This is the master calculation of the Gegaton mega-event.
It is unlikely that me or my team will do another one. This is the complete round up. Me and the Rednex assistant Rebel have manually counted actual playing time of each song and connected it to 5.6B YouTube views.
If you are part of Rednex, or the Gegaton monetization program (STIM, IFPI, Ten Songs, Kobalt, Lucille, Concord, Sony), then you should read this to better understand what just happened.
The numbers were extracted on June 12th 2024 from the YouTube analytics page and concerns the total view count from 2024. There are also hundreds of screen shots and videos saved if needed.
___________________
Summary:
The division between the two songs are as follows:
Gegagedigedagedago 62% - Cotton Eye Joe 38%
The result is the same if counted in views, bars or minutes.
The current total view count in 2024 is 9.43 billion.
Measured in actual playing time, Gegaton counts to:
141.57B seconds
2.359B minutes
39.3B hours
4489 years
76.9B bars.
(this means actual playing time, that we have measured manually, as oppose to YouTube's auto generated stats, which does not take into account how long the song is actually played)
If compared to the average duration of a traditional view (on the Rednex channel it is 81 seconds), this equals to 1.75B traditional views.
Measured in playing time, Gegaton is one of the 100 most played songs on YouTube all-time.
Measured in view counts, Gegaton is most likely the most played song in the history of mankind, if measured within any duration of less than one year.
The money compensation from YouTube for one second of played song on a user channel, as opposed to your own channel, is about 6%. Per view count it is 1%.
_____________________
About the calculations:
Attached are two documents:
“Top 500 Gega videos 240612” is a straight dump from the YouTube analytics page of the Top 500 most viewed videos which includes a Rednex song. From June 12th, 2024.
“Master Gegaton calculation 240612” is based on 305 user generated videos. It includes counting bars & seconds of the played song of all videos with more than 10M views, plus those who are under 10M, but were on the Top 200 most viewed on April 14th.
In the left column is the URL. To view the video, copy the extension _a1GfsS8cpo and stick it to https://youtu.be/
will see an abbreviated title (GEGAGEDIGEDA), the total view count for 2024 (5829799) and how many bars of either Gega or Cotton (Gega-4 / Cotton-0) is played in that video.
Feel free to double check a couple of bar counts and/or view counts and let us know of any miscalculations.
In these 305 videos, Gega is played 1524 bars, Cotton is played 937 bars. All bars are rounded upwards to one whole bar. Singing “gegagedi” is counted as one bar, not a half bar. One bar is generally 1.84 seconds.
In the two right columns are the bars times view count (Gega-23319196 / Cotton-0). That number is the actual total number of bars that the song has been played from that video to all viewers.
Further below, at the bottom of page 6 are the sums of all 305 videos, and a calculation of actual playing time measured in seconds, minutes and hours.
The total view count of the 305 videos are 5.63B. Adding 68% means 9.43B (the yearly total). We will add 68% to all numbers from the calculation of the 305 videos to reach an estimate of the total (which still seems to not include any videos below 3.8M – I don't know why this is, and it is not possible for us to get more stats, or any direct communication with YouTube for that matter)
Total counts are:
Gegagedigedagedago total view count: 7.02B
Cotton Eye Joe: 3.75B
(this total is higher than 9.43B because some videos include both songs)
Gegaton combined counts:
Total bars: 76.9B
Total seconds actual playing time: 141.57B
Total minutes actual playing time: 2.359B
Total hours actual playing time: 39.3M
Gegagedigedagedago;
Total bars: 47.96B
Total seconds: 88.25B
Total minutes: 1.47B
Total hours: 24.5M
Cotton Eye Joe:
Total bars: 28.98B
Total seconds: 53.32B
Total minutes: 889M
Total hours: 14.8M
141B seconds and 39M hours equals 4489 years of actual playing time. Despacito should have about 1000B seconds actual playing time on YouTube.
(adding 68% to 5.63B is actually 9.458B, and not 9.43B. However, by the time that I have finalized this document, the total will have surpassed 9.458B. That's how mega-events work. As we observe, they won't remain still. Therefore, I round up in good conscience)
The average actual playing per video is 8 bars or 14.8 seconds. According to the YouTube statistics (document “Top 500 Gega”), the average view duration is 25 seconds, but this is likely because this is counted on the whole video. In many cases the song is not played through out the whole video. From these numbers we can draw the conclusion that Gegaton is played on an average of 60% of the total video time.
______________
About the money:
This is only about the master rights. I don't know anything about publishing.
Rednex have been paid for March & April's views. It is about $75.000 for about 5B views (about 20M hours), which will be shared among the Gega & Cotton royalty takers. These are rough estimates. This is about 1% of what a master owner would get on an official channel per view count.
If counted in time, the YouTube compensation to the master owner for a minute on a user generated channel is about 6% in comparison to an official channel. It is not shockingly low, but definitely not too high. To be honest, it is a bit of a disappointment, but also somewhat expected.
During the last week, from June 6-12, the average view count was 45M per day. The peak was on March 23rd with 166.7M views in one day. Currently this means that, compared to the top charts available on YouTube and Spotify, Gegaton is still currently the most played song in the world by a clear margin, and has been for 3 months straight. With a possible exception of April 19, 20 and/or 21 when Taylor Swift's Fortnight was released, but then retracted quite quickly.
In all of this, TikTok, and its awkward Billboard chart, featured without any numbers whatsoever, is a complete dark room from where we get no useful stats at all. Zero. Considering that both the Gega-movement and the nugget-movement started on TikTok, and not YouTube, it is reasonable to believe that the play counts on TikTok are in their billions as well.
The Gega video with the most bars played times video views is -
– with 1.81B bars played. (this equals 106 years)
The Cotton video with the most bars played times video views is -
– with 781M bars played.
On 6/15 Gegaton also reached a total of 615.6M unique viewers on YouTube, which is significant, because that are more humans ears than listens to all of Spotify. One song vs Spotify. How this is not a world top headline is beyond my comprehension.
There are a couple of YouTube statistics oddities that need to be mentioned. A view count result from a day, many weeks in the past, keeps changing. Sometimes quite a lot, perhaps up to 15%. Our peak day has changed from 170M-something to 150M-something. Now it is at 166,718,520.
Then, there must be a large discrepancy in the overall view counts. Looking at the “Top 500” document, the total of those 500 videos is 9.426B. The total view count is about the same. Which seems to indicate, that no videos from outside Top 500 are actually included in the total. Since a video currently need 3.8M views to be in the Top 500, and we know that there is at least one million videos made which includes the song, there are a lot of views unaccounted for. To say how much is pure guess work. I am guessing between 10-20%.
______________
You can skip these less important YouTube stats:
How viewers find your videos:
YouTube search 35.0%
Playlists 24.2%
Browse features 15.4%
Suggested videos 13.9%
External 4.4%
Others 7.1%
External links:
Google Search 43.6%
whatsapp.com 10.6%
WhatsApp 6.7%
Facebook 2.6%
discord.com 1.7%
Gender
Female 52.7%
Male 47.0%
Age:
13–17 years 2.8%
18–24 years 16.4%
25–34 years 34.8%
35–44 years 30.3%
45–54 years 9.1%
55–64 years 4.1%
65+ years 2.5%
Top Cities:
Jakarta, Indonesia 111790697 views
Bangkok, Thailand 93764761
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 87362244
İstanbul, Türkiye 68699775
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 57175649
Moscow, Russia 52122823
Phnom Penh, Cambodia 51842010
Surabaya, Indonesia 50217028
Lima, Peru 50194798
Bandung, Indonesia 49790682
Hanoi, Vietnam 48721582
Hyderabad, Telangana, India 48593144
Mexico City, Mexico 46203101
Tashkent, Uzbekistan 44237076
Jeddah Saudi Arabia 43716114
São Paulo, Brazil 42911668
Dhaka, Bangladesh 40688447
Bengaluru, Karnataka, India 39369119
Delhi, India 38720262
Manila, Philippines 37024684
Semarang, Indonesia 36781412
Santiago, Chile 35828254
Riyadh Saudi Arabia 35575863
Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan 34318609
New York, NY, USA 33314906
Top Countries
US 944059137 (1)
ID 833143661
IN 788007282
BR 581839274
RU 521559287
PH 448488656
MX 392090704
VN 375795538
TR 283086523
TH 225540902 (10)
MY 171160360
GB 158793207
DE 157650239
AR 147185343
IQ 135485620
KZ 129516434
IT 122559082
BD 119123321
FR 118144909
SA 117112003 (20)
PL 104896788
PE 92436831
CO 91836998
JP 85237538
UA 80171205
CA 76490254
UZ 76393348
DZ 76354999
ES 75037644
EG 71690715 (30)
CL 71409408
RO 70000387
PK 60463673
KH 60234811
EC 58024411
AU 48901272
MA 46713166
MM 45909719
KG 42568293
NP 41332382 (40)
NL 40231315
ZA 39896713
KR 39362935
BO 34023806
CZ 33470921
VE 33042336
AZ 32521230
GT 32366564
MN 31510152
SE 30541239 (50)
AE 28122563
DO 27627454
BE 26687381
HU 26508777
GR 26468565
JO 25535203
LA 23368328
BY 22878124
IL 22839032
RS 22131134
PT 22069792
HN 21359572
BG 21027839
TW 20705055
GE 18462855
AT 18008088
PY 17316382
SY 17259954
CH 15738961
SK 15300992
KE 15050818
LB 14792820
TN 14737005
SV 14651392
AM 13726712
FI 13614431
LK 13564022
HR 13449931
CR 13313853
DK 13234620
NO 12960586
IE 12835147
AL 12322225
NI 12013535
LT 11872063
NZ 11792980
KW 11765862
MD 11747775
PA 11237113
BA 10950332
HK 9781683
SG 9730155
OM 9487849
PS 9402793
LY 8630071
MK 8155537
UY 8080807
JM 7411295
SO 6981036
PR 6820588
QA 6620070
SN 6360870
ET 5998867
LV 5700358
IR 5295714
TJ 5285725
TT 5094243
EE 4512146
CY 4488694
BH 4407101
SI 4170678
CU 4160703
NG 3863954
MU 3600340
CI 3436440
BN 3209595
RE 3146424
GY 3090390
YE 3038417
ME 2812863
FJ 2362941
AO 2171716
BT 2108189
SR 2082973
MV 1895000
BZ 1774881
HT 1691638
GA 1687734
TL 1619845
GH 1600597
ZM 1552564
AF 1544196
NA 1439683
BW 1430021
UG 1312704
LU 1287449
BS 1273522
MZ 1227531
MT 1188257
CD 1140549
TZ 1073606
PF 1040832
MR 1027214
GP 988248
GU 985953
IS 968633
TG 947459
GF 924688
MO 908643
MQ 888357
ML 875386
NC 793847
RW 759216
BB 745939
TM 737499
PG 716443
MG 684895
CG 670697
BF 648852
ZW 620938
YT 607868
EH 597371
MW 561679
LC 532647
CM 530084
CV 506286
DJ 490143
WS 447521
GD 435887
CW 426091
VC 414779
SC 392472
AW 385493
BJ 349241
CN 341237
GM 318105
AS 309412
AG 308617
GL 302029
FM 275041
VI 268701
SZ 264694
SL 257136
DM 215548
SB 189781
TO 189155
KN 184433
SD 175155
TC 164579
KY 163165
SX 147986
JE 146861
FO 137322
MH 134539
VU 121375
IM 117160
LS 113507
MF 108385
GN 107373
AD 105250
PW 96932
NE 95686
LR 87299
VG 84762
BI 80623
BQ 79721
BM 73711
GG 71061
GI 68404
GQ 65625
MP 64478
GW 62781
KM 53371
CK 52645
AI 52142
LI 50150
ST 44222
TD 43841
SS 33643
KI 33300
SM 33050
MC 27250
AX 22578
WF 20062
MS 10502
NR 8667
PM 7804
BL 6917
SH 4992
TV 4360
NU 3241
CF 2613
SJ 2553
FK 1456
NF 986
CX 285
TK 118
End