YouTube Releases Epic Video Collaboration to Recap 2012 #Rewind

By 12/17/2012
YouTube Releases Epic Video Collaboration to Recap 2012 #Rewind

Question: What do Psy, Walk Off the Earth, AlphaCat, KassemG, Daily Grace, DeStorm, Mystery Guitar Man, Dave Days, Pyrobooby, The Annoying Orange, Barely Political, Freddie Wong, Corridor Digital, Rhett and Link, Smosh, Felicia Day, Chester See, iJustine, Epic Meal Time, Hannah Hart, Jenna Marbles, Shit Girls Say, JuicyStar07, GloZell, ClevverTV, SmoshGames, and Ryan Higa (and probably a few more) have in common?

Answer: They’re all part of this epic YouTube collaboration celebrating the most viewed YouTube videos of 2012.

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Rewind YouTube Style 2012 is the latest iteration of YouTube’s #Rewind video. It’s a condensed look at what videos the world watched most on the world’s most-watched online video sharing platform over the past 12 months.

The 2011 version of #Rewind was straightforward. But this year the producers that be at YouTube forewent a simple series of clips for their year-end vid in favor of a 4:15 music video that packs in a wide variety of freshly-shot action. That action is set to the beat and lyrics of a Gangnam Style / Call Me Maybe mashup and stars some of the most famous online video personalities on the planet, who coarsely reenact the top 10 videos with the highest view counts of 2012.

Click that play button and you’ll be sure to notice distinct similarities between Rewind YouTube Style and the top 10 most-viewed videos of the year below:

  1. PSY – Gangnam Style: This crazy Korean pop music video surprised the world. It’s on track to hit 1B views and has become the most viewed video of all time in just six months.
  2. Walk off the Earth: The most-viewed cover song of 2012, otherwise known as “5 people, 1 guitar” attracted 140 million views this year.
  3. KONY 2012: For one week, this was the most-shared video in the world. The cause-based video was March’s top search and garnered the most views ever for a YouTube video in a single day (31 million).
  4. Call Me Maybe – Bieber, Gomez, Pena: This video covering the song of the summer kicked of a trend of lip sync videos that spanned from the Harvard baseball team and celebs to Olympians and the President (sort of).
  5. Epic Rap Battles – Obama vs. Romney: This episode, featuring well-known Obama impersonator Alphacat, is from YouTube’s “Epic Rap Battles” which drew over 250 million views this year (that’s 25 million views per episode). It also points to a larger 2012 trend: videos of Obama and Romney were viewed well over 2 billion times.
  6. Dramatic Surprise: What happens when you place a mysterious sign in the middle of a Flemish square? The world wanted to know as this video brought in 25 million views in the first week it was posted, with 10 different countries viewing it over 1 million times each.
  7. Why You Asking All Them Questions: Comedian Emmanuel Hudson’s popularity exploded this year, especially in the southern U.S. with almost half of this video’s 39 million views coming from mobile devices.
  8. Lindsey Stirling: Lindsey’s trademark dubstep violin styles created a lot of buzz this year- especially in the U.S., Germany and Poland. This video, which was shot by fellow YouTube creator Devin Graham, has over 500,000 likes and 100,000 comments.
  9. Facebook Parenting: A father’s reaction to his daughter’s Facebook post set off a storm of controversy, discussion, and response videos, with 11 million views in just one day.
  10. Stratos Highlights: This live stream of Felix Baumgartner’s free-fall from 128,000 feet shattered previous live stream records with 8 million concurrent views. Since then, 14,000 videos have been posted mentioning “Felix Baumgartner” and the recording posted to YouTube has attracted 30 million views.

Rewind YouTube Style is also meant to be a kind of marketing tool for YouTube.com/rewind. The custom channel features playlists and interactive YouTube players that masterfully shows off the capabilities of YouTube annotations while allowing viewers to get nostalgic and scroll through the most-watched online videos of YouTube’s recent past. Viewers can click from January through December and look at the videos the world watched most every month or narrow the scope down by genre and geographic locale.

Here’s another laundry list of names you can find in the Rewind YouTube Style vid along with their corresponding channels for easy viewing. If you noticed that we’ve left anyone out, please let us know:

Rewind YouTube Style is a Seedwell production, directed by Peter Furia, produced by Furia and Beau Lewis, filmed by Catherine Goldschmidt, and edited by Furia and David Fine. If those names sound familiar, we totally knew who they were before they created epic end-of-year YouTube collaborations. Seedwell and company are behind the YouTube Original Channel American Hipster.

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