The 'Baby Shark' Viral Challenge That Swept The World

It began when Pinkfong uploaded the 'Baby Shark Dance' song to its YouTube channel on June 18, 2016.

The nursery song which tells about a family of sharks, spawned the dance challenge, which started in Indonesia. People started participating, from toddlers to adults, performing choreographed dances to the song, and upload the footage to the internet.

It was in August 2017 that the hashtag #BabySharkChallenge began trending among Indonesian internet users.

The dance and challenge became even more phenomenal when female officers, celebrities, and a fighter pilot uploaded and shared their own Baby Shark dance challenge.

From Indonesia, the viral challenge spread to other parts of the globe, with more well-known celebrities, and more fellow YouTubers participated the challenge.

As a a result, in January 8th, 2019, the original 'Baby Shark' hit 1 billion views on YouTube, and included on Billboard Hot 100 charts, with Billboard reporting that the video was streamed more than 20 million times in just a week time.

The 'Baby Shark' video features a small boy and a small girl dressed in striped pijamas, dancing to the beats accompanied by several sharks, singing “Baby shark, doo doo doo doo doo doo."

It was one of the tens of thousands of songs uploaded by the company, and was part of an animal-themed collection of songs it worked on for seven months or more.

According to Jamie Oh, Pinkfong’s global marketing director, the song was part of an animal-themed collection of songs.

The company analyzed its analytics to see which song performed best, to then divert all of its resources into the highest-performing ones. After realizing that putting children with animal-themed songs did perform well, the company tweaked and put some twists to make 'Baby Shark' viral.

“On average our videos attract millions of views,” said Oh. “Our threshold for deciding to create different variations of the video is when it reaches hundreds of millions.”

And here, 'Baby Shark' reached that threshold in mid-2016, when it went up to more than 140 million views in a very short amount of time.

"We always create eight to 12 different songs around a theme,” explained Oh. “We like to keep our content really educational but at the same time really trendy, fun and engaging. We keep calling it K-pop for the next generation of children.”

To some people, including those who expect to see quality songs on Billboard had been disappointed to see the catchy 136-second-long children song to compete with world class music. But the internet has put 'Baby Shark' into an indisputable internet phenomenon, and a money-making potential.

It was even mentioned on YouTube’s 2018 Rewind video, which recapped the biggest trends on the site of the last 12 months.

From people who participated the challenge, to the result of years of calibration for maximum impact by the company behind it, the song is actually a lot older than most people think.

"It was sung it camps in America 20 years ago, then had a weird German techno version before spreading through Asia and finally making it over to the western world," said Scott Wark, an academic studying memes at Warwick University.

By piggybacking K-pop's popularity that swept the world, 'Baby Shark' is considered one goofy song with a catchy beat, that brings South Korea's phenomenal K-pop glimpse into it.

The popularity of the original song, has made it published in 10 languages, including French, German and Portuguese. Pinkfong has also re-recorded the song with different themed beats, including R&B and EDM versions.

“In all, we have probably 30 or 40 different variations of Baby Shark,” said Oh.

In 2020, 'Baby Shark' surpassed 7 billion views.

The video has also overtaken Luis Fonsi’s "Despacito" as the most viewed music video on YouTube, and the most viewed video on YouTube overall.

This was also confirmed by Guinness World Records, where the video received the title for "the most viewed children's music video on YouTube."

It should also be noted that the video is also one of the most liked and disliked videos ever on YouTube.