"Harlem Shake," the love-it-or-hate-it dance craze that swept the Internet earlier this year, has hit 1 billion views after just 40 days, according to researcher Visible Measures.
As the company points out on its blog, "that's half the time 'Gangnam Style' took hit 1 billion views and almost a sixth of the time that it took 'Call Me Maybe.'" Unlike those videos, though "Harlem Shake" wasn't a single execution. Visible Measures looked at 500 iterations of the dance video and aggregated them to get to 1 billion. While many of the videos have "just a few million views," the top 10 versions got a total of 336 million views, according to the researcher:
Visible Measures also notes that the phenomenon seems to have peaked in the week of Feb. 26, when it garnered almost 300 million views. Comparatively, the videos received about 75 million views last week.
Given its current downward momentum, the researcher notes that it "seems unlikely" that "Harlem Shake" will surpass "Gangnam Style" when all is said and done.
Images via Visible Measures, YouTube