view counts

Generated content produced in volume and published without a reader in mind. The first coinage of this era to name a texture rather than a technology.

An account that posts nothing but generated images and videos, at volume, for engagement — the shrimp Jesus pages, the fake craft videos, the cats in peril. The record's word for the source of slop rather than the slop itself.

A campfire song about a family of sharks, rebuilt in neon. The most-viewed video on YouTube, and the only entry whose cause of death is also its entire audience.

Two English brothers and a bitten finger, viewed nearly nine hundred million times. Deleted from YouTube in 2021 after being sold as an NFT, making it the first meme to be bought out of public life.

A children's YouTube channel of nursery rhymes with a baby called JJ, watched by so many toddlers so intensely that it became a byword for overstimulation and the reason a lot of parents feel guilty. The record's entry for the channel as a diagnosis.

YouTube's automated fingerprint system, launched in 2007, which matches uploads against a database of copyrighted audio and video and lets the rights holder claim the revenue, block the video or mute it — as the machine that decides whether your ten seconds of a song is fair use, and always decides no. The record notes it has claimed birdsong, white noise and a creator's own composition.

The Spanish-language single that took the YouTube view record and then kept taking it — first to three, four, five, six and seven billion views. A Justin Bieber remix pushed it into the American top ten, where it spent 16 weeks at number one. The record's entry for the video that broke the counter.

The 2017 scandal over YouTube videos aimed at children — often featuring Elsa, Spider-Man and Peppa Pig — that contained violence, injections, pregnancy plots and other content generated for the algorithm and watched by toddlers on autoplay. The record notes the channels were mass-deleted after press coverage in November 2017, and that the word covers both the videos and the discovery that nobody had been watching.