Most Viewed YouTube Vid Removed

You got your baby with infectious laugh. Your Potter Puppet Pals. Your Pachelbel’s Canon. Some official music videos and, of course, your Evolution of Dance (though, with this last one, I honestly never understood why).

YouTube’s “Most Viewed (All Time)” list is some prime, venerated real estate, featuring some of the web’s best known videos and representing roughly 920 million total views. Last Monday, Italian Clarus Bartel gave up his plot at the top.

Tired of the abuse and accusations that he was bringing down the house of YouTube, the seemingly innocuous Bartel removed his homemade remix of Brazilian band Cansei de Ser Sexy’s (CSS) Music is My Hot Hot Sex (which itself made headlines late last year for being the inspiration for a homemade-turned-TV iPod commercial).

“I was fed up [with the abuse and accusations of statistical manipulation],” Bartel related to the Sydney Morning Herald. “I am not interested in the first place if this is the price I have to.”

Uploaded last April, the video amassed over 100 million views before removal, and – as the super sleuths and Nubm3rs consultants at Waxy discovered – had a a 1:21,847 view:rating ratio, where 1:590 is the norm.  Those stats raise suspicions, especially since the video is just not that good. I’d say it could get a few million for being based around a hit song, but how it got views anywhere in the 8 digits is shady indeed.