Every other video to break a billion was so forgettable YouTube made a playlist to remind you of them
When the first video landed on YouTube back in 2005, its founders wouldn’t have thought that a clip uploaded to their site would be able to achieve one billion views. Sure, most of the early content on the site gave viewers mundane glimpses into personal lives, but it didn’t take long for the platform to take off. The first video to hit one million views was uploaded in October 2005 and took only 10 days to do so. When an upload crossed the billion-view threshold seven years later, news sites around the world trumpeted the achievement.
Today, nearly ten years after the fact, YouTube is tooting its own horn in celebration. Ever since South Korean pop star Psy broke ten digits on views with his music video for “Gangnam Style,” hundreds of other videos have followed suit. If you listen to YouTube’s hype, you could be forgiven for thinking that professional music videos from studio-backed artists are leading the billion-view club because the true masters of this rarified domain are none other than children’s videos.
Sitting comfortably atop the charts and leading Despacito by over three billion views is the pernicious earworm Baby Shark. In fact, over half of the top-10 list is content made for children, and one is neither musical, nor in English. That’s not to take away (too much) from the contribution that traditional artists have had in driving the growth of YouTube: the top five searches on YouTube in 2021 were all music related.
Still, YouTube’s billion-view music video playlist is worth checking out. There’s everything you’d expect to see on a list like this like Mark Ronson and Katy Perry, but there are also songs you’ve never heard of as well as some you might be surprised made the list.
And if you’re wondering about Psy, well, his music career’s still coming on strong with the music video for his most recent hit single, “That That,” putting up more than 275 million views as of press time.
