Contrary to popular belief, ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ is NOT YouTube’s most watched video
I’ve seen lots of presentations about social media, viral video, YouTube this & Facebook that, and many of them reference that only a handfull of the most popular shared videos (i.e. videos on YouTube) are created by users.
The point the industry tries to make is that although some user generated content does resonate with people - ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ is the best known example of this - the majority of YouTube’s ‘Most Watched’ are professionally-created videos.
I’m not really debating that, but it gets confusing sometimes.
For some reason the list above only includes 1 video with over 100,000,000 views, courtesy of Mr. Charlie. But Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance’ is way ahead, as her video page shows.
I checked the search again and low & behold it yielded a completely different list. The list has two musicians at the top, which is interesting in itself & kinda forced me to change the point of this post from, “look - YouTube can’t track their own video views!” to “wow - a) Justin Bieber’s such a tool, why do so many people want to watch that awful video? and b) the top 10 on the list, 2 of them are UGC. That’s not a great ratio at all.”
The lesson? The most popular videos represent world class entertainment that appeals to all our senses. Oh and the 6th sense - disgust (Beiber).
Whatever the lesson, ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ is not YouTube’s most watched video!
