April the giraffe slides into YouTube traffic history
We didn't need the official stats to know that April the giraffe broke some records. After all, she was pregnant for what felt like forever before finally giving birth Saturday. But YouTube calculated the numbers and, yep, the pregnant giraffe's livestream and birth were totally record-setting.
April, the 15-year-old giraffe at the Animal Adventure Park zoo in Harpursville, New York, was a viral video star for just 66 days. Giraffes gestate for about 15 months, and the zoo trained a camera on her starting Feb. 10 when they thought she was likely to give birth soon. In that short amount of time, the stream became the second most live-viewed channel in YouTube history, the video site said.
Keeping us guessing about when she'd pop out her calf kept her viewership numbers strong—even when she was just walking around, chewing on food, pooping, and lying down. All that waiting added up to 232 million live views since early February. That's 7.6 million minutes spent watching a pregnant giraffe in a pen. April was up there with Lady Gaga and Zayn on live view stats. And she's a giraffe.
Early Saturday morning, her calf started poking out. Labor had actually started! The word spread quickly around the internet, and by the time her male calf was born, more than 1.2 million people were watching the livestream. That makes it one of the top five most-watched moments for a live event ever on YouTube.
It wasn't just the live birth that made Saturday a record day; overall the day saw 14 million live views. Cuz, I mean, come on, that calf learning to walk and wobble around was too cute to look away from.
By Monday afternoon, with the calf making occasional appearances in the livefeed, almost 90,000 viewers were still holding on. The appeal of April is strong—pregnant or not.
Topics YouTube
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
