YouTube Australia Blog: Double rainbows, annoying oranges, and bed intruders: The year on YouTube

Double rainbows, annoying oranges, and bed intruders: The year on YouTube

Monday, 13 December 2010

It’s time to rewind back through the YouTube videos that people in Australia and around the world were watching and searching for in 2010. These lists of most-watched videos reflect the people, places and events that captured our collective attention and imagination throughout the year. During 2010 you all watched more than 700 billion YouTube videos, and uploaded more than 13 million hours of video. We met new faces, some new words and phrases entered our shared lexicon, and we celebrated as some new YouTube partners hit the big time with millions of views. Remember these moments?

It started with a crime scene, and ended up on the Billboard chart: when Antoine Dodson met the Auto-tune the News guys, a viral hit was made.

He’s an orange and, yeah, he’s pretty annoying. And that’s been the key to this clip’s meteoric rise in 2010: in less than one year, more than one million people have signed up for a regular dose of wise-cracking citrus.

Paul “Yosemite Bear” Vasquez’s emotive footage of a spectacular rainbow in Yosemite National Park caught the attention of a few pop culture sites and comedian Jimmy Kimmel, whose Tweet helped make this clip and the “double rainbow” one of the most beloved memes of 2010.

And now … the moment you’ve all been waiting for … here are the most-watched videos of 2010, compiled based on the view counts of videos uploaded during 2010 (in some instances aggregated across multiple versions of the same video):

In Australia, the most-watched music videos on YouTube were:

Globally, the most-watched YouTube videos were:

The most-searched for queries on YouTube during the year show what was on our collective minds as 2010 played out. Like Google Zeitgeist these lists reveal the interests, issues, and entertainment that connected us - is that what you were searching for each month?
January - iPad
February - luge
March - eclipse trailer
April - dog man
May - airplanes
June - california gurls
July - old spice
August - teenage dream
September - x factor
October - commonwealth games 2010
November - firework

For more reminders of the people, places and events that played out on YouTube during 2010, visit youtube.com/rewind or check out YouTube trends for more detailed lists including the most-watched videos in the US.

Posted by Mia Quagliarello, YouTube Community Manager.