So it's official, or as official as these things get: Psy's "Gangnam Style" passed Justin Bieber's "Baby" sometime last week to become the single most-watched video in YouTube's history. Baby had been sitting at the top since like 2010, somewhere north of 800 million views, and honestly I'd sort of stopped thinking about it as a number that could move. It felt like a permanent fixture, the same way you stop noticing a building's been there your whole life. Then a Korean pop song about a Seoul neighborhood I couldn't point to on a map just walked past it like it was standing still.
I want to be annoyed about this and I mostly am, because the song has been inescapable since August and my downstairs neighbor's kid has apparently decided the horse-riding dance is the only physical activity he's interested in anymore, performed directly above my desk between roughly 4 and 6pm on weekdays. But setting the noise complaint aside for a second, the actual milestone is kind of a strange one to sit with.
Baby got to the top the old way, more or less: a hugely famous teenager, a massive label push, years of steady accumulation. Gangnam Style did it in about four months, from a guy who wasn't a household name outside Korea in July. That's the part that actually interests me, not the dance or the song itself (which, fine, is catchy, I've caught myself humming the "oppan" part in the shower and I resent it). Its the fact that the distribution now genuinely doesn't care where something started. It doesn't route through MTV or radio programmers or anyone with a gatekeeping job. It routes through embeds and Facebook shares and, apparently, my neighbor's kid.
I went and looked at the view count this morning before writing this and it's sitting somewhere around 807 million, which puts it just past where Baby had settled. Whats funny is that number is going to look small in a month. The thing hasn't even hit its own ceiling yet, it's still climbing at a rate that would've been the whole story on its own a year ago.
There's a small technical wrinkle here too that I think is more interesting than the chart-topping part. YouTube view counters were never really built with the assumption that a single video would run up numbers like this. Ive seen people speculating in comment threads that the counter itself is closer to its limits than anyone expected when the system was designed, which if true is a pretty good joke at the expense of whoever originally scoped that database column. I can't verify the specifics and I'm not going to pretend I dug into their backend, but it's a fun thing to imagine: a K-pop horse dance quietly stress-testing infrastructure some engineer built years ago for a much smaller internet.
None of this is really about the song, is what I keep coming back to. Its about the fact that "most viewed video ever" used to be a record that took years to threaten and now it took a summer. That compresses everything else too. Product launches, viral marketing stunts, whatever your company's YouTube strategy is supposed to be, all of it now has to reckon with the idea that reach isn't rationed out slowly anymore. It can just happen, all at once, to almost anyone.
I don't have a tidy conclusion about what this means for content strategy or whatever, and I'm suspicious of anyone in November 2012 who tells you they do. I just think its worth writing down, while it's still surprising, that the record got broken this fast. In a year we'll probably think of Gangnam Style as the obvious answer to a trivia question. Right now it still feels like something actually happened.
Also if anyone has tips for soundproofing a ceiling on a grad-student budget, my inbox is open.