Ranking 10 Most-Viewed YouTube Videos Of All Time
The King and Queens of stream.
When YouTube originally launched in 2005, it was dominated by viral clips such as Chocolate Rain, Charlie Bit My Finger and Evolution Of Dance. The next year, however, the site would be purchased by Google and its use and success became a drastically different entity by 2009.
The music video for Lady Gaga’s hit single Bad Romance conquered the site’s viewership upon release that same year. It also began the trend of music videos topping the site’s most watched list, a trend that only continues to grow to this day.
6 years after the release of Bad Romance, 10 music videos had managed to acquire a whopping 1 billion views. The immense success of streaming revealed both YouTube’s popularity and its increasingly vital importance to the modern music industry as a whole. Amongst the 10 entries on this list, only 1 does not belong to the music video medium. The other 9, while often drastically different in genre, style, location and target demographic, are further proof of the continuing music video boom on YouTube.
Here are the 10 most-viewed videos on YouTube in 2020.
10. LooLoo Kids: Johny Johny Yes Papa
Upload date: 8 October 2016
View count: 3,243,367,3
The Johny Johny Yes Papa nursery rhyme has turned up several times over the years. Of the many channels to include it in their videos, LooLoo Kids’ animated video runs away with both viewership and dislikes. It tells the story of a devious baby and his obsession with devouring sugar cubes. To the surprise of no one, the baby’s father is less than ecstatic about this development.
The song follows a straight forward ask and answer format as the father (or ‘papa’) interrogates his sweet toothed infant. It is set to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. As the video progresses, the baby continues to spike his insulin levels with more and more sugar cubes, his father being mystically scammed every single time. Simple and short, the video has proven to be a smash hit with its target market if more than 3 billion views is anything to go by.
The video has also inspired near endless memes, parodies and rip-offs (the amount of animated tunes centred on kids lying to their folks about something is plain ridiculous at this point) in the 4 years since its initial release.