Justin Bieber – Mister Three Percent

Most people outside his demographic (and especially those without daughters) have never heard of him, but young popster Justin Bieber rules the ether so it seems.  It isn’t so much a case of pop eating itself but the internet instead.  The statistics are staggering.

It doesn’t sound like much in black and white – in fact Mister Three Percent might (just might) be construed as a slight insult (but we’re not talking inches or centimeters or smaller units of measurement even, so perhaps not) but Beiber Fever has struck Twitter to such an extent that 3 percent of its infrastructure is working around the youthful Canadian at any one moment.  That is a lot of infrastructure.

At its busiest, Bieber is mentioned on Twitter once a second.  That is quite a frightening statistic for a (some might say) second rate RnB singer.  If you search Twitter for results from the apparently countless (more legion than the Orc) Daydream Beliebers you get hundreds of results in the short space of five minutes.

Take the figure at, say, 100 per minute (albeit a peak time number) and that is a total of 144,000 new tweets about Bieber in the space of the day – a figure which (alarmingly) dismisses the idea of any replies or retweets.  Do the math.  Plus when the boy tweets himself he has one or two people who sit up and pay attention.  As of my two finger typing of this piece, Bieber had 5,110,998 followers.  In the space of typing out this sentence he had increased that to 5,111,015.

But that is not all.  His song Baby Feat. Ludacris from his one and only album My World 2.0 (hmm, rubbish title but scarily true) has outdone even the seemingly unconquerable Lady GaGa to become the YouTube video with the most ever views 317,637,966 (at time of writing). 

Although one might suspect that this is partly due to the determination of his fans to get him to the number one spot, this is an almighty feat which will be very difficult to beat – unless PoTUS is assassinated and the act is caught on film.  Only something like that might overtake this amount of hits.  And then I doubt it.

Those of you who have not put your foot in the Bieber water (as such) this is what the fuss is all about.



Having sat through it myself I realise I have heard it on the radio before (not such a Bieber virgin then!)  – but I thought it was sung by a girl. Sorry, girls. Oh and sorry if you are reading this because you typed is Justin Bieber a virgin (probably without the question mark because seriously, is that a question?) in to your search engine.

As one who remembers the seventies heyday of the likes of Donny Osmond and David Cassidy I can only say that I find the Bieber statistics somewhat depressing (not only because this site gets a tiny percentage of B's hits in terms of number).  So many (mostly) girls are reaching uberhysteria over this pint sized popster that it is like history repeating itself.

Image Credit Flickr User paparutzi

It is almost as if the laws of evolution no longer apply to humanity (now there’s a surprise) – perhaps if Osmond and Cassidy fans had not been allowed to breed it would have been alright.  Personally, I am considering reading up on creationism or building a nuclear fallout shelter in my basement. 

My World 2.1.

As a postscript, a few seconds before the publish button was pressed, Justin Bieber's Twitter followers increased by 344 since the first word of this article was written.

Strewth.  Resubscribe to your internet security software – this kid isn’t so much a pop star as a virus.

Image Credits

Bieber on Phone