With videos of shivering people flooding social feeds around the world, it’s safe to call this the summer of the Ice Bucket Challenge. And what a summer it was: we saw epic stunts, epic fails, quirky twists and a whole lot of celebrities. We learned a lot about the strange connections between famous people (Bill Gates knows Ryan Seacrest?). The IBC craze even resulted in a couple of marriage proposals. And it’s all in the name of charity: on September 7, the ALS Foundation reported more than $110 million in Ice Bucket Challenge donations.
The meme hit another major milestone this week, too: Ice Bucket Challenge videos have been watched on YouTube more than a billion times. That, combined with the volume of uploads, makes it one of the biggest video memes in the history of the Internet. Yeah, it’s that big.
The trend is also international. People from more than 150 countries have now posted "Ice Bucket" videos on YouTube, and "Ice Bucket Challenge" is August's top rising YouTube search globally. While 90 percent of videos came from the U.S. in the early days of the trend, within two weeks, the majority of IBC videos were uploaded from outside the U.S.:
As a charitable phenomenon, the Ice Bucket Challenge unprecedented in the history of YouTube. As a collaborative, participatory meme, it has a lot in common with last year’s explosive Harlem Shake. But it’s actually even bigger than Harlem Shake at its onset. In the first month after these memes took off, IBC has about double the uploads and three times as many views compared to the Harlem Shake.
Want to relive all the icy magic? Here are the most-watched IBC videos, ranked by views:
-- Claire Stapleton and Kevin Allocca
Today, YouTube unveiled its video trend lineup for 2014, providing more information about our production and development of YouTube's top memes over the past decade and revealing what we anticipate to be the year's top memes. [Click here to learn more].
In combining quantitative and qualitative research methods, our data analysts project that 2014 could be one of the most active years for meme activity yet. Our Harlem Shake program set site-wide records in 2013, but look at what we're projecting for just one of our 2014 #newtrends, "Clocking":
Since this project began in 2005, we've been closely tracking it's impact on both viewership and the number of meme videos uploaded by our production teams. As you can see, the impact of this program has skyrocketed the last few years, with viewership spikes increasing as high as 64%. We're really pleased to be expanding it in 2014!
To learn more about this year's memes and how, for the first time, you can participate by creating your own, please see our announcement video:
On July 15, PSY's now legendary video for "Gangnam Style" will officially turn 1 year old. The video is already the most viewed video ever on YouTube and was the first clip ever to surpass 1 billion views -- it currently stands at 1.7B and is still growing for those counting. But impact of the biggest web video phenomenon of 2012 extends beyond PSY's singular music video.
While global interest in K-Pop has been on the rise for the past few years, the data suggests views of Korean artists tripled in the year following the release of Gangnam Style. Here's a chart of monthly views on top K-Pop channels, including PSY:
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In the year before "Gangnam Style", official music videos from K-Pop artists were viewed over 2.2 billion times globally. The year following, that number jumped to over 7 billion views, 3x the viewership. In 2011, less than half the viewership on top K-Pop channels was from outside the Asia-Pacific region. Now, the majority of the watching is taking place outside the region. 91% of viewing in the past year was outside Korea.
In the U.S. where, for many, K-Pop had been an unknown genre of music, video viewership of top K-Pop artists doubled the year after "Gangnam Style" hit the web.
So what were people watching?
The top 10 music videos from Korea uploaded since "Gangnam Style" represent a diverse mix. PSY tops the list with his follow-up "Gentleman", which itself now has nearly half of a billion views. Other major acts include Girls Generation and Big Bang, both of which have cultivated large international followings.
You can see the full top 10 via this playlist or watch below:
-- Kevin Allocca
Depending on your frame of reference, the "Harlem Shake" is best known as dance move from the 1980s, a dance track by Baauer, or the biggest web video trend of the month. If you need to get caught up to speed, here's a playlist of some of the most-popular iterations of it from the past few days.
The meme first started gaining traction last week and is attributed to a silly video from a vlogger named "Filthy Frank." Though it was another user named SunnyCoastSkate who then established the form we've become familiar with: the jump cut, the helmet, etc.
From there, the spin-offs spread very quickly. As of the 11th, around 12,000 "Harlem Shake" videos had been posted since the start of the month and they'd already been watched upwards of 44 million times. As you can see in the chart below, over 4,000 of these videos are being uploaded per day and that number is still likely on the rise.
One of the unique directions the trend took rather early was spawned by the staff of Maker Studios, who created what's currently the currently most-viewed version from their office. While it could have just remained a college-kid fad, Maker's version helped signal that the trend was something any organization or office could be a part of, with other companies joining them like...
| College Humor | The Chive |
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| Break | Buzzfeed |
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Musicians Matt and Kim produced a pretty epic one that's been circulated widely on social media. It's been performed by the young... and the old.
Some of the many subgroups we've seen are swim teams and U.S. service academies, and there are plenty more on the way, we're sure.
Update (2/15): It turns out plenty more were on the way. As of Valentine's day the number of "Harlem Shake" videos has increased to around 40,000 -- based on video title -- and those videos now have 175 million views. Here's an update to the above chart:
-- Kevin Allocca
This post originally appeared on the Official YouTube Blog
A million views? You know what's cool? A billion views.
Today, a 34-year-old K-Pop artist made online video history when his viral video, Gangnam Style, smashed all our records and became the first video ever to reach one billion views. Yup, that’s right one BILLION views!
PSY's success is a great testament to the universal appeal of catchy music-- and er, great equine dance moves. In the past, music distribution was mostly regional. It was more difficult to learn about great artists from around the world. But with a global platform at their fingertips, people are now discovering and sharing amazing music from all over the planet, by artists like Brazilian Michel Teló and Belgian-Australian Gotye.
One billion views is an incredible number, but the PSY-nomenon goes beyond that. Check out these stats:
- PSY was already big in Korea, but in 2012, he became a global celeb as Gangnam Style quickly spread from Seoul and the pacific to North America, South America, and Europe. It’s been seen at least 1 million times in close to 75 countries, making it one of the most global music sensations ever!
- From a one-thousand person flash mob in Jakarta to cover videos from Ai Weiwei and Mitt Romney, hundreds of thousands of parodies have been uploaded to YouTube, some of which have tens of millions of views. In fact, fan tributes to Gangnam Style are now being viewed 20 million times every single day.
- PSY's own remix with Hyuna has 200 million views alone.
- "Gangnam Style" was YouTube's top rising search of 2012 and on October 6th, we saw more than five million searches for “gangnam style” in a single day. Check out this video demonstrating some of our most popular YouTube searches this year.
- For those interested in the business side: a number of assessments and projections have been posted claiming “Gangnam Style” has generated over $8.1 million in advertising deals, hit more than 2.9 million in song downloads since July, and achieved other incredible feats!
- Since late last month, people have clicked to buy the track on iTunes over 600,000 times helping make PSY the first Korean artist ever to rank #1 on the U.S. iTunes chart and #1 in over 30 more countries.
Perhaps what’s most impressive about this feat is that it took just over five months to happen. To give this milestone some context, here’s a chart of Gangnam Style’s rise to popularity versus Justin Bieber’s “Baby,” the video that previously held the most-watched video title:
Congratulations to PSY, the flash mobbers, K-Pop fans and people who love fun across the globe. Considering the Gangnam Style dance was the number one dance-related search on YouTube this year, you better make sure you brush up on your moves before New Year's Eve.
The kind of amazing creativity and unique connection between people all over the world that resulted in this one billion views is only possible with an incredible community of people we're so lucky to have on YouTube. And we can't wait to see what you'll come up with next!
Today, global sensation PSY and his wildly popular "Gangnam Style" music video surpassed Justin Bieber's "Baby" as the most viewed music video (and overall video) of all time on YouTube.
As of noon on Saturday, the viewcounts stood at 805 million to 803 million.
Bieber's video picked up the designation in July of 2010, when the then-rising star himself passed Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance". Though it was posted in February of 2010, "Baby" remains popular, continuing to garner between 350k and 500k views per day.
PSY's video first spread from South Korea to the rest of the world in early August. It's been a massive hit at a global level unlike anything we've ever seen before. Each day, "Gangnam Style" is still being watched between 7 and 10 million times.
To give you a sense of how quickly "Gangnam Style" has reached this milestone, here's a chart that shows the viewership path each video took as they each approach 1 billion views. The velocity of popularity for PSY's outlandish video is unprecedented:
"Gangnam Style" and "PSY", respectively, have been the top rising searches on YouTube over the past six months. And these searches are coming from all over the world.
Searches first spiked in South Korea in late July when the video was posted. We began to see search interest rise in the U.S. and other English-speaking nations over the next month until it began to peak in September in North America and Brazil. "Gangnam Style" searches and viewing began to spike more broadly and in places like Europe and India in October.
PSY's official channel now has over 1 billion views, a considerable number. Views on Bieber's VEVO channel alone, however, still total over 3 billion.
- Click here to see the charts for the most-viewed YouTube videos of all time
One year and 70 million views later, the Nyan Cat celebrates it's YouTube birthday today. The backstory is easy enough to explain: animated gif plus Japanese pop tune equals weird looped animation. What happened after is anything but.
Defying the logic of many, the clip went on to become one of YouTube's top 10 most-viewed videos of 2011 and spawned seemingly countless parodies, remixes, and covers. There is a 100 hour version now. With 6 million views.
Interestingly, while the video did see an initial spike in interest in April of 2011, it was not as large as some of the other well known viral hits. Instead, a look at the data shows that the clip has maintained a fairly steady following, averaging around 1 million views per week over the past year.
In the neighborhood of 100,000 videos have been posted with "nyan" in the title over the past year. And those videos have been seen over 400 million times. 400 million. Nearly half a billion.
Here are the top 10 most popular:
Last week, the 30 minute "KONY 2012" documentary, produced by Invisible Children, dominated social media feeds and was, by far, the most-viewed video on YouTube. The clip, which has been seen over 75 million times already, has seen unprecedented popularity for a non-profit video.
A look at viewing over time shows that viewing peaked last Wednesday with 31 million views in a single day, coinciding with what seemed to be the period of highest social activity around the clip.
The top rising searches, globally, on YouTube in the past 30 days relate to this subject and over 7 million views were from searches. Over 20,000 "Kony"-related videos have been uploaded in the past week.
Over 20 million views were from social media platforms. Some of entertainment's biggest stars, including Rihanna, Justin Bieber, Diddy, and Oprah, shared the video on their social media accounts, and the video quickly became the most-shared clip around the world. The video continues to spread and the numbers continue to climb, with the video still averaging millions of views per day.
The video has been increasingly popular and it's single day spike in viewing nearly tripled the most-recent video to see this kind of speedy spread.
At this point, most of us have seen the controversial and most-discussed video of the past week: "Facebook Parenting: For the troubled teen." But not everyone may realize the speed in which it took off.
The clip, which first spread last Thursday, hit 11 million views at its peak last Friday alone. For reference, that's almost double the spike last year's most viewed video, Rebecca Black's "Friday," saw when it first spiked with 6 million views in a single day.
The video picked up over 215,000 comments in one week and it remains one of our Most Shared videos.
The video caused such a stir that over 1,000 videos tagged "facebook parenting" have been posted this week, some serious and some... a bit more humorous.
It's a trend that's been going on for more than a month, but in the past week or so, we've seen the "Stuff ___ Say" trend has seen a new shift in style and popularity. Whereas initially the trend was focused on demographics and other cultural criteria -- race, gender, interests, clubs -- we've started to see way more localized versions popping up in YouTube's trending video feeds.
For example, in the past few days we've seen from a number of cities across the United States. These are among the estimated several thousand videos that exist as a part of this trend.
(Note: Some contain adult language)
| Los Angeles | Minnesota |
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| Toronto | Silicon Valley |
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| San Francisco | Washington |
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| Miami | Chicago |
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These are just a few, and you've probably seen ones for other cities floating around (drop them in the comments!). California seems to be particularly well represented, and the New York take, which first went viral last week, has been seen upwards of 2.6 million times.
The latest edition of Google's Think Quarterly -- the Speed edition -- explores some interesting Trends-related insights and background that are definitely worth exploring:
RACE TO THE TOP
This game/tool uses YouTube Trends data to help us understand what separates the fastest rising videos on YouTube from others. Click the image below to play and see how much you know about viral phenomenon on YouTube:
VIRAL VELOCITY
At this point, we all know the story of the Talking Twin Babies from Brooklyn, who became famous around the world for their unintelligible conversation. But now, click the image below to hear the story from the family's perspective via a Joe McDermott cartoon strip:
Whether you've been spending lots of time on YouTube or checking out your social media feeds, one video trend seems to be completely inescapable in 2012: the "S*** __ Say" trend.
It's one that started back in 2011, with the "S*** Girls Say" series, which launched on December 12th. Episode one, below, has over 10 million views and overall the videos on the channel have over 17 million total views.
The series was so popular -- and simple in concept -- that it spawned all manner of parodies and remakes. We can now estimate that there are well over 500 instances of these videos on YouTube from the past month.
The topics vary from ethnicity to career to other social commentaries. Some people have been using them to promote their businesses as well. The playlist below contains a handful of diverse examples, some popular, some controversial.
(Use the arrows to navigate between videos or watch them all here.)
The most recent hit in the trend has been "S*** Nobody Says," a natural evolution that's now been seen close to 2 million times in the past week.
On Friday, a cover of the song "Somebody That I Used to Know" performed by Walk Off the Earth began to draw attention for its use of just one guitar and five performers for all the music. By Sunday, the video was averaging three million views a day, with most of the viewers coming across it as it was shared on social media sites.
The band, which has posted videos on its channel dating back to June of 2009, had drawn a significant 4.8 million views up until last Thursday. But since then, their work has been seen almost 20 million times around the world.
Today, it remains one of our most shared and most viewed clips. It's the most viewed video in Germany, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and Sweden.
The "Honey Badger" video, the most popular episode from the funny Randall's Animals channel in which nature documentaries are given very amusing voiceovers, was one of the cult viral hits of 2011. Unlike many other viral videos, "Honey Badger" never saw a sudden dramatic spike in viewership an instead picked up its 31 million views gradually through out the year, starting all the way back in January, when it was first posted.
The video became so popular that as LSU cornerback Tyrann Mathieu got noticed for his outstanding defense, his fans/teammates actually gave him the nickname "honey badger" for his tough play on the field. Now, the popularity of the of the video and Mathieu, who was up for a Heisman trophy this year, have become inextricably linked, as evidenced by the search chart below.
The day Randall's clip saw its biggest spike in views: December 3, the day LSU won the SEC championship and locked up their invitation to the National Championship game. Tonight, his team plays Alabama in that NCAA title game, and so Randall might once again find some new fans.
(WARNING: Some Adult Language.)
Earlier this year, a college student named Zach Wahls delivered a touching speech in the Iowa legislature. The video was featured here on Trends and saw a small viral surge of just over half a million views.
But now it's gone viral again and, this time, the surge is not so small.
Another version of the clip suddenly skyrocketed in popularity, and it's been seen roughly 11 million times in the past 3 days. Here's a chart of combined views for the video:
So how'd it happen? It seems much of the attention was driven from a link on Reddit, and, even moreso, from a post on Moveon.org from Wednesday. The video drawing significant share traffic.
There are plenty of popular roller coaster videos on YouTube; some are of the riders and some are of the rides themselves. Recently, a very specific kind of roller coaster, the single-rail alpine coaster, has become particularly widely-spread.
A little over a week ago, David Ellis posted a video of him riding one in Austria in which he decided not to touch the breaks. It's been seen roughly 3 million times since.
Meanwhile, this 3 year old video -- also from Mieders, Austria -- suddenly spiked in popularity as well:
Not all popular videos are of the single-rail variety, of course. Earlier this year, thrillseekers may recall this POV video going viral; it was a first look at Japan's Takabisha, the world's new steepest roller coaster:
It's not too frequent but it's also not entirely uncommon to see a how-to video spike in views, particularly when it demonstrates a useful and timesaving skill that challenges how we've been doing things all along. Case in point: "Shucking Corn--Clean Ears Everytime," a homemade video posted in late September that's suddenly seen a big surge in views.
The video has been seen over 1.5 million times in the past few days alone and is still on an upward trajectory, with 400,000+ just yesterday. But unlike most viral videos, which have a balanced or young-leaning audience interest, the audience for this clip has skewed in the opposite direction: it's been most popular with viewers 55-64 years old and has been atop the most-viewed list for viewers in the U.S. above the age of 55.
Interestingly, the video has gone viral not via Facebook or Twitter, but via Yahoo Mail, where many of its views have been originating. You can see the progression in daily views below:
A few weeks ago, we saw a similarly useful clip from Saveur called "How To Peel a Head of Garlic in Less Than 10 Seconds" pick up nearly half a million views.
Speaking of peeling trends, read more about the thousands of videos explaining How to Peel a Banana that are currently on YouTube.
One of the most popular trending videos of the week is this clip of two seniors trying to operate a webcam with little success. Its popularity is evidenced by the nearly two million views over the past few days and by this sample of today's top rising searches: "old couple computer," "elderly couple can t figure out computer," "older couple trying to take picture on computer," "old couple trying to skype," "seniors accidental video." It's also the most-shared video of the day.
The video -- which was uploaded in August by a user named Mindy in the United States -- first became popular on pop-culture sites Tuesday afternoon, and drew 1.6 million views on Wednesday.
This is actually not the first clip of its kind to draw a big audience. Back in June, Rita and Frank's similarly accidental clip also drew a following and 1.4 million views.
Another 20 million views for Rebecca Black. Black released her anticipated "My Moment" video in mid-July and here's a quick look back at the views it's picked up, which total roughly 22 million at the time of posting:
At it's peak, Black's video was seen 4.6 million times in one day.
Black's "Friday" was posted in February and became a web phenomenon in March.
And what a phenomenon it was. "Friday" racked up 100 million views in just roughly a month, which was faster than Justin Bieber accomplished it. As we pointed out, the fact that her first video was about a day of the week actually ended up being a contributing factor to that video's staying power.
It’s been a big summer for the Marines on YouTube, since Sergeant Scott Moore, currently stationed in Afghanistan, asked Mila Kunis to his Marine Corps Ball in Greenville, North Carolina.
Moore’s YouTube invitation has received over 3.3 million views to date and after much “will she or won’t she” speculation, it looks like Kunis will be taking Moore up on his offer.
Now Marines across the country are trying their luck with Hollywood’s top celebs. Kunis’s co-star, Justin Timberlake has accepted an invite to a similar ball, while Golden Girl Betty White turned down Sergeant Ray Lewis for an October Marine gala.
On Tuesday, Terminator star Linda Hamilton turned the tables and said she would go with Lewis to the ball in lieu of White. This video makes YouTube’s trending list this week.
This week, PFC Hart who is stationed at Camp Pendleton in California, also joined the fray by asking Miley Cyrus to be his date for his upcoming Marine ball. Here’s his video:
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