Visible Measures Blog

Earlier this month, we unveiled The Visible Measures 100 Million Views Club, our list of videos with audiences large enough to break the herculean threshold of 100 million views. We were overwhelmed by the level of interest and discussion surrounding the list, including questions about popular campaigns throughout the years that didn't make the cut.

Starting in June, we will be updating this exclusive club about once a month. However, due to popular demand and interest, we've decided to issue an update today. Since the initial publication of the Club, we've gone back to our Viral Reach Database to both verify our initial findings as well as explore some new techniques for uncovering these major viral video phenomena. Along the way, we were reminded of just how dynamic the world of viral video can be. In accordance with this, we've tightened our definitions for the composition of each phenomenon. With that, our latest findings include:

• The 100 Million Views Club now includes 25 members spanning over 4.1 billion views across nearly 29,000 unique video placements (!!).
• Of the seven new members of the Club, all but one have entered toward the bottom of the chart. The one exception was Beyonce’s Single Ladies music video, which makes its debut at #3 on the list (!!) with more than 240 million views -- 36% of which was driven by socially-driven copies and derivatives. On the other end of the spectrum, two of the new entrants -- Chris Crocker’s Leave Britney Alone and Miss Teen South Carolina -- crossed the 100 million view threshold in just the past few days. 
• Susan Boyle’s debut on Britain’s Got Talent -- and the outpouring of social video activity surrounding her performance -- has grown by over 35 million views in less than a month (!!), though she maintained her position at #5 on our all-time list due to the entrance of Single Ladies.
• As part of verifying our earlier results, a few members of the list wound up losing views -- including Avril Lavigne’s Girlfriend and Paul Potts -- due to the implementation of tighter definitions for what's included in each entry. For example, our stricter definition compelled us to break out Evolution of Dance 2 from the original Evolution of Dance, resulting in a net loss of more than 6 million views (sorry Judson!).
• The list is now 40% music videos, 36% user generated content (depending on how you choose to classify Jeff Dunham’s Achmed the Dead Terrorist), 16% movie campaigns, and 8% TV clips (entirely from Britain’s Got Talent). Of the seven new entrants in the Club, two are music videos (both from Beyonce) and five were user generated.
• Many well-known viral videos did not make the cut, including Where the Hell is Matt?, Star Wars Kid, David After the Dentist, and more.

What does all this tell us? More than anything else, the 100 Million Views Club is a ‘living list’ that will continue to grow and change in interesting and perhaps unexpected ways.

With that, below is the updated 100 Million Views Club, with data current as of May 20, 2009.

Source: Visible Measures

Check out our latest numbers to watch the clips that helped create these behemoths of viral video. For more, please follow @visiblemeasures and @mcutler on Twitter, or subscribe to our RSS feed for monthly updates on this list and as well as regular updates on our ongoing research into today's most compelling and influential online video campaigns.

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The data used for the 100 Million Views Club was collected from our Viral Reach Database, a constantly growing video repository of analytic data on 100+ million Internet videos from 150+ video-sharing destinations.