On Friday morning, we reported that the Kony social video campaign had topped 70 million views in record time. In the afternoon, we collaborated with the WSJ to report that the campaign had topped 80 million views.
Today, we wanted to give a brief update. As of this morning, the Kony campaign has generated well over 100 million views, 112 million to be exact. The views come from over 750 clips across the web, most coming from video responses to the campaign. There are even translated and subtitled versions of the documentary popping up in Spanish, Italian, French, and Chinese. There are over 860,000 comments for the campaign.
It's hard to understand how big 100 million views is, not to mention the unprecedented speed with which Kony has surpassed the milestone. On Friday, we wrote about benchmarks for 70 million views and compared it to viral legends Susan Boyle and the Old Spice Guy. The Atlantic took that idea a step further and asked us to create a chart with how long it took some of the most viral campaigns ever to reach 70 million views. We'd like to do the same here for 100 million views.
There are only two other social video ad campaigns that have topped 100 million views: Blendtec's Will It Blend and Evian's Live Young. We wanted to provide a broad perspective on the speed of this campaign, so we've included some of the biggest heavy hitters: video games, music videos, web series, and straight viral hits.
Before we get to that chart, we need to review how we arrive at these numbers. We measure online video based on True Reach, the combined performance of clips related to a "campaign." This provides a holistic and complete view of a campaign's performance online. In the instance of the Kony campaign, the main clip has 74 million views on YouTube. The additional 38 million views come from the 750+ clips uploaded by audiences across the web. In other words, if you just look at the main clip on YouTube, you're missing tens of millions of views for the campaign.
In only six days, Kony is the fastest "campaign" to surpass 100 million views. Susan Boyle did it in nine. Lady Gaga's Bad Romance, which currently has over 900 million views, took 18 days. Rebecca Black's Friday, currently at 430+ million views, took 45 days. Even Justin Bieber's Baby, which has topped 1.1 billion views, took 56 days, one day faster than Miley Cyrus' Party in the USA. Modern Warfare 2, one of the biggest entertainment launches ever, hit 100 million views after 77 days. We won't go through all of them, but you can see how long it took some of the biggest viral names ever to reach 100 million views in the chart above.
What do you think of the results? How big do you think Kony will get? Let us know in the comment section below!
