So somewhere in the last day or two, "Gangnam Style" pulled ahead of Justin Bieber's "Baby" to become the most-watched video in YouTube's history. Something like 803 million views, maybe a little more by the time you're reading this, because the counter does not slow down even for a second. I checked it at lunch and it had gone up by what looked like a couple hundred thousand in the time it took me to eat a sandwich.
I want to be annoyed about this and I cant quite manage it.
Bieber's video had been sitting at the top for what feels like forever in internet years, it went up back in early 2010 and just sort of squatted there while every other viral thing came and went. A guy in a suit doing a horse-riding dance in front of a kids playground in Seoul knocking it off its perch is, if nothing else, extremely funny. My brother-in-law has been sending me this video since July and I ignored it for months because I assumed it was some novelty thing that would burn out in a week. It did not burn out. It just kept climbing, and now its the most-watched thing that has ever existed on the internet, more watched than any movie trailer, any music video, any speech, anything.
What actually gets me is not the song, its the mechanism. Youtube doesnt really tell you why something takes off the way this did: there's no dashboard that explains "this crossed some threshold and the recommendation algorithm decided to shove it in front of another forty million people." It just happens, and afterward everyone writes it up like it was inevitable. I dont think it was inevitable. I think a huge chunk of this is just K-pop fans mobilizing hard early on, plus the video being genuinely, structurally funny in a way that doesnt need subtitles, and then a snowball effect once news outlets started running "have you seen this" pieces sometime around August. After that it basically fed itself.
My nephew is four and has watched the horse dance probably two hundred times this month alone, which if you extrapolate across every four-year-old with an iPad in this country goes a long way toward explaining 803 million on its own. He does the arm thing. Hes very committed to the arm thing. I tried to show him the actual video once on my laptop and he got upset that it wasnt on "his" screen, which tells you something about where were headed as a species but Im not going to get into that today.
Anyway the part of this story that doesnt get mentioned enough is Bieber's old record itself was kind of a fluke of timing — "Baby" launched right as YouTube views were becoming a thing people cared about and tracked, back when getting to a few hundred million was still rare enough to be a headline on its own. Now the ceiling for "most viewed ever" just got redrawn, and I'd bet real money it gets redrawn again within a year or two, because the total number of people online with a fast enough connection to stream video keeps going up every single month. Records like this arent really about the video being infinitely better than what came before. Theyre about a bigger and bigger pool of humans with 2 minutes to spare and a mouse to click.
I also think its worth saying, because nobody else seems to be saying it: the song is actually good? Like as a song, independent of the joke. I put it on in the car twice this week without any irony at all and my wife gave me a look but didnt turn it off. Ill take that as a win.
One more thing, unrelated but Im annoyed and this is my blog so Im putting it here — my office has started playing this on loop on the lobby TV that used to just show the weather. I don't know whose idea that was. Its been three days. I like the song fine but three days of the same 4 minutes on loop starting at 9am is a specific kind of workplace psychological warfare and I would like it to stop.
Nothing else major going on this week worth a full post, deals season is in full swing everywhere you look and my inbox has about forty percent more marketing email in it than it did two weeks ago, which is its own kind of record I guess. More on that another time maybe.