Why Gangnam Style’s 2.8B views aren’t real
Psy, the South Korean singer, with its famous hit Gangnam Style was the first artist to beat the 1 billion views mark on Youtube. The equivalent to 1/7th of the entire world’s population (or the whole population of China) have seen the video which is quite impressive. Even more impressive was the same video, two years later, reaching the 2.1 billion views mark, exceeding YouTube’s views limit and totally breaking the system’s view counter (we can say YouTube is safe for now).
Some videos have now reached and surpassed the 1 billion views mark (54 to be more precise) even though Psy’s Gangnam Style still leads the top list of the most viewed videos of all time with 2.8 billion views. It took Gangnam Style almost 2 years to double the 1 billion views mark and 3 more years to get to its current value. It’s hard and it takes (a lot of!) time to get so many views, which explains the very low number of videos with such a mark in a huge platform as YouTube. So, what if we could get Gangnam Style 1 billion extra views in a blink of an eye and put it at the 3.8 billion views mark?
Due to its tremendous success, Psy’s hit song led to almost 150 re-uploads on multiple YouTube channels, getting more than 1 billion extra views in total*. If we count those, Gangnam Style would strengthen its leadership but now with a safe margin of 1 billion views to the second place. Cool hein? Maybe he will be happy to know that more than half of the world’s population knows how to perform the horse dance move (wow, that’s a lot of people).
*this data was obtained using a reverse video search technology — Spotter.
