Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Super Bowl Commercial Is YouTube’s Most-Viewed Ad Of 2016

By Sam Gutelle • 12/07/2016 •

To accompany its annual Rewind video, YouTube shared a list of the ten branded videos that scored enough views to earn spots on the year-end YouTube Ads Leaderboard. At the top of the list is “Arnold’s Fight,” a Super Bowl commercial starring Arnold Schwarzenegger for the game Mobile Strike that racked up more than 100 million views over the course of 2016.

Since its release, “Arnold’s Fight,” in which a bunch of people fight over The Governator’s phone in order to determine who will get to play Mobile Strike, has received 102 million views, 31,000 likes, and 24,000 dislikes. Those ratios suggest that the spot was bolstered by a large number of paid views, which the YouTube Ads Leaderboard counts alongside organic hits. The second-place ad, from food company Knorr, managed 60 million total views.

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Led by “Arnold’s Fight,” five of the ads in the year-end list are linked to the Super Bowl. That development makes sense given both the timeline of the Leaderboard and the importance of YouTube among Big Game advertisers. The Leaderboard counts views between January 1st and November 15th, so Super Bowl ads, which arrived in February, had plenty of time to roll up big numbers. Many of those ads also arrived on YouTube before the Super Bowl (and some of them didn’t even air during the game’s TV broadcast at all) as brands realized the importance of making a viral impression.

Here, courtesy of YouTube, is the full year-end Leaderboard:

2016 Year-End YouTube Ads Leaderboard and Global Views (Jan 1 – Nov 15 2016):