Calculation of Free Time

Having too much free time on hand made me think about the volume of free time the whole world population has and the way people choose to spend it. For the purposes of illustration, pardon me for oversimplifying the figures. Let’s just count people above the poverty threshold who have a realistic control of their consumption. This should number around 3 billion. Using rough but hopefully sensible estimates, children have 5 hours free time per day. Adults have 3 hours, seniors also have 5. Let’s put the average at around 4. 4 hours per day for 3 billion people is 12 billion hours. That’s equivalent to 6 billion movies (given a movie is 2 hours per), 2 billion games, (given an estimated 6 hour lifespan for a game), 800 million books (given 15 hours to finish a book), 180 billion songs (given 4 minutes per song), 240 billion Youtube videos (given 3 minutes per video). All in one day. Crunch the numbers for one year and the numbers become too mind-boggling to comprehend. For a single institution to get just 1% of this market, that will still be equivalent to 120 million hours per day, or 44 billion hours a year. Given let’s say a standard movie price of 5 USD per movie, that institution controlling 1% of the world’s free time stands to earn a whopping 110 billion USD in revenue.

It’s a huge market. All entertainment, ranging from NBA superstars to Hollywood actors, from Jay-Z to J.K. Rowling, are vying for a slice of this huge pie.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. These calculations assume, rather simplistically, that people are only consumers. What about people who create content using their free time, such as this blog entry?:p What about the untapped 20 hours? Well, okay we can deduct 8 hours for sleep. That still leaves us with 12 hours. Most of it is work time, but that doesn’t mean you can’t consume or produce any content during work time right? Even 10 hours multiplied by 3 billion people will give you 30 billion entertainment hours a day of potential market. Even given the trend that more and more people are shifting towards free content, entertainment media is still extremely lucrative for all the components in the ecosystem (producers, consumers, intermediaries, and advertisers).

The possibilities are truly mind-boggling.