The Amazing Growth of TED Talks Infographic

The Amazing Growth of TED Talks Infographic

TED talks (Technology, Entertainment, Design) have become the world’s most popular lecture series since its inception in the mid 80’s, now boasting well over one billion cumulative views on the Ted website.

Run by the private non-profit Sapling Foundation under the slogan ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’, TED talks are a series of conferences started with the idea of giving the world’s best thinkers a chance to give the best talk of their lives. From a relatively small start, TED has welcomed speakers such as Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Gordon Brown, Richard Dawkins and Malcolm Gladwell (to name but a few), and has an incredibly strong online following – as well as packed audiences for every conference.

PF Events have put together The Amazing Growth of TED Talks Infographic to give us some insight into the rise of TED and the numbers behind its huge success.

Here are some interesting facts about TED Talks:

• TED was founded in 1984 as a one-off event, the annual conference series began in 1990.
• TED conference creator Richard Saul Wurman set up TED with the idea of inviting the best and brightest to come and give the greatest talk of their lives in 18 minutes.
• TED has become the most popular lecture series online – in 2011, they had more than 500 million views. By November 2012, TED talks had been watched over one billion times worldwide.
• Tickets for a TED conference are invite-only, and are reported to cost around $6,000.
• TED.com users can now watch more than 1,900 talks available for them to stream on the site (as of February 2015).
• The TED Facebook page has 7.5 million likes.
• The first TED conference featured a $25 million copy of the Declaration of Independence and the 14,000 lb. T-Rex skeleton from Jurassic Park.

The top ten TED Talks are:

1. Do schools kill creativity? (Ken Robinson)
2. Your body language shapes who you are (Amy Cuddy)
3. How great leaders inspire action (Simon Sinek)
4. The power of vulnerability (Brene Brown)
5. My stroke of insight (Jill Bolte Taylor)
6. The thrilling potential of SixthSense technology (Pranav Mistry)
7. 10 things you didn’t know about orgasm (Mary Roach)
8. Why we do what we do (Tony Robbins)
9. The puzzle of motivation (Dan Pink)
10. Underwater astonishments (David Gallo)

Pick your subject wisely – the most viral topics are happiness, knowledge, ethics, food and psychology. In comparison, the least popular topics appear to be architecture, weather, media, war and time.

View also: Why TED is a Great Place to Learn Online Infographic