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

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

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:

Gangnam Style vs Call Me Maybe: A Popularity Comparison

Gangnam Style or Call Me Maybe? PSY or Carly Rae Jepsen? This summer, the two songs/music videos have been nearly inescapable on the web and have sparked unpredictably enormous levels of interest and reaction.


Comparing the popularity of two video phenomena can be tricky. There are a multitude of factors you could take into account. For example, if you look at how many views the two official videos has accrued, Carly Rae Jepsen's single has 250 million since it was posted March 1, while PSY has drawn 150 million since July 15.

Plotted out on a chart:



As you can see, "Call Me Maybe" has been insanely popular over the past six and a half months. But what you don't see is the velocity with which "Gangnam Style" has exploded. To examine that, we've charted the daily viewership for these videos and mapped out the days since they were first posted:



As you can see here, within just 2 months, Korean pop anthem "Gangnam Style" has increased to an average of over 6 million views per day. But you can also see that "Call Me Maybe" has had unusually strong staying power, averaging over 1.5 million views each day throughout the entire summer. That kind of sustained audience is uncommon and it still remains unclear just how long "Gangnam Style" will be around.

NOTE: Not factored in here is another, star-studded "unofficial" video which helped kick off the "Call Me Maybe" craze back in February and March.

There are also other considerations, too:

• "Call Me Maybe" has been a somewhat American phenomena, while the "Gangnam Style" craze has been a bit more global.
• Much of the attention on "Gangnam Style" has focused on its outrageous music video, while the attention "Call Me Maybe" has gotten has been more about the song's pop culture spread.
• On the fan reaction front, PSY fan videos are just starting to appear, but videos mentioning "Call Me Maybe" have been seen nearly a billion times.

Where we go from here no one knows. "Gangnam Style" is still taking off -- PSY teaching the dance to Ellen and Britney Spears has been seen 5 million times in two days this week -- and "Call Me Maybe" all these months later is still this week just behind it at #2 on the YouTube Music Chart.

Videos Mentioning Obama or Romney Top 2 Billion Views

The U.S. election is heating up, and we’re not just talking about the humidity in Tampa. Since April 2011, when Romney officially entered the race, close to 600,000 videos mentioning Obama or Romney have been uploaded to YouTube, and these videos account for close to 2 billion views.

Topping the list of these videos is baracksdubs’ “Barack Obama Singing Call Me Maybe,” which has racked up over 24 million views in just a few months.



Political pop song parodies are on the rise in general. In the past month, this Gotye parody titled, “Obama That I Used to Know” and a more humorous One Direction parody about Romney have both crossed the million view mark and hit the YouTube Trending Videos list.

It’s not just light-hearted fare that have people tuning in. Since the primaries began, there have been more than 100 million views of official presidential candidate videos on YouTube.

In fact, in just the last 30 days, people have spent more than 20 cumulative years watching official videos of Obama and Romney (that’s two years longer than Justin Bieber has been alive).

And new uploads from Obama and Romney’s official YouTube channels are gaining traction quickly, with videos receiving hundreds of thousands of views within a few days of upload. The latest video on Obama for America’s YouTube channel has received over 217,000 views in just 24 hours. And since Mitt Romney announced Paul Ryan as his running mate, he has seen a surge in both channel subscribers (a 300% increase since the Ryan announcement) and views. Their first video together, “America’s Comeback Team” has racked up over 1.1 million views in two weeks and is the second most-viewed video on the Romney channel:



We’ll be tracking the political trends on YouTube until Election Day. To keep your finger on the pulse of political video, and to watch up-to-the-minute live and on-demand coverage from the campaign trail, visit the YouTube Elections Hub at www.youtube.com/politics or follow YouTube Politics here.

Blockbuster Battle: Spider-Man vs. Batman

In anticipation of this summer’s biggest blockbuster films, the world watched trailers for The Amazing Spider-Man and The Dark Knight Rises over 100 million times. With all of the fanfare surrounding these superheros, we wondered who would win if they squared off against each other in a good old fashioned popularity contest. Would Gotham’s hero rise against the amazing webslinger? Would Peter Parker get the best of Bruce Wayne?

We found some really interesting data when we looked at global searches for “Spiderman” and “Batman” videos in the weeks leading up to each film’s box office debut. See the graphs below to discover which superhero was the most popular among fans.




Global searches for “Spiderman” (red) snuck ahead of “Batman” (blue) by just a bit when The Amazing Spider-Man hit theaters on July 3. But search interest in the caped crusader significantly overtook Spidey after The Dark Knight Rises premiered on the July 20.

India is the only country where "Spiderman" drew more search interest than "Batman" -- and that’s likely due to Bollywood star Irrfan Khan’s role as Dr. Ratha.

So there it is - Batman wins over Spider-Man. But if the data doesn't do it for you, here's extremely rare footage of the two superheroes duking it out for all to see.

'Gangnam Style' is Your International Hit of the Month

Only in 2012 can an off-the-wall music video from South Korea become a hit in the U.S. in a matter of just a few days. This month, Korean pop singer PSY's "Gangnam Style" surprised many by quickly climbing to the #3 spot on YouTube's music video charts.

Below you can track the number of views per day this video has registered around the world since it was posted:



North American interest in Korean pop music has been on the rise for some time now and it's not entirely uncommon to see a popular music video spread across the Pacific.

YouTube searches for PST's single hit their first peak in Korea on July 26, but searching in the U.S. and Canada for "gangnam" really started to spike a week later. Globally, the video began drawing the most attention this past weekend, and "gangnam style" is one of YouTube's top rising searches of August.

The video, which blends Korean and English, has been drawing over one million views per day, and is currently one of our most shared videos in South Korea as well as the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore, Taiwan, Belgium and Sweden.

Naturally, we've already started to see lots of parodies/homages as well. In the past two weeks, nearly 1,000 videos have been posted with "gangnam" (in English) in the title. And we can only hope they all feature the same dance...

Early Trends for the London Games

Great ads, amusing parodies, and dry wit; the 30th olympiad has already brought us a microcosm of YouTubeness. "Olympics 2012" is a top rising search in the U.S. from the past 30 days and sports fever has spread across diverse genres.

We're only a few days in, but those first few days and last week's build up have delivered plenty of trending videos all over the YouTube map. First, and not surprisingly, many top brands have produced special ads for the games, some of which have been frequently shared and embedded.

The spots in the playlist below, which includes ads from Nike, P&G, Adidas, and more, have been seen over 15 million times total.



One of the most popular single videos to come from London this week was filmed not inside the games themselves, but from outside, where a dry and very funny Olympic worker expresses her enthusiasm about the start of competition. The clip already has 1.2 million views to date.



In the music genre, some of Team USA's top athletes created home-made lip-sync videos that spread quickly as the games kicked off. Below Women's Soccer "sings" some Miley Cyrus while U.S. swimmers take on Carly Rae Jepsen. Together, these videos have over 4 million combined views.


We'll be tracking all the trends coming out London over the next two weeks. Stay tuned!