Baby Shark Becomes Most-Viewed YouTube Video

Credit: Unsplash

Much like a real shark, it’s quite hard to escape from.

I think I’m officially out of touch, because if I were to assume any video on YouTube would have the absolute highest views, it’d be one involving cats. I guess I’m getting old, because based on these new metrics, cats are old news. It’s all about sharks now, specifically baby ones.


Baby Shark, the infectiously catchy children’s pop song created by South Korean company Pinkfong, has become a dominating smash hit in the last couple of years. From this single song has spawned a live concert tour, an upcoming animated TV show, and more than likely, many sleepless nights for parents whose dreams have been flooded by marine life. But as of today, Baby Shark is not only one of the most ubiquitous properties on YouTube, it’s the most ubiquitous property on YouTube.

The original Baby Shark music video on Pinkfong’s channel is now the highest-viewed video on all of YouTube, with a terrifying viewcount of, at time of writing, 7,053,563,510. Fun fact, the video also has about 22 million likes and 10 million dislikes. With this staggering statistic, Baby Shark has officially beaten out the previous champ of YouTube views, the music video for Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito,” which currently has a viewcount of 7,040,280,749. A (relatively) small lead, but a lead nonetheless.

According to the BBC, Pinkfong has amassed around $5.2 million in ad revenue from plays on the Baby Shark video alone. That’s not even factoring in profit from things like merchandising and licensing. As an additional bit of existential wonder, mathmaticians hired by the BBC ran the numbers, and determined that, if every one of the views on Baby Shark were played back-to-back on loop, the video would be playing for 30,187 straight years.

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