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Uncategorized Saturday, September 22nd 2012 at 11:00 am

Gangnam Style is Officially The Most Popular Video on YouTube… Sort of

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How do you measure a video’s popularity on YouTube? Conventional wisdom says; “look at the number of views“, but just because a video has a huge number of hits means that everybody enjoyed what they saw: It’s implied, but not clearly stated. That’s why the internet has “like” buttons. After all, “liking” something, whether you do it on YouTube or Facebook or Google+, acts as an endorsement what you saw. The barometer for judging the king of random internet videos will likely be a hard-fought internet for years to come, but in the meantime a new contender has earned a solid claim to the throne. The Guiness Book of World Records named everyone’s favorite K-Pop hit, PSY’s Gangnam Style, the most “liked” video in the history of YouTube.

Since the video’s official posting on July 15th, the music video for Gangnam Style has been liked on YouTube 2,361,241 times, as of today. That’s up from 2,141,758 YouTube likes when Guinness made their proclamation on Thursday. As you might have already assumed, Gangnam Style is also the most viewed K-Pop music video on YouTube: As of today people have watched the video 241,664,464 times. (I’m only responsible for two or three of those.)

Interestingly, the video’s closest contenders are all music videos as well: According to Guinness, LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem (1,574,963), Justin’s Bieber’s Baby (1,327,147) and Adele’s Rolling in the Deep (1,245,641) are the second, third, and fourth most-liked clips on YouTube. While their number of “likes” pale in comparison to Gangnam Style, the “most liked” runners-up all have a considerably higher number of views: Rolling in the Deep, the lowest of the three, has 331,962,123 views. All three of the competing videos are also considerably older: As we mentioned, the Gangnam Style video was posted on july 15th, while the videos for Baby, Party Rock Anthem, and Rolling in the Deep are all more than a year old.

Psy’s great and Gangnam Style is an incredibly catchy song, but the news has me thinking about a bigger question: How long do you think it will be before college students are taking courses about the “great” YouTube clips of the twenty-first century?

(via Guinness Book of World Records)

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  • J

    Actually Gotye is 3rd most liked with 1.4 million. You can see the full list on youtube’s charts page.

  • travis

    Amazingly how outdated this article is in less than a month. Gangnam Style is now up to 4,000,000 likes and climbing. No other video even comes close

  • Zoidberg

    Where can one find the charts page?

  • PaNilliB

    so outdated…
    gangnam now has 600,000,000 views and 5,000,000 likes and you need to consider this: this is only three MONTHS old – lots of other ‘most watched’ or ‘popular’ videos are at least like two YEARS old…

  • cool pooh

    gangnam style is most liked video in youtube history..!!

  • Anonymous

    Gangnam Style now has more than 5 Million Likes and will be the No.1 Youtube video before the week is out. Most Likes, and soon, most views. I think it’s fair to say that this is the most liked video in history.

  • DoctaWho

    You are now outdated too, sir. Gangnam style has over 800,000,000 views as of today, 11/26/2012.

  • gdg

    jdhdhjfhdjfhd

  • gdg

    hi iam matt roberts i live in callens i like ally

  • King

    You got outdated too, now more than a billion views.