Psy’s Gangnam Style may be so 2012, but it’s still raking in the hits. So much so in fact that YouTube no longer knows how to count them!
The viral hit video by the South Korean pop star that has become a household name and dance party staple across the world, has got so many views, that Google no longer knows how to count them!
In a blog post Google said, “We never thought a video would be watched in numbers greater than a 32-bit integer (=2,147,483,647 views), but that was before we met PSY. “Gangnam Style” has been viewed so many times we had to upgrade to a 64-bit integer (9,223,372,036,854,775,808)!”
The Daily Mail has kindly decoded what this means in non-geek speak: “Because the number is stored as 0s and 1s there is a character limit based on the amount of memory taken to store it. So in the case of the Psy video, the number of views surpassed this limit, meaning Google had to upgrade and allocate more memory.”
This means that the service could not accurately display the number of views the video was getting, and was also unable to display commas. So you were seeing numbers like 2154611892 instead of a much more readable 2,154,611,892.
“Hover over the counter in PSY’s video to see a little math magic,” adds the Google blog. What happens is that the numbers start spinning around like a slot machine. And no, it’s not a glitch, it’s an ‘easter egg’ left in there by Google in honour of the video being the first to break YouTube’s hit counter.
This is not the first time that Gangnam Style has created YouTube history. The song also became the first song to pass two billion views on the site.
Given all the brouhaha it’s only right to watch the video again. So enjoy!
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