The most-viewed YouTube video is Baby Shark Dance, a 2016 upload by the Korean company Pinkfong that overtook Despacito in November 2020, passed ten billion views in January 2022 and is still ahead in 2026. Before it, the title went to Luis Fonsi's Despacito (2017 to 2020), Wiz Khalifa's See You Again (for a few weeks in 2017), Psy's Gangnam Style (2012 to 2017), Justin Bieber's "Baby" (2010 to 2012) and a chain of home videos and pop clips going back to a wedding-dance comedian in 2006. This is the history of that race, the moment it broke YouTube's counter, and why a nursery rhyme now beats every pop star alive.
The story is really three stories. The first is about single videos becoming events: the crown changed hands in public, with press releases. The second is about the machinery of counting, which YouTube has changed several times, usually to stop cheating. The third is about children, who do not choose videos so much as have them chosen by autoplay, and who watch the same one hundreds of times.
The home-video era, 2005 to 2010
YouTube's first video, Me at the Zoo, went up on 23 April 2005 and has the modest view count of a historical document. The first "most viewed" titles went to things people forwarded by email: a Brazilian football clip, a Pokémon theme cover, and then, from April 2006, Evolution of Dance, six minutes of a motivational speaker named Judson Laipply dancing through 50 years of pop. It held the top spot for most of 2006 to 2009, apart from a period in 2008 when Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" overtook it after fans built a page that auto-refreshed the video to inflate the count. YouTube adjusted the number, which was the first public sign that views were something the platform policed rather than simply reported.
Charlie Bit My Finger, a 2007 clip of two English brothers in a chair, became the most-viewed video in late 2009. It is the last time an ordinary home video held the title. In 2010 the crown went to Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" and then, from July 2010, to Justin Bieber's "Baby", which was also for years the most-disliked video on the site, a distinction it lost to YouTube Rewind 2018. Charlie was auctioned in May 2021 with an announcement that it would be deleted; it is still online.
The lesson of this era, learned by record labels around 2009 when Vevo launched, was that YouTube was a music-video channel with a global audience and no gatekeeper. From 2010 onward, almost every holder of the title has been a music video.
Gangnam Style breaks the counter, 2012 to 2014
Psy's Gangnam Style was uploaded on 15 July 2012 and overtook "Baby" on 24 November 2012, four months later, which remains the fastest climb to the top. On 21 December 2012 it became the first video to pass one billion views, a number nobody had thought about before. It reached two billion in May 2014.
Then, on 1 December 2014, YouTube announced that the video had exceeded the maximum value of a 32-bit signed integer, 2,147,483,647, and that its counter had been rebuilt to use 64 bits. The story was slightly theatrical (engineers had seen it coming and made the change earlier), but it produced a lasting fact: the most-viewed video on YouTube had literally broken the Hit Counter. The joke that YouTube "never anticipated a video being watched more than two billion times" is technically what the company said.
Gangnam Style also settled a question about language. It was in Korean, with a chorus in English that means nothing in particular, and it was the most-watched thing on earth. The next two holders would be in Spanish and, essentially, in toddler.
See You Again and Despacito, 2017
Gangnam Style lost the title on 10 July 2017 to See You Again, the Furious 7 tribute to Paul Walker, which had been uploaded in April 2015 and climbed steadily as the go-to song for graduation and memorial videos. It held the title for less than a month. On 4 August 2017 Despacito, uploaded on 12 January 2017, passed it, having become the first video to three billion views the same week.
Despacito's run set most of the intermediate records: four billion in October 2017, five billion in April 2018, six billion in February 2019, seven billion in October 2020. Its Spanish-language success, without the English remix that carried it on US radio, made it the second non-English holder in a row. In February 2020 the video briefly disappeared after a hacking group defaced several Vevo channels, replaced the thumbnail and changed the title; it was restored within hours, with its views intact, which was itself news, because the count was by then treated as a public monument.
The 2017 crown changes were also the last to feel like a contest between pop stars. The T-Series War of 2018 to 2019, in which Sub to PewDiePie became a slogan, was about subscribers, not views, and the winner was an Indian label with a catalogue of film songs. That pointed at what was coming: volume beats stardom.
Baby Shark and the toddler takeover, 2020 onward
Pinkfong's Baby Shark Dance, uploaded in June 2016, passed Despacito on 2 November 2020 and became the first video to ten billion views on 13 January 2022. By 2025 it had passed 15 billion. It did this with almost no press cycle, because its audience cannot read press. Baby Shark is watched on repeat, on tablets, by children who would watch it again if the adult in the room allowed it and often when they do not.
The rest of the top ten looks the same. Cocomelon, a channel that renamed itself in 2018 and became the biggest kids' channel in the world, has "Bath Song" and "Wheels on the Bus" in the top five, each past seven billion. LooLoo Kids' "Johny Johny Yes Papa", a 2016 nursery rhyme that also became a meme for its uncanny animation, sits alongside them. ChuChu TV's phonics song and a Russian channel's coloured-eggs video are also there. Roughly half of the most-viewed videos on YouTube are for people under five. The rest are Despacito, See You Again, "Shape of You" and "Uptown Funk". Masha and the Bear's "Recipe for Disaster", a 2012 Russian cartoon episode, was for years the most-viewed non-music video, with more than four billion.
This takeover had consequences beyond the chart. The YouTube Kids app was launched in 2015 partly because the main site's autoplay had become a toddler channel. Elsagate in 2017 revealed the dark side of the same economy, with algorithm-bait videos using children's characters in disturbing scenarios, and in 2019 YouTube paid 170 million dollars to settle a US complaint that it had collected children's data. From 2020 creators have had to label videos as "made for kids", which turns off comments and personalised ads. The most-viewed videos on the platform are, in other words, the ones the platform has the least commercial use for.
What "most viewed" measures now
A YouTube view has never been a simple count of plays. From roughly 2012 the platform has required a deliberate play of around 30 seconds before a view counts, and it filters out traffic it thinks is automated. Between 2012 and 2015 many uploaders saw their counts freeze at "301+" while the system verified the early views; the freeze was removed in August 2015. Content ID, from 2007, decides who gets paid for a view, which for a music video is usually the label rather than the uploader.
Two more recent changes matter for the leaderboard. In November 2021 YouTube hid public dislike counts (the Return YouTube Dislike extension restores an estimate), so "most disliked" is no longer a public race. And in March 2025 YouTube Shorts began counting a view every time a Short starts playing, with no time threshold, which is how TikTok and Instagram count. That means Shorts numbers and long-form numbers are no longer the same unit; a Short with ten billion "views" would not be Baby Shark's equal, and YouTube's all-time list still ranks long-form uploads.
There is also the question of what a comment like Like If You're Watching in 2026 shows: old videos keep accumulating. Rickroll material is the clearest case. Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" passed one billion views in July 2021, 34 years after release, almost entirely because of a 2007 prank. What Does the Fox Say (2013), Let It Go (2013) and Old Town Road (2019) are all past a billion; Keyboard Cat and Nyan Cat are not, which says something about how much smaller the internet was in 2007 and 2011.
The last change is upstream of counting. Since 2024 the fastest-growing category of children's content has been AI Slop, generated nursery-rhyme animation from AI Slop Farm channels that publish dozens of videos a day. None of them has approached the top of the list, because the list rewards one video watched for years, not a thousand watched for a week. Baby Shark's lead is, for now, safe from the robots and from the pop stars alike.
FAQ
What is the most-viewed YouTube video of all time?
Baby Shark Dance by Pinkfong, uploaded in June 2016. It overtook Despacito on 2 November 2020, reached ten billion views on 13 January 2022 and was past 15 billion by 2025.
Which video was the first to reach one billion views?
Gangnam Style by Psy, on 21 December 2012. It was also the video whose count exceeded the 32-bit integer limit in 2014, which is why YouTube's counter was rebuilt.
What is the most-viewed music video?
Despacito by Luis Fonsi featuring Daddy Yankee, uploaded in January 2017, which held the overall title from August 2017 to November 2020 and remains the most-viewed music video.
Why are so many of the most-viewed videos for children?
Because toddlers watch the same video on repeat, and autoplay feeds them more of the same. Cocomelon, Pinkfong, LooLoo Kids and ChuChu TV between them hold about half the top ten.
Does a YouTube Short count the same as a normal view?
No. Since March 2025 Shorts count a view every time the clip starts, with no minimum watch time; long-form views still need a deliberate play of around 30 seconds. YouTube's all-time list ranks long-form videos.
