Worried your peers are spending to much time on YouTube? Relax. Your peers haven’t heard of YouTube? You should be worried.
One of the components of the recently published Global Innovation Index (GII) is a country’s activity on YouTube. In collaboration with Google the GII ranked every country of the world according to how prolific they were in uploading videos to YouTube as an attempt to measure the country’s digital creative output. The result is a rank on the scale of 1-100, with actual numbers obscured to protect Google’s data.
Interestingly, if these results are plotted along with the OECD’s data on productivity the results seem to be correlated. That’s not to say YouTube usage makes you productive, but it could indicate that both YouTube activity and productivity are a result of a technologically advanced society.
The outliers are also interesting. Icelanders, for example, are a very connected, tech-savvy bunch (I should know, I’m Icelandic). In fact, they’re in first place when it comes to YouTube uploads per capita. But Iceland’s productivity is below the OECD average – they work long hours to achieve their high GDP per capita. Israel is also prolific on YouTube (and has one of the most active startup ecosystems in the world) but they’re even less productive than us Icelanders.
On the other end of the spectrum, our cousins the Norwegians should probably start spending more time on creating digital content. Too much oil money might make them rest on their laurels and fall behind. Which means fewer Norwegian videos on YouTube. And that can only be bad.