MUSIC • TECHNOLOGY • POLICY

According to the Washington Post’s Caitlin Dewey in her reporting about Google’s January 22 Q4 earnings call:

Youtube has become one of the biggest forces behind Google’s growth, said Nikesh Arora, Google’s chief business officer.

Viewers watched an average of 4 billion hours of video a month in 2012. Gangnam Style, the most-watched video of all time, earned $8 million in advertising revenue — or roughly 65 cents a play, Quartz calculates.

So let’s see–the “Gangnam Style” official video has as of a few minutes ago gotten 1,238,957,445 views on YouTube.  This doesn’t count all the unofficial monetized versions of the video which also have a bunch.

So let’s see–$8,000,000 divided by 1,238,957,445–even without doing the math, a simple country lawyer like me can see that it’s not possible for the per-view payment to be anything remotely close to $0.65.  (And given that a single track mp3 download on…