I saw this headline and thought it was interesting: World Cup viewers may top 30 billion.

Of course the population of the Earth is only 6 billion.  They must be counting alien viewers too…. :-)

Actually, the article does explain how this works:

The 2006 soccer World Cup continues to set television ratings records, with cumulative viewing figures for the month-long tournament expected to exceed 30 billion or five times the total world population.

Naturally, when you can count someone over and over again, you can get well over five times the population of the Earth.

In fact, I think this is how politicians do elections….