MOSCOW, April 23 (RIA Novosti) - The video for South Korean rapper Psy’s new single, “Gentleman” has matched the record time for getting 100 million views on You Tube, set earlier this year by clips of February's Russian meteorite event, a video performance analysis blog has reported.
The Visible Measures blog said Psy’s single had “hit 100 million in only three days,” tying with the record set by videos of the meteorite that fell to Earth in Russia’s Urals region on February 15. The single has now been watched more than 150 million times in total since it was posted on You Tube last weekend.
“The speed with which the Russian Meteor video acquired views was quite astonishing at the time. But it made sense because the news story relied on user-uploaded videos of the meteor,” Visible Measures said.
The meteorite landed with a massive boom that blew out windows and damaged thousands of buildings around the city of Chelyabinsk, injuring around 1,200 people in the area.
Video footage of the meteorite, much of it filmed on in-car cameras that many Russians use to protect themselves against potential traffic accident claims, went viral.
“[But] the speed with which Gentleman is garnering views has less to do with its newsworthiness than with viewer’s curiosity to see how Psy would follow the success of ‘Gangnam Style’, the most viewed video of all time,” Visible Measures added.
“Gangnam Style” has so far garnered over 1.5 billion views and turned the previously obscure, at least outside of South Korea, rapper into a global phenomenon, whose trademark dance-style has been mimicked from everyone from UN chief Ban Ki-moon to NASA astronauts.
