Gangnam Style is one step closer to taking over the world.
The song that you only knew about at first because of that ridiculous dance (if you want a good laugh, watch the people from the Today show trying to do it), but then became such a phenomenon that you simply could not escape it, reached a huge milestone when surpassed Justin Bieber’s Baby as the most watched video on YouTube of all time, it was announced Saturday.
The video is also the most liked video of all time, with 5,371,613 likes.
Psy took to Twitter earlier in the day to celebrate the news:
As of right now, 805,055,375 have watched Gangnam Style, while Baby has 803,847,584 views. What is most impressive, though, is how quickly Gangnam Style rose to take over the top spot.
Baby, which had held the position since July 2010, slowly rose in views over the last two years to get to over 800,000 hits. Gangnam style did it in less than six months.
On top of that, the video is still growing like gangbusters.
"Each day, 'Gangnam Style' is still being watched between 7 and 10 million times," YouTube trends manager Kevin Allocca wrote. "The velocity of popularity for PSY's outlandish video is unprecedented."
The terms Gangnam Style and PSY have been the top rising searches on YouTube over the past six months, and they are still rising globally. Searches peaked in North America in September but were still growing in Europe and India last month.
And things are only going to get better for Psy, according to ChannelMeter, which is predicting that, on December 16, Gangnam Style will become the first video to ever reach one billion views.
ChannelMeter also says that growth for Baby is flat, which is probably because the video is over two years old at this point.
But don't feel too sorry for Beiber (not that you would anyway; he's an 18 year old kid with more money than the combined readership of this article will ever see): his channel is still kicking Psy's all over the place, with over three billion views, compared to one billion views.
For any of you who have, somehow, escaped the Gangnam Style phenomenon, or you really want to see it again, here it is. The one. The only. Gangnam Style!
