year).

Now a fun one: assuming every time someone clicks on “Drama Prairie Dog”, they watch the entire 5-second clip, 275 days-worth of human life has been devoted to watching the prairie dog turn, over and over again. I’d say this one was worth it, for all the joy it brought, wouldn’t you?

A couple more: “Daft Hands”, at a one-in-three ratio of actual viewings per “view”, would have been watched for almost 53 man-years. More than half a lifetime. OK Go’s “Here it goes again”, with half of its 37.5 million views counting, clocks 219 man-years. In comparison, this amazing bridge took only 14% more time to build. Oh, and “Evolution of Dance” with almost 94 million views (until recently the most-viewed YouTube video ever)—if we counted every one of its views (I know that’s a stretch), it would have over a millennia (that’s a thousand years) of human life devoted to watching it. Wow.

My final point, however, is this: I don’t think that all YouTube is bad. It can be fun, relaxing, and social. It can even be inspirational. If Randy Pausch gave his “Last Lecture: Achieving your childhood dreams” five times a day, six days a week to audiences of 150 every time, he would have had to keep up that more-than-full-time pace for two years before reaching as many people as he has with one tenth of the views on YouTube so far. He didn’t live that long.

So, I’m not saying you shouldn’t show your friends that great new clip you found. After all, I’ve probably encouraged someone to watch some of these linked videos. All I ask is that we occasionally think about how we’re collectively using our time, and that we make sure it’s worthwhile.