Top 10 YouTube Videos of All Time, 2008 Edition
Last year we reviewed YouTube's 10 most popular videos. It's time to update that list and see what, if anything, has changed. Last year we concluded that 7 of the top 10 videos were music - with 5 of those being professional videos. That trend has continued, although there are now no amateur music videos in the top 10. There are 6 music videos this year, all of them from professional musicians and their record labels.
While YouTube became famous from user-generated content, this year's top 10 list shows that professionals still create the most popular content. Of the 4 non-music videos, 2 are comedy (professional comedians), 1 is a sappy foreign love story, and the last is a cute baby video. Only the baby video seems to be an amateur one.
UPDATE: Top 10 YouTube Videos of All Time, 2010 Edition
So, what's changed over the last year in terms of rankings? Well there is a new number 1. We also now have two videos that have gone over 100 million views - the top video last year was at 55.8 million. There are 8 new entrants to the top 10, with the only two survivors being numbers 1 & 2 (who swapped places this year).
Here's the top 10 as of September 2008: [Note: we wanted to embed all 10 of them, but 5 of these videos have had embedding disabled by YouTube - which is surprising to us, because embedding videos on third party sites is one of the best ways to get a video to 'go viral'. I guess the video owners think they've already gone viral enough.]
This official pop video from RCA Records has been viewed 103,202,250 as of today. It was number 2 in Aug 07, but since then it's gone past its rival Evolution of Dance. It's been rated 267,592 times, with an average rating of 4.5. It has 301,807 text comments, no video comments.
The video is listed as a "partner" video by YouTube, but unfortunately it can't be embedded into external sites.
UPDATE: An alert reader notified us that Avril Lavigne fans gamed the system, attracting additional views through deception and controversy. Our reader tells us that "Leona Lewis' "Bleeding Love" is the 9th added favourite on YouTube of all time, confirming its authenticity. Compare that with an artificially inflated video like Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend", which has considerably more views but is added less favorably, appearing at number 16 on the same chart."
Last year's number 1 has slipped to number 2, but it too has over 100 million views. It just recently passed that mark, as it's currently 100,006,105. It's had 234,391 text comments, 20 video comments. It too has a 4.5 rating, from 412,728 votes.
As we noted last year, Laipply is a comedian and motivational speaker from Cleveland, Ohio. The video shows him dancing a six-minute routine encompassing 32 songs spanning more than 50 years of music and dance. In many ways this is your typical YouTube video - a funny, goofy, short and clever video, in this case uploaded by and starring a professional comedian. But there are tens of thousands of similar videos on YouTube, uploaded by enthusiastic amateurs.
3. Lo que tú Quieras Oír (Spanish, means 'What you want to hear')
A new entrant to this year's top 10, this Spanish language short movie was released March 26, 2006 and has notched up 76,502,726 views to date. It appears to be some kind of love story. Here's the summary transcribed using Google Translate:
"Sofia comes home after a long day of work. Chat with a friend and prepares dinner for her boyfriend. But something happens and is forced to choose between fact, fiction or something that is halfway between the two. What you want to hear is a love story about the relationship between fiction and reality."
4. Leona Lewis - Bleeding Love
Embedding disabled
5. Rihanna - Don't Stop The Music
Embedding disabled
Embedding disabled
7. Timbaland - Apologize (feat. One Republic)
8. Jeff Dunham - Achmed the Dead Terrorist
Pretty funny ventriloquist act. It was added September 29, 2007, so is just over a year old. The performer has put up this message, telling us in no uncertain terms to go buy his work you freeloaders:
"===Stuffs===
63 million views, 16000 subscribers
===Notes===
---Sorry guys, I won't upload this anywhere or send it to you, go buy the DVD.
---Also, I do not accept friend requests. Don't bother sending them.
---10000 Subsriber event funness; I will now go through any and all PMs sent to me, and reply them. Be aware of strong curseing and rudeness.
===Where To Buy===
Log onto www.jeffdunham.com, there he has a link to Amazon.com where you can purchase the full dvd. ^^"
Embedding disabled
10. Hahaha
OK this is more like the user-generated content that all the cliches say we come to YouTube for. It's a meaningless laughing baby video. So far it's garnered 62,128,203 views.
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"Evolution of Dance" is definitely the best one!
Thanks for the update!
Regarding the "embedding disabled" - this is typical of most music videos that are "official" from the music labels (check UniversalMusicGroup, RCA Records, and others' channels). It has always been disabled for many of the labels. Some things just never change...
Nonetheless, going "viral" on just YouTube.com seems to be enough to get on the top list - goes to show just how important music videos are to YouTube traffic.
Does an embedded you tube video play count as a video view?
If not, then that might explain why. If it still counts then yeah, the labels haven't learnt anything
Good stuffs.Hahahah is my fav choice.
Speaking of YouTube, their latest partnership with Wii is really a big hit.
its sad that most videos are music clips of professionals artists
Actually, the translation for "Lo que tú quieras oir" wasn't bad at all ... here it is with some minor corrections:
"Sofia comes home after a long day of work. Chats with a girlfriend and prepares dinner for her boyfriend. But something happens and is forced to choose between fact, fiction or something that is halfway between the two. "Lo que tú quieras oir" ("What you want to hear") is a love story about the relationship between fiction and reality."
I wish I am in this list next year ......
Six of the top ten are music videos. I find it amusing that YouTube has nearly become a free service for streaming music online.
UPDATE: a reader emailed to tell us that the Avril Lavigne video got to number 1 by gaming. Details added to the post.
I half expected to see a "cute panda" video somewhere in here...lots of friends went crazy for videos of baby pandas last year. Sounds stupid, but they really are pretty damn cute.
@theharmonyguy So true, I rarely use YouTube other than for songs that I want to hear but don't feel like buying (that and the pandas, of course!).
I am a little surprised there were no cat videos! That said, the dance vid is truly a classic and the ventriloquist one, while funny, was skirting the border of racism and alarms me that it made the list.
I'm very proud for the Spanish Director, thanks for the heads up, Richard. I've written a post about it (in Spanish) here http://cli.gs/um2tTP
Posted by: JungleG
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September 30, 2008 2:13 PM
Don't forget the contestant from South Carolina at the Miss America pageant (or the Palin Katie Couric interview)
All very cool videos...
Thx for sharing! :)
- Simon Leung
www.SimonLeung.com/youtube
I don't see why evolution of dance even got that popular in the first place, I don't find it particularly funny. There are many funnier videos out there, although I suppose a lot of them are proabably a lot more contavertial.
Achmed is cool! :)
Hey, I just wanted to say that the video "Lo que tú quieras oír" is a very weird tricky case because for sometime I had the spanish version of youTube and it was ALWAYS there, automatically playing the stupid video everytime you went to YouTube through the spanish version.
It is a short story, nothing (really nothing) extraordinary. I'm guessing it was a kind of error of the hompage in spanish (which makes sense since thousands of millions speak spanish, the second language behind the chinese)... it would be interesting to find out what happened.
Best,
A
I like the baby hahaha ~
btw, an easy way to browse these popular videos is using Tube Explorer.
click YouTube->Hot&News->Most Viewed All Time
Check out this US based video site similar to Nico Nico Douga. Distributed real time commenting technology that made Nico Nico so successful in the US.
http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/auctions/47222
Auction ends in 7 hours.
www.bamzuku.com
I love the fact that people now just run bots that sends thousands of request to videos to up their view count... None of these videos are view that many times.
You would think youtube would put something to detect of there was a million request by the same IP address and ban that IP.
Stupid artist... or whoever is using the bots.
They basically wrecked the "most viewed page" its now unreliable
new Idea... if I get the time I'm going to destroy these videos
in a similar manner of the page refresher, I'll make an automated system that spams vulgar comments and a rating of 1 into the videos (or 0 if possible). views will go up but the BS might go down