Baby Shark becomes the first YouTube video to reach 10 billion views, and we have no one to blame but ourselves

That’s over 43,000 years of watch time, doo doo doo doo doo doo

If you’re a parent to a toddler, you know all too well about videos your child insists on watching again and again (and again). Don’t worry, your kid isn’t broken; repetition is a normal part of development. The universality of that experience is evident when you look at YouTube's top videos and six out of the top 10 are clearly aimed at young eyes. The king of them all has got to be Baby Shark, which just became the first video to reach 10 billion views on the platform.

Pinkfong's Baby Shark has held the number one spot for a while now, but has only just hit that lofty 10B level (via The Verge). It surpassed the former most-watched video (Luis Fonsi’s Despacito) back in November 2020, which had over seven billion views at the time. That means in the past year it’s been watched nearly an additional three billion times — more than the combined populations of India and China.

The origins of the song are lost to the murky depths of history, but most speculation places its beginnings sometime just after the release of Jaws (yeah, that long ago). Before Pinkfong uploaded its initial version in 2015, there was the German recording that became a dance hit in Europe in 2007, and there are a few English-language uploads from around the same time. These early uploaders all acknowledge that they picked the song up from summer camps or youth groups years before they recorded their versions.

If you’re not sick of Baby Shark at this point, you probably never will be, but there’s still plenty of media out there to sate your ravenous hunger for all things Baby Shark. Nearly every childrens’ channel on YouTube has its own version of the song. And if that’s not enough, there’s also a cereal, a musical, a TV show, and books. In short, we’re going to be stuck with Baby Shark for a while.

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