Lady Gaga Tops Forbes' World's Most Powerful Celebrities List

As with any Chart-based data, it’s the underlying algorithms and qualitative decision-making which is usually key. In terms of public ’Hype-Meters’, I doubt there’s many that have not at least heard the name Lady Gaga - her contemporary influence is pretty pervasive, as this accolade attests to.

The 5 Key Criteria for Forbes’ Celebrity 100 List:

• Pay: Annual Earnings
• Money Rank: Overall Wealth Ranking
• TV/Radio Rank: Minutes of exposure / coverage on TV and Radio - includes Music / Video Playback, Interviews and Appearances
• Press Rank: Frequency of appearance and column inches in all publishing media
• Web Rank: Number of visitors to celebrity’s main sites
• Social Rank: Numbers of followers on Facebook and Twitter

Of the top Rankings, Lady Gaga outranks all for Web and Social Rank, and Oprah tops the Money and TV / Radio Rankings, leaving a lowly Roger Federer (25th Overall) to head up the Press Rankings.

For us Brits, the #10 ranked - basketball player LeBron James of the Miami Heat is not quite yet a household name on this side of the water; #14 Kobe Bryant of the LA Lakers is possibly better known here, but otherwise there are no real surprises in the top 20, although the listing does seem to be heavily skewed towards American media, as one would expect.

The perennial Brit - Elton John places at #5, with Simon Cowell still rising fast op to the 9th spot.

I Have a feeling that Oprah’s Star is waning, and it’s nice to have two youngsters in the top 10 - in the form of Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift; it will be interesting to see if these two can hold out on their placings and popularity. I expect Lady Gaga to have a very strong 2011, along with Simon Cowell. It will be most interesting to come back next year and compare the relative placings then.

Both Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber owe a lot of their sucess to their mastery over the Internet and Social Media in particular. Being a successful celebrity today is totally changed from the model even a few years ago. If you want to be successful today, you must take advantage of and master the Internet - there is no alternative to this now.