YouTube dance phenomenon The Harlem Shake has generated over one billion video views in just 40 days. According to web monitoring firm Visible Measures, it only took the viral sensation 40 days to reach 1 billion views. From the day when the first video was uploaded (February 12) until it hit 1 billion views on […]
YouTube dance phenomenon The Harlem Shake has generated over one billion video views in just 40 days.
According to web monitoring firm Visible Measures, it only took the viral sensation 40 days to reach 1 billion views. From the day when the first video was uploaded (February 12) until it hit 1 billion views on March 24, the videos were accumulating an average of more than 20 million views a day.
To put it in context, that’s half the time Gangnam Style took hit 1 billion views and almost a sixth of the time that it took Call Me Maybe. However, unlike those videos, Harlem Shake wasn’t a single execution.
Visible Measures looked at 500 iterations of the dance video and aggregated them to get to 1 billion.
While many of them just have a few million views, the top 10 versions generated a True Reach of more than 336 million views.
The craze was started in February by five teenagers from Queensland, Australia known on YouTube as The Sunny Coast Skate, prmptin gothers to make their own versions. The video itself was a follow-up to a comedy scetch from YouTube Vlogger Filthy Frank which featured a section where several costumed people danced to the song “Harlem Shake” by Baauer.
Despite now hitting the billion mark, it seems to be losing steam. As seen in the graphs below, total views per week have dropped since the viral hit its peak in week three, the week of February 26, when it accumulated almost 300 million views. Last week the Harlem Shake garnered less than 75 million views.
And looking at the average daily views week over week paints a similar picture. At the top of its game in week three the viral was gaining more than 40 million views a day. This last week, that average was down to about 9 million views a day.
Accumulating around 75 million views in a week or an average of about 9 million views a day is still huge for any viral. But as the trend for the Harlem Shake is a downward one, it seems unlikely that it will overtake the king of the virals, Gangnam Style, anytime soon. However, it is close to sneaking by some other fan favorites that have also surpassed 1 billion views.
The Billion Views Club
The Harlem Shake is the fifth most viewed viral ever. PSY’s Gangnam Style tops the list with a True Reach of more than 3.8 billion view, which is more than double the number of views of the next viral on the list, Justin Bieber’s Baby, which has a True Reach of 1.6 billion views. Filling out the rest of the top five virals over 1 billion views are Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe (1.3 billion views) and Adele’s Rolling in the Deep (1.22 billion views).
Source: Visible Measures
Original Visible Measures blog post:
http://corp.visiblemeasures.com/news-and-events/blog/bid/96850/The-Harlem-Shake-Hits-1-Billion-Views
