See You Again Overtakes Gangnam Style as YouTube’s Most-Watched Video
Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth’s See You Again overtook Psy’s Gangnam Style as the most-watched video on YouTube.
The South Korean megahit had been the site’s most-played clip for the last five years.
The surreal video became so popular that it “broke” YouTube’s play counter, exceeding the maximum possible number of views (2,147,483,647), and forcing the company to rewrite its code.
Gangnam Style exceeds YouTube’s view limit prompting counter upgrade
Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth’s See You Again, a heart-wrenching ballad, has now been streamed 2,897,632,968 times; beating Psy’s current count of 2,895,111,556 views.
Adding it up, that means See You Again has been streamed for a total of 21,759 years. If one person was to listen to each of those streams consecutively, they’d have to have started during the glacial peak of the last Ice Age.
Image source YouTube
Charlie Puth wrote on Twitter: “I joined YouTube in 2007 hoping to make a video that would reach 10,000 views.
“Just heard about See You Again… Wow.”
See You Again was written for Furious 7, playing over the closing credits in tribute to Paul Walker, who died in a car accident before the movie was completed.
It was the best-selling song worldwide in 2015, and received best song nominations at both the Grammys and the Oscars.
Gangnam Style hits 2 billion views on YouTube
The music video features the final scene of Furious 7, in which the two main characters Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and Brian O’Conner (Cody Walker, filling in for his brother, Paul), drive side-by-side, sharing a smile for the last time before they pull onto separate roads and drive into the sunset.
As the camera pans up into the sky, a title card reads “For Paul” and the video ends.
Paul Walker dead: Fast & Furious actor dies in LA car crash
The video reached 1 billion views in six months, and hit 2 billion in September 2016. However, its reign as YouTube’s most-watched clip may be short-lived.
Luis Fonsi’s summer smash Despacito has racked up 2.5 billion views in just six months, and it shows no signs of slowing down.
Meanwhile, 47 of the top 50 clips on YouTube are music videos, proving the importance of the streaming site to the music industry – despite the fact the two sides are locked in a battle over royalty payments.
According to analysis by Midia Research, every stream on YouTube generates $0.001 for the music industry.
That means Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth’s See You Again has earned $2.9 million from YouTube – roughly the same amount it has made from 665 million plays on Spotify.