The amounts of calculated effective information of viruses are consistent to the complexity defined by the number of proteins or genome size. In fact, the effective information is roughly proportional to the number of proteins. For viruses, the advantage of using effective information is not obvious because viruses are simple and the number of protein coding genes or genome size can be used to determine the complexity of viruses. For higher multicellular organisms, due to G-value paradox, the effective information will be more useful.