Miley Cyrus’ VMA Performance Has Led To More Than 200 Million Views

Miley Cyrus‘ infamous twerk-filled renditions of We Can’t Stop and Blurred Lines at the Video Music Awards have provided a huge boost to her name’s search volume and her YouTube videos’ viewcounts, but the explosion of Miley-related content hasn’t exclusively generated views for the 20 year old free spirit.

When parodies, commentaries, reuploads and other fan videos are taken into account, the entire performance scored 203,885,833 YouTube views in two weeks, from August 25, 2013 to September 10, 2013. And that’s not including any views on Miley’s Official YouTube Channel (which was up 52% in views after her performance, by the way).

That figure comes from the bright minds at ZEFR. The company’s Head of Marketing, Oren Katzeff, explained the analysis that allowed ZEFR to uncover the massive figure:

All videos were uploaded either on or after 8/25/2013, the date of the VMAs. The initial, broad level search focused on a number of terms specifically related to this year’s VMAs, such as “twerking” and “Robin Thicke,” with all results containing the term “Miley” at the very least.

Then, these results were filtered to exclude non-relevant videos, such as the new Miley Cyrus song and music video Wrecking Ball, providing a set of highly relevant videos, totaling over 203 million views to date. The results include everything from reuploads of the performance to commentaries and parodies.

Time for a little Captain Obvious: 203 million is a lot

of views. It’s as many as many popular YouTube personalities get in a year. Ridicule Cyrus all you want, but I know I would happily provide an embarrassing twerk performance if I knew it would generate that many views. Philip Defranco put it best:

Internet: I can’t believe Miley did that in her new video, its just like why?!??! Me: *Stares at 16 million view count in 24 hours*

— Philip DeFranco (@PhillyD) September 10, 2013

When you think about it that way, it’s no surprise that Cyrus keeps cranking out salacious videos one after another. We can expect Wrecking Ball to inspire another slew of parodies (it’s already begun), and while we’re laughing at Miley, she’s laughing all the way to the bank.