In February 2025, YouTube turned 20. The video site has gone through a lot over the past two decades, including an acquisition, an earnings glow-up, and multiple generations of star creators. In our 20 Years of YouTube series, we’ll examine the uploads, trends, and influencers that have defined the world’s favorite video site — one year at a time. Click here for a full archive of the series.
In retrospect, it makes perfect sense that the most influential YouTube video of all time is pretty weird.
Its signature dance move involves invisible horses. It includes the most famous elevator twerk of all time. For many of its viewers, its lyrics are indecipherable, save for “hey, sexy lady” and “oppa, Gangnam Style.”
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Psy‘s magnum opus arrived in July 2012 and captivated the internet like nothing before. Its earth-shattering success was due, in large part, to good timing. Seven years into YouTube’s existence, viral videos were peaking, music videos were doing massive numbers, and the platform’s global era was just beginning. ‘Gangnam Style’ arrived at that pivotal moment and set records that would not be broken for years.
In case you weren’t active on YouTube in 2012 (and just because I’m fascinated by this type of analysis), let’s run through a few of the most gobsmacking ‘Gangnam Style’ stats. From its upload date to the point where it became YouTube’s most-watched video, it averaged 70 views per second. It needed only five months to become the first YouTube video with at least one billion views, and when it reached that milestone, there were only 56 YouTube channels with that many views. On a single day in October 2012, the phrase “gangnam style” was searched more than five million times on YouTube.
A 2015 retrospective gave us a few more eye-popping numbers. “With 11,000+ years of watchtime, the total amount of Gangnam Style served up by YouTube thus far would be enough to fill nearly 50 million standard VHS tapes,” reads a YouTube blog post published at the time.
I think you get the point. ‘Gangnam Style’ was bigger than any video that came before it. It arrived at the United Nations, crashed the Oval Office, and got so much traffic that it broke YouTube’s view counter. Go ahead and add one more to tally, if you feel like it:
There are two different ways YouTube can be split into pre- and post-‘Gangnam Style’ eras. The most obvious divide concerns the song’s genre. K-pop was largely an Asian phenomenon in 2012, but after Psy burst onto the international scene, fans from all over the world got excited about South Korea’s hottest artists. In 2011, YouTube noted that “less than half the viewership of top K-Pop channels was from outside the Asia-Pacific region.” One year after ‘Gangnam Style,’ 91% of viewership on those hubs came from outside Korea.
That wasn’t just a shift in musical taste. It was a cultural upheaval that caused artists around the world to adopt the particular style associated with K-pop tastemakers. “Afterwards, viral hits became a constant across genres, with artists using memorable videos or you-can-do-it-too dances as a way to gain attention (alongside more cynical and bizarre attempts at chart-crashing),” Pitchfork wrote in 2017. “Thanks to its surprise success, ‘Gangnam Style’ helped usher in the streaming age in the West.”
YouTube was already become a global force in 2012, with international creators like HolaSoyGerman and Hikakin becoming household names. That was good news for Google’s bottom line, but it made it much more difficult to envision the YouTube community as a singular entity, rather than the fractured collection of niches it is today.
The decline of YouTube Rewind supports that theory. In the years following Psy’s breakout, YouTube’s year-end recap became so overstuffed that it struggled to function as a platform-wide celebration.
In that case, YouTube couldn’t go back to the way things were before ‘Gangnam Style.’ The other quality of the post-Gangnam era is even more irreversible: The numbers just keep going up. Once one video got a billion views, the floodgates opened up, and the YouTube ecosystem became wholly different from its early years.
Consider that, between 2012 and 2022, the number of music videos with at least one billion YouTube views went from zero to 317. Psy showed the scale that could be achieved through the power of worldwide appeal, and other creators were quick to pick up on that growth hack. YouTube was always bound to become a numbers game, but ‘Gangnam Style’ took that phenomenon from a canter to a gallop.
These days, YouTube is so big that the founding father of the billion-views club has been left behind. Younger K-pop stars have broken his chart records and other music videos have overtaken ‘Gangnam Style’ on YouTube. Psy has left to ponder what exactly made his greatest hit into such a smash. “I still don’t know why it was so special,” he told Billboard in 2017. “If I knew why, I could make it again and again.”
Unpredictability powered the ‘Gangnam Style’ rocket ship in the first place and became a big part of the song’s legacy. The impresario behind that track — and the star of its iconic video — seems to have made peace with the wacky YouTube world he unleashed.
“One of the things I love most about this job is that it’s unpredictable. We say among ourselves we’re in the ‘lid business’ — because you don’t know what you’ve got until you open it,” Psy told The New York Times in 2022. “You don’t know which cloud will bring the rain.”
