How “Gangnam Style” Broke YouTube
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-30288542
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608341/how-the-gangnam-style-video-became-a-global-pandemic/
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=gangam%20style&geo=US
In one of my computer science classes this semester, we recently discussed an implication that the viral video, “Gangnam Style” had on the software that is used to run YouTube. The video was first released by an artist named Psy in 2012. It spread so rapidly that it was the first YouTube video to reach over 1 billion views. At the time, YouTube had used a 32-bit integer to display the number of views a video has on its website. This meant that a video could have a maximum of just over two billion views. By 2014, however, the video had been viewed so many times that YouTube was forced to change its software so that it could display numbers above 2 billion. They began using a 64-bit integer, which meant that the maximum possible number of views a video could have increased to over 9 quintillion.
While this change in YouTube’s software is interesting from a computer architecture standpoint, I thought it would be worthwhile to analyze the spreading of “Gangnam Style” from a Networks standpoint. Over the last five years, researchers from the University of Budapest have investigated the introduction of the video to all parts of the world.
When Psy released “Gangnam Style,” he was relatively unknown beyond his home country of South Korea. Therefore, it makes sense that in the first few weeks after the release, the video had few views by people who were not residents of South Korea, even though it was extremely popular within the country.
The researchers found, however, that at some point, the video was shared with the Philippines. From this point on, the number of views began growing exponentially. One of the reasons for the sudden increase in views is that the Philippines has many more strong ties to English-speaking countries than does South Korea. This meant that many more people chose to watch the video once the people they knew also watched the vide.
The researchers concluded that the nature of the spreading of “Gangnam Style” does, in fact, represent an information cascade. As the number people who viewed the video increased, the rate of people watching the video also increased in a wave-like pattern. This meant that while a person may not have independently chosen to watch “Gangnam Style,” if enough people around him or her had seen the video, he or she chose to watch it to. This fits our definition of an information cascade.