Sometime last year, Adele’s “Hello” Video was posted on YouTube and as expected the fans flocked in numbers to watch it. Fast forward 87 days later and the video has crossed the 1 billion views mark on the video sharing site. According to YouTube, this makes it the fastest video to reach one billion views on the site.
The first YouTube video to reach 1 billion views was Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’ that took over 158 days to surpass the 1 billion mark. Currently, ‘Gangnam Style’ has over 2.5 billion views which is about twice what Adele’s “Hello” currently has a little bit over 1 billion views.
There are currently 17 videos on YouTube with over 1 billion views, four of those were released last year (2015).
Most of the videos that reach 1 billion views fast tend to be music videos and this has been the trend as you can see from the graph above. This is not strange at all as music videos tend to be very popular on the video sharing platform.
In a statement, YouTube said, “While one billion views is rare, it’s occurring at a faster rate. Since 2014, the number of days to reach one billion views has dropped dramatically. In 2013, the fastest track to 1 billion was Katy Perry’s ‘Roar’ at 487 days. In 2014, it was Taylor Swift’s ‘Blank Space’ at 238 days.”
At this point, it looks like ‘Gangnam Style’ has a few more months to enjoy being on the top spot as it may be dethroned from the spot by the end of the year.
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Source [YouTube]