Gangnam Style to Baby Shark: YouTube's 20 greatest viral hits

The Guardian

19-04-2025

YouTube is 20 years old. Although video had existed online before, YouTube's ease of use – for the first time sites could easily embed video into their content – made it revolutionary. As such, we now live in a world where people watch more YouTube than anything else. But how did we get here? Perhaps the best way to find out is to trace the most significant videos produced in each of its 20 years.
The video that started it all. A 19-second clip of YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim in San Diego Zoo, trying to explain an elephant – awkwardly. As one modern comment left under the video now states, it's refreshing that Me at the Zoo didn't end with Jawed urging viewers to smash the like button.
A man (credited as 'inspirational comedian Judson Laipply') performs dances in rough chronological order to the screaming delight of an unseen crowd. Perhaps it was the lack of options available to users but, at the time, this was a blockbuster.
Maybe the definitive YouTube video. A baby bites his brother's finger, and the brother cycles through every available emotion as he attempts to process the sensation. In a true and just world, Charlie Bit My Finger would be shown before the news every evening to cheer people up. A joy.
In time, YouTube's most viewed lists would be dominated by music videos, but this was the first big one. The appeal of Crank That was that, like The Macarena and The Birdie Song before it, it had an accompanying dance. The video is full of people doing that dance.
People couldn't get enough ofthe Britain's Got Talent judges and audience's reaction to Susan Boyle – a baffled 'How can someone who looks like that sing like this?' Today, it feels even more gruesome than it did at the time.
For a brief time, a fun thing to do on the internet was to autotune people to make songs of what they were saying. Nick Clegg was one notable victim of this [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUDjRZ30SNo], but he was dwarfed in terms of popularity by Antoine Dodson went viral when his local Alabama news appearance was remixed into an absurdly catchy song via Auto-Tune. He was talking about someone's attempt to sexually assault his sister. Different times.
I'm going to call it: this was when the internet peaked. Rebecca Black was a girl overcome with ambitions of pop stardom. Her mother paid $4,000 to a company called ARK Music Factory to write and produce a song and music video for her. The result was Friday. The lyrics ('Yesterday was Thursday / Today is Friday … Tomorrow is Saturday / And Sunday comes afterwards') were inane. The performance was iffy. But there was an innocence to Friday that felt extremely pure. Even betterSomehow, Black has managed to leverage the song'sits notoriety into an actual music career.
A monster, pure and simple. The first video ever to gain a billion views on YouTube, thanks to its catchy tune and knowingly absurd visuals. Both wonderful (it represents Year Zero of contemporary K-pop) and dreadful (Ed Balls did the dance on Strictly), this song changed the world.
This song didn't change the world, but well done for trying. The follow-up to Gangnam Style. The video wasn't quite as memorable, the song wasn't quite as catchy, and there was generally a sense that straws were being clutched at. Still, more people watched this than anything else in 2013, so that's something.
Psy couldn't hold on to his crown for a third year, because he was comprehensively outviewed by this oddity. It's a short horror film whose antagonist is a dog dressed up as a spider. It is genuinely quite creepy in places, genuinely very stupid in others and has been watched more than 184m times.
By its 10th anniversary, YouTube had already ossified into what it is now: largely a collection of music videos and televisionTV clips, with its former quirky individualism shoved to the side. According to Google [https://blog.google/products/youtube/youtube-rewind-2015/], the top trending videos of the year included three late night talkshow clips, a handful of music videos and a Super Bowl advert for a mobile game. But then there was also this, a video of a man who turned his lounge into a ball pit.
For a brief time, James Corden's Late Late Show perfected the YouTube video, by getting the big stars of the day to belt out their own songs in a car. Adele's instalment was an immediate sensation, featuring all of her biggest songs at the point where she was arguably the biggest act in the world. James Corden was there too.
I've been leaving lots of music videos off this list, but Despacito deserves its place. It is, at time of writing, the second most-watched YouTube video of all time, with 8.6bn views. The song is catchy, the video bright and colourful. Perhaps the secret to Despacito's success, though, is the fact that, its lyrics are absurdly filthy. Either way, this is the song that soundtracked a million spin classes.
Over the last two decades, YouTube has acted as a barometer for our changing tastes. We can now look back and see, for instance, that seven years ago everyone was so obsessed with the Kardashians that hundreds of millions of people watched a syrupy compilation of Kylie Jenner's faux-grainy pregnancy home movies. To demonstrate what a weird moment in time this was, her follow-up video To Our Son – released just four years later – only got a third of the views.
A particularly dry year for YouTube, with its most-viewed videos all being music videos or TV clips. In the UK, the most-watched video was a BT Sports compilation of a football match. The days of Mutant Giant Spider Dog were well behind us, clearly.
I have to confess to some creative accounting here, since Baby Shark Dance wasThis was originally uploaded back in 2016. However, in November 2020 it hit a staggering milestone, becoming the most-watched YouTube video of all time. At present, Baby Shark Dance has 15.7 billion views, almost doubling those of Luis Fonsi. Is this because as a society we are fully invested in the family dynamics of cartoon sharks? Or could it be, perhaps, that the pandemic was a really difficult time to be the parent of young children, and sometimes you'd just let them sit in front of YouTube for hours on end? Who can say.
This might represent the birth of modern YouTube. The video's creator MrBeast is arguably the most successful YouTuber on the planet, crafting a series of grabby stunts with production values that rival traditional TV. Including this, the most watched video of 2021, MrBeast made himself comfortable in a big coffin and let his friends bury him for two days.
In 2022, the influential Minecraft YouTuber Technoblade, who had been publishing videos for nine years, died of metastatic sarcomacancer. Shortly afterwards, his channel posted a video where Technoblade's father read a statement from him, and tearfully described what he was like as ahis son. Despite all the noise that YouTube creates, the fact that the most watched video of the year was a man processing his grief is a testament to how beloved Technoblade was.
When it is eventually released, Grand Theft Auto VI will almost certainly become the most successful piece of media, of any form, that has ever been made. Such is the demand for it that, when its first trailer was released in December 2023, it broke the record for most views in 24 hours, not including music videos. All that and it reintroduced the world to a Tom Petty banger.
And here we reach the new age of YouTube where, in a bid to rival TikTok, many of the top-hitting videos now come in the form of scrollable shorts, which do enormous numbers despite being genuinely inane. One of the most-watched YouTubeShorts, for instance, is a legitimately nightmarish instructional video about how to make a ladybird out of slime [https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Kq4O7W5EQ7Y]. However, iIn 2024, no short was viewed as much as this one, about a girl climbing over a fence. Welcome to the future.