📚 Baby Shark Becomes YouTube's Most-Watched Video of All Time

Baby Shark, the infuriatingly catchy children's rhyme recorded by South Korean company Pinkfong, has become the most-watched video ever on YouTube. The BBC reports: The song has now been played 7.04 billion times, overtaking the previous record holder Despacito, the Latin pop smash by singer Luis Fonsi. Played back-to-back, that would mean Baby Shark has been streamed continuously for 30,187 years. Pinkfong stands to have made about $5.2 million from YouTube streams alone. It took four years for Baby Shark to ascend to the top of YouTube's most-played chart, but the song is actually much older than that. It is thought to have originated in U.S. summer camps in the 1970s. One theory says it was invented in 1975, as Steven Spielberg's Jaws became an box office smash around the world. There are a huge number of variations on the basic premise, including one version where a surfer loses an arm to the shark, and another where the protagonist dies. There are also international versions - including the French Bebe Requin and the German Kleiner Hai (Little Shark), which became a minor hit in Europe in 2007. But none of them could match the phenomenal success of Pinkfong's interpretation, which was sung by 10-year-old Korean-American singer Hope Segoine and uploaded to YouTube in 2015.

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