Another milestone for PSY: 3B YouTube channel views

PSY is the third artist ever, after Rihanna and Justin Bieber, to reach that number of hits

I am truly starting to believe, and fear, that we shall never truly be rid of PSY. People used to say that the only living things that would survive a nuclear war would be cockroaches and Cher. Now you might want to add PSY to that list as well. Alright maybe that is an exaggeration, but, seriously, did anyone really think that we would still be talking about PSY at this point?

The K-pop sensation, who has set multiple YouTube records, has now reached another milestone: he has became the third artist, and fifth YouTube channel overall, to reach three billion views on the video-sharing site, according to a report from Billboard on Thursday.

The only other artists to reach that feat are Rihanna and Justin Bieber.

Bieber, of course, is the artist that PSY passed as his "Gangnam Style" video became the most watched of all time in November, with over 805 million hits. The previous record had been held by Beiber's "Baby," which had over 803 million hits. 

That video then set another record when it became the first, and so far only, video to hit one billion views in December. Now, with over 1.7 billion hits, the video will most likely become the first video with two billion hits as well.

And rather than slowing down, PSY is actually speeding up, as his channel had 69 million video plays this past week alone, up 93% from last week.

His second video, Gentlemen, has not proved to be as big of a sensation as Gangnam Style, but it did set a YouTube record of its own when it was played 38 million times on April 14th, the most views ever in a single day. The previous single-day record was set by KONY 2012 last March, with 31 million views.

Gentleman was seen over 100 million times in less than four days and now has 475 million views, nearly halfway to being the next video to reach 1 billion views.

All of this activity has certainly been a boon for YouTube, as the site announced that it passed one billion unique monthly viewers in March. That means that 50% of the entire Internet population is visitng YouTube every month.

In the most recent comScore report on online video ranking in the United States, Google was far and away the leader.

Google sites, driven mostly by YouTube, came away with 154.5 million unique viewers, who watched 436.7 minutes of video. In a distant second was Facebook, with just over 60 million viewers, who only watched 26.1 minutes of video. 

Vator has reached out to YouTube for comment on PSY's latest milestone, and we will update if we hear back.

(Image source: https://www.youtube.com/user/officialpsy)