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"It's official: Psy's \"Gangnam Style\" is the first video ever to hit a billion views on YouTube. \nFor most mortals on video sharing networks, hitting the 1 million views milestone is a feat. For Psy's dance hymn, which was uploaded to YouTube on July 15, millions of views are racking up every hour. It took approximately three hours for the video to go from 995 million to a billion. \nAn animated dancing Psy now appears next to the video's view counter: \n\n\"Psy's success is a great testament to the universal appeal of catchy music \u2014 and er, great equine dance moves,\" Kevin Allocca, YouTube trends manager, said in a blog post. \"In the past, music distribution was mostly regional. It was more difficult to learn about great artists from around the world. But with a global platform at their fingertips, people are now discovering and sharing amazing music from all over the planet.\"\nSome love the song, some hate it, and, by now, many are sick of it. But it captured the essence of pop in the YouTube era: It blended the perfect combination of weirdness, virality, dance moves and catchy melody, and that made it one of the most popular pieces of entertainment in recent times.\nSEE ALSO: How Music Ruled Twitter in 2012\n\nAdmit it: You saw it for the first time, laughed, then you watched it again. Then you heard it at a party, on the radio and then over the crummy sound system of a local grocery store. And then it was everywhere. \nNow is the perfect time to spin it once again. Oppa Gangnam Style!\n\"Congratulations to PSY, the flash mobbers, K-Pop fans and people who love fun across the globe,\" Allocca said, adding these extra stats to highlight the popularity of \"Gangnam Style.\"\n\nPsy was already big in Korea, but in 2012, he became a global celeb as \"Gangnam Style\" quickly spread from Seoul and the pacific to North America, South America, and Europe. It's been seen at least 1 million times in close to 75 countries, making it one of the most global music sensations ever! \nFrom a one-thousand person flash mob in Jakarta to cover videos from Ai Weiwei and Mitt Romney, hundreds of thousands of parodies have been uploaded to YouTube, some of which have tens of millions of views. In fact, fan tributes to \"Gangnam Style\" are now being viewed 20 million times every single day. \nPsy's own remix with Hyuna has 200 million views alone. \n\"Gangnam Style\" was YouTube's top rising search of 2012 and on October 6th, we saw more than five million searches for \"gangnam style\" in a single day. Check out this video demonstrating some of our most popular YouTube searches this year.\nFor those interested in the business side: a number of assessments and projections have been posted claiming \"Gangnam Style\" has generated over $8.1 million in advertising deals, hit more than 2.9 million in song downloads since July, and achieved other incredible feats! \nSEE ALSO: Hey, Sexy Marketing! Big Brands Go 'Gangnam Style'\n\nSince late last month, people have clicked to buy the track on iTunes over 600,000 times helping make Psy the first Korean artist ever to rank #1 on the U.S. iTunes chart and #1 in over 30 more countries.\n\nPsy's pre-taped performance for TNT's Christmas in Washington airs tonight at 8.  Psy shook met and hands with Barack Obama at the pre-taped event at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., amid recent uproar about Psy's controversial anti-American rap.\nReporter Brian Anthony Hernandez contributed to this report; image via YouTube"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2012/12/21/gangnam-style-billion-views-2/>