Every year at the Oscars, someone notes that the ceremony is being watched by “a billion people.” That’s an impressive figure, to be sure. It’s also a complete fiction. As I explained at Quartz,
Last year’s Oscar ceremony drew a United States audience of 40.3 million, making it the seventh highest-rated telecast of 2013 (the other top 10 shows were all NFL-related). That would mean that elsewhere in the world—the Academy says Sunday’s telecast will be seen in “more than 225 countries”—an additional 960 million people are interested enough to tune in and see what gown Cate Blanchett will wear and which film will win best production design. Roughly 13% of Americans watched last year’s ceremony; 14% of the remaining global population would also need to view the show in order to reach that mythical billion-viewer figure. Comparatively, the 2008 Summer Olympics opening ceremonies in Beijing were viewed by an estimated billion people, but those numbers were bolstered by more than half of China’s 1.3 billion population.
I trace the origin of the “billion audience” myth, and talk about why, despite all rational evidence to the contrary, the b-word won’t be going away anytime soon.