Gangnam Style
Viral spread

Following its July 15 release, "Gangnam Style" overtook Carly Rae Jepsen 's " Call Me Maybe " to reach the number one position on the YouTube Top 100 Music Videos during the week of August 28, 2012. On September 1, 2012, it overtook Girls' Generation 's " Gee " to become the most viewed K-pop video on YouTube. Although "Call Me Maybe" had unusually strong staying power, averaging over 1.5 million views each day, "Gangnam Style" increased to an average of over nine million views per day within just two months. This was mainly because "Call Me Maybe" remained largely a North American trend, whereas the popularity of "Gangnam Style" was not confined to the United States. 61.6 percent of viewers were male, and those aged between 13 and 17 represented the biggest group.

According to The Wall Street Journal, T-Pain was among the first to have "sent to the stratosphere" when he tweeted about it on July 29, 2012. It was then picked up by Neetzan Zimmerman from the social blog Gawker, who asked "Did this underground Hip Hop artist from South Korea just release the Best Music Video of the Year?" on July 30. This was soon followed by Robbie Williams, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Tom Cruise, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and William Gibson.

The earliest video to catch the attention of media networks outside South Korea was "Psy Gangnam Style MV Reaction," which was uploaded by Katie and Mindy Anderson on July 18, 2012. The Andersons were subsequently interviewed by Evan Ramstad from The Wall Street Journal a few weeks later. In his article published on August 6, 2012, Ramstad also included "Kpop Music Mondays : PSY Gangnam Style," a review and parody of "Gangnam Style" uploaded on July 23 by K-pop video bloggers Simon and Martina Stawski, a Canadian couple living in Seoul. This makes the Stawskis' video the earliest parody featured in an American newspaper. On August 8, 2012, Ramstad appeared on WSJ Live, and he mentioned the Andersons and the Stawskis again, before claiming that "a lot of Koreans are also making their own parodies of 'Gangnam Style.'"

On September 3, 2012, the number of daily views generated by "Gangnam Style" went past the 5-million mark. By the end of September, it had topped the iTunes charts in 31 countries.

"Gangnam Style" reached the unprecedented milestone of 1 billion YouTube views on December 21, 2012. YouTube specially marked the video's accomplishments with a cartoon dancing Psy animated icon, added first by the site logo, and later next to the video's view counter when it exceeded 1 billion views. On April 6, 2013, the video on YouTube reached 1.5 billion views. As of August 2024, the video is the tenth most viewed video on YouTube, having reached over 5 billion views.
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