On a quiet Sunday afternoon, it started.
“Hey honey, come look at these numbers,” Richard called out. He had posted the reel from when we were on our flight out of St. Thomas — the one that passed right above Epstein Island. It had already racked up more views in a few hours than he usually gets in a whole week.
He almost didn’t post it. He wasn’t sure anyone would care. To us it was surprising and strangely fascinating — we had never realized exactly where the island was until we flew directly over it. It felt a little surreal.
“This is nuts,” he said later that afternoon when it passed 100k views. By the time we went to bed that night, it had crossed 400k. The next day the updates kept coming.
“640k views — up from 260k just three hours ago. This one might break a million!”
By 10:30 a.m. Monday, the reel had already generated 108 days of total watch time, with an average view duration of 25 seconds.
It was fascinating watching the stats evolve. First, it hit two days of watch time, then two weeks. The snowball kept rolling faster and faster downhill. Every new update left me stunned — it was so much fun experiencing the whole thing from behind the scenes with him.
Like most reels, it eventually lost its initial explosive momentum and settled into a slower, steadier climb. Right now, it sits at 5.5 million views with an average view time of 25 seconds. That’s a crazy amount of time!
It adds up to roughly 2.3 million minutes, or 38,300 hours, or 1,596 days — the equivalent of 4 years and 135 days of continuous watching.
And that doesn’t count the 8.2M views from another big account that reposts viral videos and asked to be able to share it. Over 13.7M views and counting…
The reel can be seen on his Instagram page here, or you can see the longer version in wide format on his YouTube linked at the bottom of the page.
