The music video "Gangnam Style" by Korean artist Psy was the first YouTube video to hit a billion views. This video started accumulating views in July of 2012, and hit the billion-view mark in December of 2012. The video now maintains several hundred million views more than the next-most viewed video on the website.
However, it was as recently as 2008 that the title of "Most Viewed Youtube Video" could be acquired with fewer than 100 million views. Judson Laipply's "Evolution of Dance" held the title until that particular year, when Avril Lavigne's single "Girlfriend" finally topped the Youtube charts. The view count for each of them at the time hovered around 89 million views. Though her music video did eventually exceed 100 million views later that year, it took the #1 spot with a view count below this number.
2008 wasn't some prehistoric time for the internet, either. Facebook was already on the digital stage, hitting 100 million active users in that year and riding high rates of growth. It was an election year, and Barack Obama was using the internet in ways previously unseen in presidential campaigns. This was even after 2girls1cup - and the many reaction videos to it - had reached its height of infamy.
Clearly, there's been some inflation in Youtube's popularity since those days. With the next few blog posts, I'd like to walk us through an analysis of YouTube's role in entertainment culture.
