K-Pop’s Psy video hit Gangnam Style has topped the YouTube chart of most watched videos of all-time.
As of noon on Saturday, November 24, the video clip ousted Baby by Justin Bieber, as the most watched video on the portal when the view counts stood at 805 million and 803 million respectively.
Gangnam Style made its debut on July 15th and established the term K-Pop across the world.
If K-Pop will be a dominant music force remains the be seen, but Psy’s original video plus all the various remakes now total over one billion YouTube views making the song the first YouTube ‘billionaire’.
It is still virals like this music video that create the image of YouTube rather than the millions of dollars that Google puts into the portal to create ‘real’ television channels.
Bieber’s video became the best watched video 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 YouTube has ever seen before. Each day, Gangnam Style is still being watched between 7 and 10 million times.
According to the YouTube official blog, 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 US 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 one billion views. Views on Bieber’s Vevo channel alone, however, still total over three billion.
The chart below shows the fast rise of Gangnam Style by Psy compared to Baby by Justin Bieber (courtesy YouTube)
