The Baby Shark song and video has achieved a milestone in Internet history: it is the first to get more than 10,000 million views on the YouTube platform. And even if you’re not even aware of what song it is at first, if I tell you ‘Baby Shark du du dududú’ and you use a little imagination to put it to music, it might ring a bell. Parents know her for sure because she has been extremely popular among children. Hence the historical figures.
But where did this phenomenon come from? This video had already achieved record numbers on the Google platform in the past. It happens that Baby Shark has been tremendously popular for a while now. At the end of 2020 it already became the most viewed video on YouTube and its growth has not stopped and now the number of views reaches 10,000 million.
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A children’s song that does not go out of style
landed on the platform in 2016 and these more than five years that have passed since then do not seem to have been enough to stop its success. Come on, it hasn’t gone out of style.
It’s a nursery rhyme from Pinkfong Baby Shark “Kids’ Songs & Stories”, a channel with more than 50 million subscribers and with many videos of children singing songs in English and with the same colorful style as the famous Baby Shark.
The creator of this global phenomenon is SmartStudy under the Pinkfong brand. The song is remembered by many adults in the United States as the typical melody that they sang many decades ago in their children’s camps. But this colorful video with children dancing has made it a global phenomenon. Although other artists took Baby Shark to YouTube with different versions, the one that has triumphed is the one produced by Pinkfong, an education brand within the South Korean media company SmartStudy.
Pinkfong was born in Seoul in 2010 and opened a branch in Los Angeles, the most popular place in the American AV industry, in 2016. The “Pinkfong! Kids’ Songs & Stories” YouTube channel was launched on December 13, 2011.
YouTube has a graph (and which Mixx.io shares) that indicates the evolution of the most popular videos in its history and you can see that, while others lose traction over time (as happened with the also Korean Gagnam Style ), Baby Shark has continued to grow unstoppable.
Wikipedia has a very good graph on the evolution of the most viewed video on YouTube pic.twitter.com/UtaofPULBe
— mixx.io – technology podcast (@mixx_io) January 14, 2022
This song was used as torture and other curiosities
In addition to the torture that this repetitive rhythm can mean for a caregiver of children, it turns out that literally, the main song of the most famous video in the history of YouTube was used as an element of torture in the United States: A court confirmed the allegation that a trio of Oklahoma corrections officers used the tune to mentally crack five inmates. The song, repeated for hours to exhaustion, functioned as a torture device.
In addition to the video on YouTube, there is also a Baby Shark show on the Nickelodeon channel, a Baby Shark movie, and Baby Shark NFTs from last November 2021. They can be purchased at MakersPlace and some have sold for more than $56,000, as can be seen on the sales website of these NFTs.
After Baby Shark, the second most viewed video in YouTube history is the catchy song Despacito by Luis Fonsi.