Last year on July 26, the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights launched a global campaign aimed at raising awareness of discrimination and violence against the LGBT community. Known as UN Free & Equal, it has used social media and celebrities in order to promote awareness of the global challenge of ensuring LGBT rights. In the wake of last year’s Indian Supreme Court decision to recriminalize consensual homosexual acts between adults, the UN held a press conference in Mumbai to release a video in April called “The Welcome.” Starring Bollywood actress and singer Celina Jaitly and using an updated song from the 1970s, it has been viewed more than two million times on YouTube and has become the most watched UN video ever.
As a tool to raise awareness, it’s been a huge success – garnering news attention from newspapers all over India and even the Wall Street Journal. But what can we say about the viewership? Charles Radcliffe of the High Commissioner’s office was kind enough to provide me with some of the website analytics. Here’s what the data show.
1) Viewership is indeed global.
To give you a sense of what the viewership looks like, here’s a map based on some of the website data:
The country with the most views was Thailand, followed by the United States, Mexico, Philippines, and Romania. There were more than 45,000 views in India, comprising almost 4% of the total views. As a means to garner attention in the developing world, this project has been a great success. There were, for example, more views in Colombia, India, Peru, and Turkey than in Canada, more views in Brazil, Argentina, Algeria, and Serbia than in the UK, and more views in Malaysia and Indonesia than Australia. All of these figures predate a wave of more recent media attention centered around the number of views breaking the 1 million mark.
2) Audience demographics vary.
To better understand who watched the video, the next chart breaks down the distribution of viewership by country and by age category for the ten countries with the most number of views.
Two findings jump out here. The video was viewed more by younger audiences (24 or younger) in developing countries and more by older viewers (25 and up) in developed countries. India was an intermediate case between developing countries and Canada and the United States. India had the highest percentage of viewers between 25-44 (54%). This might well be attributable to remixing a Bollywood standard.
We have no way of knowing from these data how individuals responded to the video, of course. But “The Welcome” has been a fascinating coupling of message and medium that will be a model for other organizations looking to reach global audiences and shape opinions for years to come. Two million views on YouTube can’t be wrong.