Baby Shark breaks through YouTube’s biggest milestone to amass 10 billion views

The viral dance had already set a Guinness World Record two years ago as the most viewed video on YouTube

(Youtube/Pinkfong)

The ‘Baby Shark Dance’ music video has become the first YouTube video to reach 10 billion views on the platform.

The record was reached on Thursday, with 10,002,858,093 views at time of writing.

Baby Shark Dance had already set a Guinness World Record as the most viewed video on YouTube in November 2020, when it had received seven billion views. It ranked number 32 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and number 6 in the British Official Charts in 2019.

The previous record-holder was Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito”, but Baby Shark Dance surpassed it by over two billion views. It has been the most-viewed video on YouTube for the past 15 months.

The video is produced by Pinkfong, a children’s education brand from South Korean company SmartStudy. They have developed over 4,000 children’s videos, songs, games, and apps to date.

It was first released in November 2015 and went viral across south east Asia. The dance has since spawned an animated TV series on Nickelodeon, live tours, and NFTs.

Its popularity grew through the ‘baby shark challenge’, which encouraged people to film themselves performing the moves of the dance.

In 2018, there were 88,000 Instagram posts tagged with the hashtag #babysharkchallenge.

“It has been a truly meaningful journey to witness how Baby Shark has connected people around the world and we can’t wait to introduce Baby Shark’s further adventures that will bring unparalleled experiences to even more fans everywhere,” Pinkfong chief executive Min-seok Kim said.