On April 23, 2005, Jawed Karim posted the first video ever uploaded to YouTube, the website he co-founded with two friends a couple of months prior. The 19-second "Me at the zoo" is brief and innocuous enough that you likely wouldn't guess what inspired Karim to build a video-sharing site after his former PayPal coworkers, Chad Hurley and Steven Chen, initially pitched starting a new venture together: Janet Jackson had a "wardrobe malfunction" during the previous year's Super Bowl Halftime Show, and Karim couldn't find a clip of it online anywhere.
Karim, Hurley, and Chen couldn't have predicted what their seed of an idea would become. How could they? First conceived as a video-based dating site that failed to take off (that rings a bell), YouTube as we know it today began 20 years ago as the everyman's creative playground and digital portfolio. Where pop stars like Justin Bieber, Troye Sivan, Shawn Mendes, and Dua Lipa used the site as a stepping stone to mainstream fame, YouTube is now a viable and lucrative career route to the over three million account owners registered in the site's Partner Program. And to the everyman? Well, at least it's a good place to watch some music videos.
There are over 500 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute. Most of those hours aren't music videos, but a lot of them are! Though some observers have used stats to question whether music videos still matter in the era of TikTok snippets and Spotify streams, there's little doubt that most people engaging with the medium today are doing it through YouTube. Where viewers were once dependent on TV networks like MTV and BET to see music videos new and old, on-demand video streaming has allowed people to watch their favorites on repeat, with the most popular titles racking up billions of views.
Today, we mark 20 years of YouTube by revisiting the site's 10 most-watched music videos. Check out the list below. (And by the way, we're excluding kids' channels from this list, or else we subject ourselves to the wrath of "Baby Shark" yet again.)
10. OneRepublic – “Counting Stars” (2013)
Views as of today: 4.148 billion
“Counting Stars” isn’t that bad for the first two minutes, but OneRepublic’s brand of stomp-clap ho-hey tip-your-fedora pop-rock should never need to go on for four consecutive minutes. And the song’s video doesn’t add too much interest, throwing the band in a drab church basement as service attendees dance above them. The church floor eventually collapses, and I’m not sure what that’s supposed to indicate. Are they trying to tell us that God is, in fact, fallible? Do we really need OneRepublic to tell us that?
9. Shakira – “Waka Waka (This Time For Africa)” (Feat. Freshlyground) (2010)
Views as of today: 4.217 billion
A FIFA World Cup official song making this list feels like a tiny miracle. In the moment, it was a fitting soundtrack for the assertive “Yes We Can” optimism of the Obama era, rich with useful reminders that this is your time to shine and if you fall just get back up, eh-eh! The music video features Shakira doing some easily replicable choreography, spliced with footage of footballers around the world. It does the job, I suppose.
8. Maroon 5 – “Sugar” (2015)
Views as of today: 4.225 billion
Imagine having the audacity to think that your unannounced presence would greatly improve a stranger’s wedding. Imagine you’re a bride on your wedding day and all your family and friends ignore you because fucking Adam Levine is there. That’s the whole premise of Maroon 5’s “Sugar” video: The band crashes a bunch of (presumably real) nuptials, performing this bland-as-hell song. Levine recruited David Dobkin to direct the video, having been a fan of his movie Wedding Crashers, in which Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn crash weddings in efforts to get laid. “Sugar” has no redeeming qualities, and I’m so sorry to everyone this cursed video affected.
7. El Chombo & Dancing Green Alien – “Dame Tu Cosita” (Feat. Cutty Ranks) (2018)
Views as of today: 5.03 billion
This one actually has an interesting backstory. Panamanian DJ El Chombo and Jamaican dancehall artist Cutty Ranks initially released “Dame Tu Cosita” — Spanish for “give me your thingy” — in 1998 to little fanfare. But in October 2017, a French video game animator by the name of ArtNoux used the track on a video he made of a dancing green alien who’s been “possessed by reggaeton vibration.” The video went viral and got El Chombo and Cutty Ranks a smash hit 20 years later. Imagine this little Geico gecko demanding you “give him your thingy.” A cultural phenomenon if we’ve ever seen one.
6. Crazy Frog – “Axel F” (2009)
Views as of today: 5.177 billion
But, in the grand scheme of small animated critters who dance, I’m afraid Crazy Frog still reigns supreme here.
5. Mark Ronson – “Uptown Funk!” (Feat. Bruno Mars) (2014)
Views as of today: 5.549 billion
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: “Uptown Funk!” is a great song. Mark Ronson, Bruno Mars, et al. filmed the accompanying clip at a 20th Century Fox Studios backlot, and my only gripe is that you can definitely tell it was not filmed on an actual city street. But “Uptown Funk!” was not written to make the average Joe city-dweller look cool. It was made for making Ronson and Mars look cool, and by that metric, the video succeeds.
4. PSY – “Gangnam Style” (2012)
Views as of today: 5.553 billion
And now we have the antithesis to the “Uptown Funk!” video: A video shot on-location in and around Seoul, making its star look anything but cool. And yet, Psy's generation-defining choreography made "Gangnam Style" the first-ever video on YouTube to surpass 2 billion hits, effectively “breaking” the site’s view counter. It primed us all for the K-pop boom and taught us how to ride an invisible horse. May we all aspire to be so Gangnam stylish.
3. Ed Sheeran – “Shape Of You” (2017)
Views as of today: 6.45 billion
I shudder to think about the period in history when a dorky ginger guy getting the shit effortlessly beat out of him by a sumo wrestler was considered peak comedy. There are no redeeming qualities to Ed Sheeran’s “Shape Of You” video. It sounds like shit, it looks like shit, and to top everything off, it was released the week after inauguration day 2017. Hadn’t us Americans suffered enough already, Ed?
2. Wiz Khalifa – “See You Again” (Feat. Charlie Puth) (2015)
Views as of today: 6.65 billion
It’s hard to call the “See You Again” clip a “music video.” About two-thirds of it are lifted from the film for which it was written, Furious 7, and the other third is mostly just Charlie Puth playing upright piano somewhere in the Hollywood Hills, surrounded by sports cars that definitely could not transport an upright piano up the Hollywood Hills.
1. Luis Fonsi – “Despacito” [Ft. Daddy Yankee] (2017)
Views as of today: 8.704 billion
There are more views on Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito” video than there are estimated humans on Earth. Unfortunately, there's absolutely nothing remarkable about its music video, which is just two rich and famous guys -- one of whom willingly refers to himself as “Daddy” -- dancing in a shanty town, a former Miss Universe winner (model Zuleyka Rivera) inexplicably hanging out among them. It’s the platonic ideal: Here’s an island town without a cloud in the sky, a 24/7 party where everyone is just the right amount of tipsy to grind together in slow motion. Everybody looks way better than they should, and there's no mid-song skit or anything to disrupt the vibe of you, the viewer relaxing at home.
With all of that considered, it shouldn't be surprising that the "Despacito" video is the most-viewed clip in YouTube's history. YouTube wasn't founded on some premise of nobility -- it was founded by guys who wanted to make money and have fun doing it. May the next 20 years of YouTube provide us with another wealth of music videos to blog about.
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