Bob,

Please utilize this math as you see fit, but I request you do not reprint this email as coming from me. You can even take credit for the math if you like.

In general, the Live Earth stuff rubbed me the wrong way as it did you. But what really gets my goat and adds to the opinion that this is more a Kevin Wall ego stunt is the oft-quoted, never challenged figure that 2 billion people watched a portion of Live Earth. Yet I do the math, and I just can’t get even close to that figure.

First off, there’s around 7 billion people on the planet, so about 30% of the planet watched this event? That’s a bit of an overstretch. Then, if you discount the approximately 1 billion people on the planet who live in abject poverty, that brings it down to 6 billion, or 1 out of every 3 people watched some portion of this event. I’m not sure that ratio would hold up amongst my circle of friends.

So, what about doing the math in reverse? Well, I’ve rarely seen a TV show get more than 25 million viewers in the US in the last year (only really the Super Bowl and the American Idol finale). But anyone in TV knows that to get ratings, you don’t broadcast something on a Saturday…at night…in summer.

But for the sake of argument that they did manage to find 25 million viewers across all the channels combined and throw in a very generous 5 million off of Satellite Radio. Now, let’s take into account the published figures of 10 million watching on MSN and 1.3 million attending the concerts themselves. So far, we’d have:

US TV – 25 MM
Sat Radio – 5 MM
Internet – 10 MM
Concertgoers – 1.3 MM

So we’re only at 41.3 million. So presuming 10% of the US saw this (which is still a big if), you’d still need to get to the 1 in 3 figure for the rest of the world. And we HAD a concert on our soil. Can we presume places like Russia (150 million people) had 1/3 of their population watching? I would doubt it.

But again, let’s be GENEROUS and say that 10% of the rest of the non-poverty world did indeed watch Live Earth. That would add another 570 million which would mean about 611.3 million folks watched a portion of Live Earth. Now I can’t get 611 million people to watch anything that I create, so that’s still impressive. However, that’s not even 1/3 of the published figure that remains unchallenged by their organizers.

And remember this is being generous with the TV and satellite stats. Those numbers could easily be far lower than 30 million and likely will be. It’s also generous to say that 10% of China were watching Live Earth, which had no Chinese pop stars on it to my knowledge. So by my math, Live Earth would have to be 3 times as generous to reach the presumed statistics.

I’ve done my share of statistic embellishment in my time, but this one takes the cake.