Psy’s Gangnam Style Breaks YouTube
Ryan Simmons / 10 years ago
Gangnam Style, the music video by Korean K-pop star Psy, broke YouTube’s view counter.
The video, with its staggeringly high number of views outpaced YouTube’s counter, which was previously limited to 2,147,483,647 views, thanks to its use of a 32-bit integer. Gangnam Style currently has 2,155,260,965 views at time of writing.
Google has since updated the counter to use a 64-bit integer, meaning the new limit is 9,223,372,036,854,775,808, that’s over 9 quintillion.
“We never thought a video would be watched in numbers greater than a 32-bit integer (=2,147,483,647 views), but that was before we met PSY. “Gangnam Style” has been viewed so many times we had to upgrade to a 64-bit integer (9,223,372,036,854,775,808)!”
The counter on Psy’s video now comes with a little mathematical wizardry whenever you hover your cursor over it.
I’ve never particularly understood the insane popularity of the video myself, but still, I guess it pushes Justin Bieber’s ‘Baby’ into second place for most watched YouTube video. That’s definitely a good thing.
Source: BBC News
