Maybe the Web isn't making us stupider: TED talks hit 500 million views
Nonprofit organization TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) is famous for the annual conferences it has held for over 20 years, which concentrate on promoting and sharing interesting ideas in the arts and sciences. For the last five years, the group has been posting videos of its famous "TEDTalks" freely on its site, to help spread its ideas even further.
The library of videos started with just six presentations and has grown to just under 1,000 today, On Monday, along with the first non-English TEDTalk, the group announced some of its most impressive statistics: its talks have been viewed more than 500 million times across TED.com, iTunes embedded and downloaded, Hulu, and more. Just one year ago, TED's video count was at 290 million across 700 available videos.
The 20 most popular TEDTalks cover such diverse topics as education, neuroscience, mathematics, physics, motivation, happiness, choice, technology, sex, and leadership.
Sir Ken Robinson's 2006 talk (embedded below), loosely titled "Schools kill Creativity," is TED's most-viewed video with 8.66 million.
While this is an impressive number of views, it would not even break the top 200 most viewed videos on YouTube. The most-viewed video there, Justin Bieber's "Baby", has been viewed over half a billion times itself, more than all the TED talks combined. With 8 million views, Robinson's TEDTalk still would only just break into the Top 50 education-specific videos, far behind the top-ranked video of Disney's Goofy being turned into a baby (78 million), and an awkwardly popular video of horses mating (61 million).
Still, there is strength in numbers, and with TEDTalks now coming out in languages other than English, its popularity is sure to grow even further.