Google has officially unveiled the 2017 iteration of its YouTube Rewind page, as of December 6, reviewing the year’s best videos and trends. For those who aren’t already aware, YouTube Rewind is an open report from Google, highlighting the year’s fastest growing content creators, trends in video viewing and uploading, and top content in general. Visitors to the page – which is accessible via the source link below – can explore and watch the year’s hottest YouTube content, which is accompanied by in-depth information for those who are interested in the facts surrounding the content. Finally, YouTube Rewind offers a quiz for those viewers who feel YouTube savvy enough to give it a shot. Thankfully, for those without a lot of time on their hands, Google also posts an official Rewind video, which has been embedded below. As with past Rewind videos, this one is hosted by one of the year’s top celebrities, Stephen Colbert.
Although there is far too much content on the site to cover with just one article, the first thing to greet the page’s visitors is a scrollable, interactive guide which walks viewers through trends discovered on YouTube over the past 365 days. Starting things off in the trends category, and marked as a meme, is a video titled Children Interrupt BBC News Interview, which shows two children walking in on a BBC interview. That video has, according to the page, 25 million views but the spin-offs inspired by the situation racking up nearly three times the number of views. Meanwhile, in the music category, the song Despacito – published by LuisFonsiVEVO – has managed a staggering 4.4 billion views, taking its spot as YouTube’s biggest video in just 204 days. That’s followed by Slime, which, as a topic, saw over 2 million different uploads and 17 billion related views. Fidget Spinners fared well, too, garnering upwards of 900,000 uploads and almost 8 billion related views. Trending in Entertainment, on the other hand, is The Masked Singer, a singing show originating out of Thailand, with 3 billion views. As mentioned above, there is really too much content to cover comprehensively in a single article, but some of the other highlights include the Walking on Lava Challenge, 1000 Degree Knife, April the Giraffe, #RolexChallenge, and Shooting Stars, with 1.4 billion, 644 million, 290 million, 599 million, and 119 million related views, respectively.
Moving on to the top videos posted for the year, Ed Sheeran managed to be featured in two of the top ten trending videos – in spot number two for Ed Sheeran Carpool Karaoke and another in spot five for his song Shape Of You, featuring Choreography from Kyle Hanagami. Sheeran took the number two spot in music videos, with the same tune. Those videos had around 118 million, 40 million, and 2.8 billion views, respectively. Rounding out the top 3 trending videos, in the meantime, is As Long As We Will Become The Dust, sung by Oyster Masked and posted by THE MASK SINGER 2, with just under 179 million views at number one. Ping Pong Trick Shots 3, published by Dude Perfect and narrowly missing 93 million views, ironically fell in at number three. On the music video side of the equation, Luis Fonsi’s Despacito, featuring Daddy Yankee, came in at number one, while the official video for J Balvin & Willy William’s Mi Gente took spot three with around 1.4 billion views.