A trillion playbacks in 2011: Rebecca Black, Pitbull and other YouTube stats

9to5 Staff | Dec 20 2011 - 10:49 am PT

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmnkYyHQqNs]

Google today said its YouTube site hit a trillion playbacks in 2011 – that’s a 1,000,000,000,000 view counts for you, or about 140 views for every person on the earth. In a post over at the official YouTube blog, the company invited folks to “see what the world watched on YouTube in 2011 with YouTube Rewind”, available at www.youtube.com/rewind.

It’s an interactive timeline of this year’s most popular videos and events. As you can imagine, kitten videos, dog clips and videos of cute babies (iPad toddlers, anyone?) are again amongst the most-viewed clips not put out by big music companies. And what’s the biggest YouTube video of the year?

Rebecca Black, of course, an American pop singer who also dominated Google’s annual list of the fastest-growing search queries. Her music video is followed by this cute dog clip, then the Jack Sparrow music video (featuring Michael Bolton).

In the “most watched videos from major music labels globally” category, Pitbull’s On The Floor was by the most popular music video, although their Give Me Everything (featuring Ne-Yo, Afrojack and Nayer) and Rain Over Me (featuring Marc Anthony) were pretty popular as well. In fact, those three music videos accrued over four hundred million views.

The majority of YouTube clips that have managed to clock insane view counts throughout the year come from YouTube’s VEVO channel, dedicated to music videos (VEVO is a joint venture among Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Abu Dhabi Media.

Go past the break for a handy list of the most popular YouTube videos of 2011 across several categories.

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Most viewed YouTube videos globally (excluding videos from major music labels)
(playlist)