South Korean rapper PSY's Gangnam Style is the latest biggest thing on the web. Thanks to its slick production, offbeat humor, unconventional dance moves, and infectious rhythms, the music video has quickly become one of the most viral pieces of content online.
Originally uploaded in July, the music video was initially known only within its Asian based, K-Pop fanship. In the last 60 days however, viewers from all over the world have been turned onto the video, thrusting Gangnam Style and PSY into the global spotlight.
But Gangnam Style is much bigger than you think. The original music video found on YouTube has 145 million views. This is massive, but, again, it gets bigger. We've identified over 260* related videos to the original music video. These videos include spoofs, mashups, video reponses, video reactions (of people watching the music video – yes, people watch these – one of them has over 6 million views), live performances, behind-the-scenes clips, dance troupes with their own routines for the song, people dancing Gangnam Style at baseball and football games, and more. The total performance of these Gangnam Style videos is what we call True Reach.
The True Reach of Gangnam Style is over 350 million views, over 205 million views more than the original music video. Overall, the True Reach for Gangnam Style has been blazing over the past week, averaging more than 16 million views daily. And, Gangnam Style is closing in on 1 million comments fast: it currently stands at 960,000 comments. This rapid growth in viewership can be attributed in part to a variety of celebrity plugs, including on-air mentions by Ellen and Chelsea Lately, as well as tweets from Josh Groban and Robbie Williams, and a cover performance by Nelly Furtado.
Bigger Faster Than Call Me Maybe
As we frequently like to do, we wanted to provide some context for Gangnam Style's massive performance. We wanted to put it up again this year's juggernaught, Carly Rae Jepsen's Call Me Maybe, as well as one of the biggest music videos of all time, Justin Bieber's Baby.
To measure the performance of these music videos on an apples-to-apples basis, we looked at the number of days it took to reach Gangnam Style's current 350+ million views. Gangnam Style hit 350 million views in 59 days. Baby did it in 109 days. And Call Me Maybe did it in 112 days, taking almost twice as long as Gangnam Style.
Gangnam Style also trumps Call Me Maybe in another metric. As we noted above, there are over 260* clips related to the Gangnam Style music video. Call Me Maybe only has 165* clips related to it.
The Spoofs
One of the most entertaining aspects of a music video like Gangnam Style is the way audiences respond to it. As we noted about, audience-driven clips are responsible for 200 million views for the music video. Sometimes audiences go so far as to create their own version of the music video.
Just as we found with Call Me Maybe, there is a multitude of parodies of Gangnam Style. There are so many, in fact, that we wanted to create a Top 10 chart of the most-watched spoofs.
You'll find that Top 10 Chart below.
What do you think of Gangnam Style? Do you have a favorite spoof? Let us know in the comments section below!
Gangnam Style's Top 10 Spoofs