PSY Passes Bieber; 'Gangnam Style' New Most-Viewed Video of All Time

November 24, 2012

Today, global sensation PSY and his wildly popular "Gangnam Style" music video surpassed Justin Bieber's "Baby" as the most viewed music video (and overall video) of all time on YouTube.

As of noon on Saturday, the viewcounts stood at 805 million to 803 million.



Bieber's video picked up the designation 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 we've ever seen before. Each day, "Gangnam Style" is still being watched between 7 and 10 million times.

To give you a sense of how quickly "Gangnam Style" has reached this milestone, here's a chart that shows the viewership path each video took as they each approach 1 billion views. The velocity of popularity for PSY's outlandish video is unprecedented:



"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 U.S. 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 1 billion views, a considerable number. Views on Bieber's VEVO channel alone, however, still total over 3 billion.

  • Click here to see the charts for the most-viewed YouTube videos of all time

'Sandy' Videos Spur Major Interest

November 01, 2012

The superstorm Sandy inflicted serious damage to the east coast of the United States this week, drawing attention and interest from all over. In the United States, "Hurricane Sandy" was YouTube's top rising search of the past seven days as residents in affected areas as well as those beyond, sought out information as well as bystander footage of the disaster.

Over 30,000 videos mentioning "Sandy" were uploaded Monday alone and these and other videos from this week have been viewed tens of millions of times.

With over 5 million views in just 2 days, the most-watched video from the storm is the footage of the power plant explosion in lower Manhattan that left much of the city in the dark.



The Weather Channel livestreamed their forecasts of the storm on YouTube as it battered the East coast, reaching 13 million livestream views over the course of their coverage.

Other popular videos include footage of flooding in New York and the rescue of passengers from the HMS Bounty.

More footage at CitizenTube



Interest in "Hurricane" searches Monday were at their highest since 2008 (as far as our records go back). The most recent search interest spike prior to this was last summer, when Hurricane Irene threatened the east coast as indicated in the chart below:

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