The Most-Viewed YouTube Short Ever Recorded

The record belongs to @ColinAmazing, and the video is "BEST Duo Trick Shots", certified by Guinness World Records at 4.66 billion views as of 10 March 2026. That is the most-watched vertical clip on the platform by a wide margin.

Guinness certifies a title and a count. It says nothing about what happens inside the clip, and we hold no YouTube data of our own that would fill the gap. The surface the video ran on is public, though. Shorts play in a vertical feed where the next video arrives by swipe, and the format loops by default, so anything that holds a viewer past the swipe gets seen again by the same person. Replays feed the counter too: since March 2025 YouTube has counted a Shorts view each time the clip starts to play or replay. What a creator can see sits in YouTube Studio: open Content, click Analytics on a Short, and the retention curve sits under the Engagement tab. YouTube documents that report as needing at least 100 views and a length of at least 60 seconds, so a brief clip may show only watch time and average view duration.

It is tempting to line the Shorts record up against the most-viewed videos on YouTube and declare a winner. The lists do not speak the same language.

On the all-time video list, as of 30 August 2026, Pinkfong's "Baby Shark Dance" sits at 17.28 billion views, uploaded in June 2016. Cocomelon's "Wheels on the Bus" holds 9.34 billion on that same 30 August 2026 list, and "Despacito" 9.11 billion. Twelfth place, Mark Ronson's "Uptown Funk", carries 5.89 billion as of the same date. So the Shorts record of 4.66 billion would not even enter that top twelve, despite being the single most-watched vertical clip on the platform.

That comparison flatters nobody, because the totals accrued under rules that kept moving. YouTube has changed Shorts view counting more than once, most recently on 24 August 2026, when a view began registering from the first frame across Shorts, long-form and live alike. The engaged view, the metric that drives payment, is defined only as clicking to watch or watching past the initial seconds, with no exact threshold published. Two numbers printed in the same font are not necessarily the same measurement, which is why whether your own plays even count is worth knowing before you compare anything.

Records feel permanent. Counters get audited.

Discord's April Fools video in 2024 collected over a billion views in under a day, and YouTube then recounted the total down to around three million. Nothing about that story is a rumour: the count went up, then the platform audited it and the count came back down. That is the clearest public demonstration available that a view total stays a running tally, open to revision long after everyone has screenshotted it.

Two practical consequences follow. A record you read today may be restated next quarter without ceremony. And a suspiciously fast climb is exactly the kind of pattern the platform re-examines, which is why creators quoting a number should quote the date beside it, the way Guinness does.

The subscriber crown is a separate contest, and the gap at the top is enormous. As of 2026, MrBeast leads with 516 million subscribers. T-Series, the Indian music label, holds 315 million. Cocomelon is third with 202 million, and those three are the only channels past the 200 million mark.

Below them the composition gets interesting. On that same list, SET India has 190 million and Zee Music Company 123 million, Goldmines 110 million and Sony SAB 106 million, all of them Indian television networks or music and film labels rather than individual creators. Vlad and Niki hold 150 million as of 2026, Kids Diana Show 138 million and Like Nastya 133 million, a cluster built on wordless or simply-worded formats. Stokes Twins, a stunt and challenge duo, carry 146 million on the same list. PewDiePie, the channel that defined the solo-creator era, sits at 109 million as of 2026. Seventeen channels in total had crossed 100 million subscribers by that date.

The pattern worth noticing is that the very top of YouTube is crowded with material that needs no translation: nursery rhymes, toy play, stunts, spectacle. The Shorts record arrives with a title that promises a trick shot, which travels the same way a nursery rhyme does.

This question gets asked constantly, and the honest answer is that no such record exists and none can.

Anyone with a Google account can create a channel in under a minute, and that channel starts at zero. There are countless channels sitting at zero right now, and any of them could claim a tie. YouTube publishes no directory ordered from the bottom, and public subscriber counts appear in abbreviated form. Creators can also hide the count entirely in YouTube Studio under Settings, Channel, Advanced settings, where a checkbox controls display of the number. A ranking needs every value in the set, visible and ordered. Neither condition holds here.

When a site does publish a "least subscribed" list, what it has assembled is a handful of channels somebody happened to stumble across. That measures nothing. Point the question at your own channel and it becomes answerable: YouTube Analytics has an Audience tab, where returning viewers and watch time from subscribers tell you what the headline count never will. If you are working on that number deliberately, the YouTube growth services we run are organised around the same metrics Studio shows you, so the before-and-after stays checkable.

A record tells you what the ceiling looks like. It tells you almost nothing about your Tuesday.

What transfers from the top of these lists is format discipline, not scale: clips that survive a swipe, material that needs no translation, a reason to watch twice. Every one of those is testable on a channel with two hundred subscribers, which is more than can be said for billions of views.

The follow-on question is whether a single viral hit leaves anything behind once the spike passes. Going viral on Shorts is one problem and whether Shorts build subscribers at all is another: one enormous clip does not automatically build a channel.

So pick one property and test it this week. Strip the spoken setup off your next Short and watch the retention curve in Studio instead of the view count, then publish the same idea a week later with the setup left in and compare the two curves. Whatever that comparison says is a measurement you own, and it answers by Thursday.

No video has a trillion views, and none is close. The most-viewed video on YouTube as of 30 August 2026 is Pinkfong's "Baby Shark Dance" at 17.28 billion, roughly one fifty-eighth of a trillion. Second place on that same list, Cocomelon's "Wheels on the Bus", sits at 9.34 billion. Claims of trillion-view videos usually come from misread charts or from totals summed across an entire channel rather than a single upload.

There is no flat rate, and YouTube does not publish one. Shorts revenue comes from ads shown in the Shorts feed, pooled monthly, with music licensing costs taken out before the rest is split by share of engaged views, and creators keep 45% of what is allocated to them. YouTube states that using music does not change a creator's own allocation or that rate, so the cost lands on the pool rather than the clip. The actual figure swings with the viewer's country, the advertiser demand in your niche, and the season. Anyone quoting a single dollars-per-million number for Shorts is inventing it.

Seventeen channels had passed 100 million subscribers as of 2026. Near that line on the same list sit PewDiePie at 109 million, Goldmines at 110 million, WWE at 114 million, and Alejo Igoa at 121 million. Higher up are Like Nastya at 133 million, Kids Diana Show at 138 million and Vlad and Niki at 150 million. Only three channels had passed 200 million: MrBeast, T-Series and Cocomelon.