Baby Shark becomes the first YouTube video to reach 10 billion views, and we have no one to blame but ourselves
If you’re a parent to a toddler, you know all too well about videos your child insists on watching again and again (and again). Don’t worry, your kid isn’t broken; repetition is a normal part of development. The universality of that experience is evident when you look at YouTube’s top videos and six out of the top 10 are clearly aimed at young eyes. The king of them all has got to be Baby Shark, which just became the first video to reach 10 billion views on the platform.
Pinkfong’sBaby Sharkhas held the number one spot for a while now, but has only just hit that lofty 10B level (viaThe Verge). It surpassed the former most-watched video (Luis Fonsi’s Despacito) back in November 2020, which had over seven billion views at the time. That means in the past year it’s been watched nearly an additional three billion times — more than the combined populations of India and China.
The origins of the song are lost to the murky depths of history, but most speculation places its beginnings sometime just after the release ofJaws(yeah,thatlong ago). Before Pinkfong uploaded its initial version in 2015, there was theGerman recordingthat became a dance hit in Europe in 2007, and there are a fewEnglish-languageuploadsfrom around the same time. These early uploaders all acknowledge that they picked the song up from summer camps or youth groups years before they recorded their versions.
If you’re not sick of Baby Shark at this point, you probably never will be, but there’s still plenty of media out there to sate your ravenous hunger for all things Baby Shark.Nearly everychildrens’ channelon YouTubehas its ownversion ofthe song. And if that’s not enough, there’s alsoa cereal,a musical, aTV show, andbooks. In short, we’re going to be stuck with Baby Shark for a while.
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