In what can only be viewed as the first true sign of an impending apocalypse, music artist PSY’s “Gangnam Style” video has reached a milestone of 1 billion views on YouTube today.
Of course, if you visit the official YouTube page, you’ll still see that YouTube’s official counter for the video doesn’t show the golden “1,000,000,000” number. However, since YouTube stats are usually delayed up to 48 hours, it’s a safe bet to assume that history has been made yet again. Update: YouTube has just emailed me to confirm the figure.
The world first caught wind of Gangnam Style’s insane popularity back in Sept. when it reached 350 million views in 60 days — surpassing Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call me Maybe as the number one viral video of all time. Then months later, PSY was able to take down Justin Bieber’s “Baby” music video to become the most viewed of all time on YouTube.
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And now, it’s the first video to hit a billion views on YouTube. It seems congratulations are in order.
Update with stats from YouTube’s blog:
- PSY was already big in Korea, but in 2012, he became a global celeb as Gangnam Style quickly spread from Seoul and the Pacific to North America, South America, and Europe. It’s been seen at least 1 million times in close to 75 countries, making it one of the most global music sensations ever!
- From a one-thousand person flash mob in Jakarta to cover videos from Ai Weiwei and Mitt Romney, hundreds of thousands of parodies have been uploaded to YouTube, some of which have tens of millions of views. In fact, fan tributes to Gangnam Style are now being viewed 20 million times every single day.
- PSY’s own remix with Hyuna has 200 million views alone.
- “Gangnam Style” was YouTube’s top rising search of 2012 and on October 6th, we saw more than five million searches for “gangnam style” in a single day.
- For those interested in the business side: a number of assessments and projections have been posted claiming “Gangnam Style” has generated over $8.1 million in advertising deals, hit more than 2.9 million in song downloads since July, and achieved other incredible feats!
- Since late last month, people have clicked to buy the track on iTunes over 600,000 times helping make PSY the first Korean artist ever to rank #1 on the U.S. iTunes chart and #1 in over 30 more countries.
Via Billboard
