Baby Shark most-watched YouTube video of all time

Baby Shark,the extremely catchy and upbeat rhyme recorded by South Korean company Pinkfong has become the most-watched video on YouTube. The song has now been played 7.04 billion times, beating previous record holder Despacito, the Latin pop hit by singer Luis Fonsi.

Played back-to-back,this would mean Baby Shark has been streamed continuously for 30,187 years.

From YouTube streams alone,Pinkfong stands to have made $5.2 m.

More shocking,however,is the fact that even though Baby Shark took 4 years to ascend to the top of YouTube’s-most played list,the song has been around for much longer than that.

It is believed to have originated in the 1970s in US summer camps.One theory suggests that it was invented in 1975,when Steven Spielberg’s Jaws became a box office smash around the globe.

There are international versions,including the French Bebe Requin and the German Kleiner Hai,which became a minor hit in Europe in 2007.

However,none of them could measure the remarkable success of Pinkfong’s version,which was performed by 10-year-old Korean-American singer Hope Segoine and uploaded to YouTube in 2015.

The song is incredibly appealing to children,whose proclivity for repetition has undoubtedly helped it climb the ranks of YouTube’s most-watched videos.

“Nursery rhymes have always been sort of slow,very cute,but something that would help your children fall asleep-as opposed to Baby Shark,”Pinkfong’s marketing director Jamie Oh told the BBC in 2010.