According to the World Records Academy, Susan Boyle has set the world record for Most Successful Musical Debut after her first-round performance of “I Dreamed a Dream” was viewed 110 million times online in its first ten days, and 210 million times within its first month online.
Visible Measures, the company which tracks videos for sites such as YouTube, reports that all other videos concerning Susan Boyle (which include television interviews and her previously recorded rendition of “Cry Me a River”) have earned a total of about 210 million hits. In addition to this staggering statistic is the fact that 20 million of these hits were made overnight, making Susan quite literally a model overnight success story.
Throughout Susan’s still-strong popularity, the video of her first appearance on Britain’s Got Talent has remained her most-viewed performance. It generated about 2.5 million views within its first 72 hours online, and after a week had been viewed 66 million times – another online record set by Susan. The video, which was featured on twenty different pages, was viewed a total of 103 million times over the course of nine days.
Susan has not only generated interest in her online videos, as is displayed by the traffic her Wikipedia page has received: almost 500,000 hits since its creation. Susan had more than a million friends on Facebook a week after opening an account on the social networking site, and comments flood the singer’s Facebook wall almost constantly.
World Records Academy referred to the Internet as Susan’s “round-the-clock stage,” and though the singer had never heard of YouTube before hitting the big time, it certainly helped make her the Internet’s most famous singer.