The YouTube Video With the Most Views Is a Children's Song

Baby Shark Dance is a nursery rhyme with a dance routine, posted by the Korean education company Pinkfong on 17 June 2016. Ten years later, on 30 August 2026, its counter read 17.28 billion.

Second place is not close. Cocomelon's Wheels on the Bus, uploaded 24 May 2018, had 9.34 billion on that date, and Despacito, the song that saturated 2017 and went up on 12 January 2017, had 9.11 billion. Stack Despacito's entire nine-and-a-half-year run on top of itself and you arrive in roughly the same neighbourhood as Baby Shark.

Every figure below is a counter reading taken on 30 August 2026; the upload date follows it.

Quote any of them without the date attached and you are quoting something that was true once.

That is the whole composition of the top twelve.

The upload dates explain more than the view totals do. Eleven of the twelve went online between 2009 and 2018, which means those counters have been running for eight years or longer. None of this was a viral week. A view counter is cumulative rather than per-session: it adds up every play a video has ever collected, and YouTube revises it when an audit says the total was wrong. So the videos that win are the ones people come back to rather than watch once, and a song a four-year-old demands on repeat produces a very different curve from a documentary somebody finishes and never opens again.

The Facebook advertisement is the odd entry, and the only one from the 2020s. It reached 8.02 billion by 30 August 2026, and the public counter treats it exactly like the songs around it, with no separate label for paid distribution. What those counters have in common shows up in the kinds of video that collect the most views.

A view count looks like a fact carved in stone. It is a maintained figure that YouTube audits.

The clearest demonstration is an April Fools video from Discord, which registered a billion views in under a day and was later recounted by YouTube down to the low millions. The number on screen had been wrong, and it was corrected in public.

There is a second limit built into the counter. It reports how many times something was watched and says nothing about who did the watching, which is a wall people hit on every network, and even what counts as a valid view is YouTube's call. Aggregate counters aggregate. They are not visitor logs.

"Who has the most views on YouTube" and "who has the most subscribers" get answered as if they were one question. They are not.

On the subscriber side, as of 2026, MrBeast led with 516 million, T-Series had 315 million, and Cocomelon had 202 million. Seventeen channels had crossed 100 million subscribers by then and only three had crossed 200 million. Yet no MrBeast video appears in the most-viewed top twelve, while Cocomelon holds two places in it.

The subscriber list also shows who operates at that scale. Five of the top fifteen channels as of 2026 are Hindi-language media companies rather than individual creators: T-Series at 315 million, SET India at 190 million, Zee Music Company at 123 million, Goldmines at 110 million, and Sony SAB at 106 million. A subscriber total counts sign-ups accumulated over a channel's life. A view total counts plays on one video. The two leaderboards are measuring different objects, and neither predicts the other.

Which leaves "who has the most views on YouTube" without a clean answer at the channel level. Published rankings cover channels by subscriber count and videos by view count. A channel page shows its own lifetime view total, but no authoritative ranking of channels by that figure exists, and none is used here. At the video level the answer is Pinkfong, at 17.28 billion as of 30 August 2026.

Guinness World Records lists the most-viewed YouTube Short as BEST Duo Trick Shots from the channel @ColinAmazing, at 4.66 billion views as of 10 March 2026.

Comparing that to Baby Shark is not like-for-like. Since 24 August 2026 YouTube counts a view the moment a video starts to play in every format, so the rule itself no longer differs. What differs is how playback starts: a Short begins playing as the feed scrolls past it, rather than because someone opened it and pressed play. YouTube does not publish a single combined all-time ranking that mixes the two formats, and any list doing so has made its own decision about what counts.

Not much as a target. Quite a lot as a reminder that these counters are built slowly and in public.

What a creator can actually inspect sits in YouTube Studio under Analytics, where the Content tab reports impressions, click-through rate and average view duration per video, and the Audience tab splits your monthly audience into new, casual and regular viewers. Those numbers describe behaviour you can verify. YouTube describes the signals its recommendation system uses but does not publish how they are weighted, so treat any confident explanation of what the system "decides" as a guess wearing a lab coat.

A new upload starts from zero, and Studio reports those first days in the same detail as any later week. Some creators choose to put a block of early views behind a launch rather than let a good video sit at single digits for a week. What that buys is a starting position on a counter, and nothing more than that. YouTube's fake engagement policy does not allow artificially inflated metrics, and it validates view counts periodically and strips out views it judges fraudulent.

For a normal channel, how many views count as viral today is a far more useful yardstick than seventeen billion, and what keeps people watching is measured in retention rather than the counter.

The oldest video in the top twelve, Crazy Frog's Axel F, went online on 16 June 2009 and was still collecting views seventeen years later. Whatever eventually passes Baby Shark is almost certainly already uploaded, sitting somewhere in the low billions, counting quietly.

No, and nothing is remotely near it. The all-time leader, Baby Shark Dance, stood at 17.28 billion views as of 30 August 2026, which is under two per cent of a trillion. The entire public top twelve on that date ran from 5.89 billion to 17.28 billion. A trillion-view video would need to multiply the current record by more than fifty, and no video on the list is growing at anything like that rate.

As of 30 August 2026: Baby Shark Dance at 17.28 billion, Wheels on the Bus at 9.34 billion, Despacito at 9.11 billion, a Facebook advertisement at 8.02 billion, Bath Song at 7.61 billion, Johny Johny Yes Papa at 7.24 billion, Phonics Song with Two Words and See You Again both at 7.08 billion, Shape of You at 6.79 billion, and Axel F at 6.14 billion. Five of those ten are children's videos.

Far too many videos to list, and the milestone stopped being remarkable years ago. Every entry in the all-time top twelve was at or above 5.89 billion as of 30 August 2026, so a billion is roughly a sixth of what it takes to reach the bottom of that table. On the Shorts side, Guinness World Records had @ColinAmazing's BEST Duo Trick Shots at 4.66 billion views as of 10 March 2026.