Here's a big caveat: With the occasional exception of travel costs, both TED and TEDx speakers are generally unpaid. That said, some TEDx venues may be willing to provide demo video footage of your speech, which may balance out the opportunity cost of lost revenue.

Ensuring rigor in our science-related content TED employs a science curator as well as fact-checkers and topic-specific advisors. Before a speaker is invited to the TED stage, we strive to ensure that their work has been peer-reviewed, and that they are well regarded by other scientists.

The following chart takes a look at the top 8 most watched TED Talks videos of all time, according to views on YouTube. In first place comes Sir Ken Robinson's 2006 talk, "Do Schools Kill Creativity?", with almost 75 million views.