Agence France Presse
SAN FRANCISCO: “Gangnam Style” topped YouTube’s list of the most attention-grabbing videos this year, as other professionally produced works outshined the amateur clips that had originally made the website famous. “Almost everything on the list this year was created by professional or creative talent for an online audience,” YouTube trends manager Kevin Allocca told AFP shortly before the results were released late Monday.
“It’s different from years ago, when homemade videos or random, funny stuff from smartphone cameras were the hits.” Music video “Gangnam Style” by South Korea’s Psy became the most viewed YouTube video of all time and was on pace to log a billion views by the end of this year. The view count on Monday was slightly more than 971.5 million. Second place was a “Walk off the Earth” music video, a rendition of a hit Gotye song featuring five people simultaneously performing on one guitar.
A “Kony2012” video that was part of a viral campaign to bring accused Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony to justice was the year’s third-most attention-getting YouTube video. The White House had praised the campaign, while a string of celebrities weighed in by tweeting links to the video and promoting the initiative by California-based non-profit group Invisible Children.
Kony2012 was reported to be the first cause-based video by a nonprofit to make YouTube’s annual list of top videos. Fourth place on the YouTube list went to a “Call Me Maybe” video in which stars, including Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez, ignited a lip-synching rage.