Red Bull Stratos Jump follow-up: Dude survives — and breaks 5 records!

Confirming the predictions we posted last Friday, the Red Bull Stratos Jump has proven that jumping from the edge of space is still considerably less dangerous than sitting on a particularly unsteady bench.

In other impressive Stratos Jump news, Felix Baumgartner’s jump from 128,000 feet from earth broke not one, not two, not three or four, but FIVE official world records. Four of these records are scientific in nature:

• the first person to break the sound barrier in freefall,
• highest vertical speed in freefall,
• highest freefall parachute jump and,
• greatest freefall distance.

Needless to say, we’re impressed.  However, (in our one-track-social-media-minds) the most important record broken was #5:  most concurrent views of a live stream on YouTube.

Red Bull dominated YouTube on Sunday, attracting over 8 million viewers to their channel to stream the jump live.  Since we checked last week, their subscriber base has sky-rocketed (no pun intended) from around 600,000 to 776,786!  What does this translate to for Red Bull?  Forbes has reported that Ben Sturner, President and CEO of Leverage Agency, has called the jump “perhaps the greatest marketing stunt of all time” and said that, “The value for Red Bull is in the tens of millions of dollars of global exposure, and Red Bull Stratos will continue to be talked about and passed along socially for a very long time.”

But I think I’ll still go for the particularly unsteady bench…