Baby Shark has surpassed 10 billion views on YouTube, solidifying its place as the most viewed video on the platform, a milestone it achieved back in November 2020.
Baby Shark took the world by storm in 2016 and has been a staple of early-learning, baby sensory and baby entertainment videos for the past… Christ, six years come June.
It’s also a staple internet meme, marked by its innocence and innocuous but annoying music, completely loaded and taken in the wrong direction by many a memer. It’s also been the subject of many YTPs, a popular form of video editing and shitposting on YouTube.
Where did Baby Shark come from? Well, it was produced by a South Korean education company called Pinkfong, the channel of which produces nursery rhyme videos on a daily basis. Given Baby Shark’s popularity, the channel was changed around Baby Shark, switching from simply “Pinkfong” to “Pinkfong Baby Shark – Kids’ Songs & Stories”.
Other hits from Pinkfong include Monkey Banana-Baby Monkey (953 million views), Baby Shark Dance with Song Puppets (835 million views) and Baby Shark, featuring Luis Fonsi (703 million views). These are all incredibly high view counts, but none of them stand up to the colossal 10 billion views Baby Shark has racked up.
It took a while for Pinkfong to produce a hit in these numbers, with the channel releasing its first video back in December 2011. While that video sits at a more-than-comfortable 9.9 million views, later videos would rarely start breaching the million view marker until Pinkfong started releasing videos more frequently.
Then, Baby Shark. The Hit. The gamechanger. The banger. We applaud your work, Pinkfong. The Baby Shark as we know it from memes went viral with the #BabySharkChallenge, which started to pick up popularity in Indonesia and then the rest of the world.
As it started to resonate in the internet world, it began to crop up more. It inspired a chant in Apple TV show Ted Lasso and Elon Musk also contributed to the memeage a bit, tweeting out that it “crushes all”. In 2019, Baby Shark got into the Billboard Hot 100 charts at number 32. Now, Baby Shark enjoys the blissful milestone of YouTube supremacy.
We salute you, Baby Shark.
It’s the end, doo doo doo doo doo doo.
It’s the end, doo doo doo doo doo doo.
It’s the end, doo doo doo doo doo doo.
It’s the end!