So it finally happened. Sometime this past Saturday, Gangnam Style slid past Justin Bieber's "Baby" to become the most-watched video in YouTube's history, somewhere north of 800 million views on each. I saw it break on Twitter before I saw it anywhere else, which feels about right for 2012.
I want to be annoyed about this. I really do. I have heard the horse-dance move described to me in painstaking detail by three separate coworkers, watched someone do it (badly) at a birthday party in October, and had it stuck in my head for approximately six consecutive weeks since this thing first crossed over from Korean pop charts into every corner of the English-speaking internet back in the summer. Its everywhere. And yet I cant actually be mad at it, because unlike a lot of stuff that goes viral, the song is genuinely catchy and the video is genuinely funny, which is a combination that doesnt happen nearly as often as youd think given how much garbage gets pushed at us as "the next big thing."
What I actually find more interesting than the song itself is what this does to YouTube as a platform. Bieber's video had held the number one spot for almost three years. Three years is an eternity on the internet, its basically an entire console generation. And it took a music video released by a relatively unknown-outside-Korea artist, with zero major US label push behind it at launch, to knock it off. Nobody at YouTube planned for this. Nobody at Sony or Universal drew up a marketing calendar that said "and then in November a Korean rapper's satire of Seoul's wealthy Gangnam district becomes the biggest thing on the internet." It just happened because people kept sending it to each other, over and over, for months.
Ive gone down a bit of a rabbit hole reading about how the view count even works, since it's the kind of thing you dont think about until a number gets big enough to make you think about it. Apparently YouTube doesnt count every single load as a view — there's throttling and validation happening behind the scenes specifically to stop bots and refresh-spam from inflating numbers artificially, which is a smarter system than I assumed existed back when I figured it was just a simple counter ticking up. Knowing that makes the 800-million number feel a little more real, honestly. It's not just a bunch of people leaving a tab open overnight.
(Small tangent, but related: I also spent a chunk of Monday trying and failing to get a Nexus 4 into my cart before it sold out again, which it did, again, in what felt like under ten minutes. Between that and the Cyber Monday traffic numbers everyone's reporting today, its been a week of watching the internet strain under demand it apparently didnt plan for. Somebody at Google needs to explain to me why a phone launch gets less server capacity planning than a music video.)
Back to the video though. What gets me is how little any of this has to do with quality control or gatekeeping in the traditional sense. A decade ago you needed radio programmers and MTV and a record label with a budget to get a song in front of that many people. Now you need the song to be good enough that people choose, individually, over and over, to forward it to a friend or post it on a wall. Thats a completely different kind of filter, and I dont think weve fully figured out yet whether its a better one. Sometimes it produces something as genuinely fun as this. Other times it produces whatever the flavor-of-the-week meme is that everyone's sick of within a month.
Anyway. Bieber held the crown since early 2010, PSY's got it now, and I'd bet real money someone else takes it within the next year or two, because that's just how this cycle goes now. If youve somehow avoided the video until this post, I'm sorry to tell you that avoiding it any longer is basically not an option at this point. Just watch it at lunch and get it over with.