Angry Birds is less popular than television

Andrew Sullivan, via Hillel Fuld, reports:

Another mind boggling statistic about Angry Birds, and you should sit down for this one, is that there are 200 million minutes played a day on a global scale. As Peter [Verterbacka, Angry Birds creator] put it, that number compares favorably to anything, including prime time TV, which indicates that 2011 will be a big year in the shift of advertisers’ attention from TV to mobile.

Americans alone watch a mean of 5 hours of television per day.  Let’s say half of that is prime time.   300 million Americans times 150 minutes is 45 billion minutes a day, and we haven’t counted any TV usage anywhere else in the world.  The popularity of Angry Birds does not “compare favorably” to the popularity of TV.

Update:   On the other hand, it’s quite reasonable to suppose that there are lots of popular TV shows that occupy fewer global person-minutes than Angry Birds does.  So the claim that advertisers should be taking the idea of advertising on mobile games, just as they do on TV shows, sounds fair to me.

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3 thoughts on “Angry Birds is less popular than television

  1. As per your update, it looks like a very popular prime-time show has viewership of something like 10 million people per episode in the US. As there are usually 22 episodes a year, I think that works out to 36 million minutes per day, say double that globally. Which indeed puts Angry Birds in the same league.

  2. JSE says:

    Agreed. But I don’t find that very mind-boggling!

  3. Richard Séguin says:

    What is mind-boggling is that someone watching 5 hours of television per day is probably simultaneously watching about 2 hours of brain-curdling commercials while passively allowing their train of thought to be chopped up into shreds.

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