How many views would The Beatles have gotten?

Let's try some (very) estimated math to figure it out. When The Beatles made their USA debut in 1964 on The Ed Sullivan Show, there were roughly 73,000,000 viewers tuning in. The population of the country at the time was about 192,000,000. So roughly 2 out of every 5 people in the USA were watching at this specified time on this specified day.

If we take into account the population (313 million) of 2012 and apply the same percentage of viewers (38%), there'd have been roughly 119,000,000 people who tuned in.

Now, considering these numbers are based on people viewing a show when it aired, we can assume there were people who were not able to watch because they were preoccupied, busy, or forgot to tune in. Considering YouTube videos can play constantly over and over without an "air time," it should be safe to assume there'd have been more viewers who tuned in later on. Even if there was only a 10% increase in viewers (big estimate) for people who wanted to tune in but missed out, applying that to our current numbers would add an additional 31.3 million. That brings is to roughly 150,300,000 views.

But here's a big one: YouTube videos can be watched multiple times per viewer. How many times do you watch a YouTube video that you really, really like? Three? Four? There's probably a decent amount of teenaged people who watch their favorite music videos multiple times a day for a few weeks, especially if YouTube is their main source for music. So if we assume 40% watch a new music video only once, 50% watch it 2 or 3 times, and 10% watch it 15+ times, we'd probably get to multiply our final number by about 8 (major estimation going on here). But that would bring the new number up to 1,202,400,000.

The last thing to be taken into account (that I can think of without putting too much thought into this) is that the USA is only roughly 11% of the world's Internet users. Europe, which also had a huge Beatle craze, is currently 22% of the world's Internet users. So if we apply everything we just did for the USA to Europe, Europe would have twice as many views for a particular music video that the USA did. That's brings the new total amount of views to 3,607,200,000. Australia would add another 120,240,000. Asia, assuming they are only 12.5% (1/8th) as "in" to The Beatles as the USA, Europe, and Australia, would add another 601,120,000.

That brings our (highly estimated) GRAND TOTAL to 4,328,640,000 views in the time frame of a couple months.

Say, for a bit of extra fun, we compare those numbers to Psy's "Gangnam Style." Our projected numbers are for a Beatles video that's been out maybe 8 weeks. "Gangnam Style" has been out for 31 weeks. That means that if The Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand" were hypothetically debuted on YouTube at the same time of Psy's "Gangnam Style," it would currently have 17,314,560,000 views; or, be 12.5 times more viral than "Gangnam Style" was.

Millions of teenage girls would forget Beiber in a second and fall in love with real music and I would stop typing this and head to the Cavern right now....

I think it would be off the scale,best band that we have ever produced, i saw them live twice in the 60s,and even chatted to john lennon at a party in london,i will never forget that, great days.

The Youtube system would suffer meltdown, ending life on earth as we know it...

100 times more than any of the talentless bimbo's and monkey boy's of today would ever get combined!

Unimaginably many

More than jb and lady gaga combined!

Quite a lot. They were very popular you know!

They'd blow it up