The moral of the story is never underestimate children's inability to know when enough is enough.

The quick "You don't want to know the answer" when showing the third tetrations definitely caught me off guard. Not sure if it was just me but that was hilarious.

I like it when full numbers are shown, I feel like it makes them more meaningful. It also makes it more legible for certain languages because of spaces, eg in Estonian you'd see "413 tuh vaatamist" instead of "413K views", which is kind of hard to see on first glance.

I momentarily had a crisis when I tried coming to terms with how much watch time Baby Shark has. 7.57 centuries collectively. All spent watching Baby Shark.

*Bonus fact* : Tetration is such a mysterious operation that no one knows how we should properly extend it to decimal inputs. We know that 3 tetrated by 3 would be 7625597484987, 2 tetrated by 4 would be 65536, and 100 tetrated by 100 would be [ERROR], but we're not sure what 2 tetrated by 0.5 would be, or 5 tetrated by 1.2. There's just not enough properties we've found to define them.

if there are ~2 billion parents with internet access (if my math is correct), then the average parent has watched baby shark 5 times

Even though this was a "shower thought" video, I've found it really interesting! So cool to see how the metrics are truncated.

5:22 In fact, if you switch your language to an East Asian language on KZfaq, the pattern of the number of significant figures changes, as digits are grouped by 萬/万/만 (10000) instead of K (1000): 1234 views stays as 1234, 12345 views is truncated to 1.2萬, 123456 views is truncated to 12萬, 1234567 views becomes 123萬, 12345678 views becomes 1234萬, and so on. Additionally, (at least) some Indian languages have another different digit grouping system so likely something different happens if you switch to one of those languages.

In KZfaq Germany view count numbers to outsiders seem to be showing accurately up to 999,999, after which there is x.y million for numbers above 10^6 and then xy million for numbers above 10^7 IIRC KZfaq used to just append ,000 here for thousands in Germany, probably because the "K" for thousand is not that established in the German language. But I think people might have gotten confused by that, so they changed it to exact numbers up to 999,999. note: I used a comma [,] in this comment for the thousands separator, but in German we actually use a dot [.]

I wonder, if Baby Shark were allowed to run ads, and had been for the entire length of its existence on KZfaq, how much money in ad revenue would it have made?

tbh baby shark is stuck in an endless loop of views generating cause parents play this video to feed their kids or to entertain them cause it attracts kids and keeps them addicted. and they choose this video out of all the videos since this is the most popular one. this forms that loop

That's an interesting topic. Nothing to do with AI or any project of your own, but it was still very fun to watch. I'm still baffled at baby shark being so popular though. Sure, it's only 1.x views per person averaging the world, but there's only 2.6 billion users on KZfaq ("only") so that's 3.8 views per person, and on such a large scale with most viewers only watching once or not at all, there must be kids watching literally hundreds or even thousands of times to make up for it.

This is probably the most important thing happening right now

9:17 "They're using 5 characters, to represent a 4-digit number" Yes, but 4 digit-numbers are also often written using 5 characters because of a thousand-separator (digit grouping)

how is this man the only guy who can get me interested in this stuff

"If we have that third number anyways, might as well make it useful" Lets hope youtube doesn't catch onto the fact that there is still something they can ruin left

I remember the good ol' days when Gangnam Style was the first video ever to reach 1 billion views and we were all impressed. It even had a cute little animation next to the view count to celebrate

0:57 “what about taking numbers to the third titration?” I've seen worse

The truncation process is really useful in idle games that grow their numbers into exponential growth after a decent amount of time. So yeah there's gaming applications to these numbers

“that is as much precision as youtube could possibly give as there’s no such thing as a fractional view” *splits myself into thirds*

i love these types of videos, thanks cary! now i know i'm not the only one who is fascinated by the way youtube trunctuates their numbers!

Can we all please take a moment to praise the animator for his astonishing work of syncing the mouth movements to the speech?! That must have taken ages!

When looking at the inconsistency and superficial illogic of how KZfaq does it, it's important to consider that the primary concern for this kind of design is visual appearance (both legibility and aesthetics). Regarding the inconsistency between subscriber and view counts, it makes sense for them to be displayed differently because they appear in different parts of the page. The subscriber count isn't surrounded by much other information, so it can afford to be a little more verbose, and subscriptions are harder to achieve than views, so each one "means" more and it's worth displaying with a little more precision. The shortened view counts, on the other hand, tend to appear in lists which are fairly dense with information, which is why keeping them easily legible at a glance is a priority. The view count of the current video is displayed in a completely separate easily identifiable area, so it can afford to have full precision without making things too confusing. Regarding the apparent illogic of using an abbreviation that consists of more characters than the raw number, again I think the result makes sense from a design perspective. The objective isn't to minimize the bytes used, it's the minimize the screen space used while maximizing the legibility. The decimal separator may be an extra byte of HTML, but a video streaming site is hardly in the business of scrounging individual bytes of saved bandwidth here and there, and it takes a fraction of the space a digit would have (also consider that where raw numbers are displayed, they use thousand separators, so it may not even be a character saving at all). And I feel like the order of magnitude suffix (or whatever you call the trailing K/M/B) is readily visually separable, meaning it's primarily the number of digits the user is seeing that impact on information overload/legibility/however you want to put it. Anyway, fun video!

I've never thought about this before (besides thinking it's weird that the channel page doesn't show the full sub count), but this was still a very interesting and entertaining video. Great work as always, Cary!

I have my KZfaq interface set to German (Germany), and I don’t have this; my view counts up until 999,999 have ALL sigfigs anywhere on the site (this video popped up in my recommendations as having, well, 162,202 views). Starting with one million, it’s as shown in this video. Weird!

Also, I just wanted to say, on the topic of measuring growth, I've been following you since about 4 years ago, and it's been amazing seeing you grow and get the recognition you deserve, from a relatively niche small channel to something than can regularly get videos in the algorithm. Good work man!

I thought you were going to dissect that song, why the song is mathematically addictive. I know that there's a mathematical formula to make an earworm song.

2:37 it's bfbs exit in the background :D

I thought this video would go into some sort of limitation regarding for example floating point number precision. Even though it makes no sense to save views as floating point numbers. 10B is bigger than 2^32 (about 4.3B) but if you use 32 Bit integers you either have an overflow, or the views stay at a maximum of 4.3B. Anyways nice video.

There are 3 billion bots watching Baby Shark.

Children are the most powerful viewbots. I almost wish I could return to that, being able to rewatch the same thing 50 times and still finding it enthralling.

Reminds me of idle games (Cookie Clicker, e.g.) where after you play long enough you start losing significant figures in all the costs and stats, which is fascinating because it doesn’t make the games any less playable when this happens - the less-significant figures _literally don’t matter_ at that point!

I thought the metric would've been "repeat viewers" or "people who only watch x type of content" and now I really want to know some of that.

Cary shower thoughts are more interesting than my life

Finally, a video focusing on KZfaq view statistics. This is what I have been waiting for, thank you Carykh.

Such simple concept from a average video seeming got so popular with is simple but mesmerised pattern that lures people giving it so much power

interestingly, under the east asian system (using 万 and 億 for 10,000 and 100,000,000) you can get up to four sig figs, so even if one day baby shark has 100 billion views, the view count to outside observers will still go up every 100 million views in east asia

Thank you for telling me tetrations are a thing. I looked it up after this and learned about Hyperoperations which were a thing I had thought about many times but only now learned actually has a name and a mathematical formula to go with it! I am stupidly ecstatic about this in a way only a math nerd could be.

Nice! A month before this video was launched, I actually studied this youtube's view truncating system and implemented it in my Python project. Basically my project was about getting youtube search results. It's really interesting to see a video on it!

Now is 11 billion

Very fascinating 😳 I never thought numbers would be this interesting

how to explain logarithms without saying the word "logarithm":

i watched this without even realizing it was for SoME2, nice work

I love how Cary is someone who 100% knows how to inspect element and make the numbers in the view count change, and yet his style is to write over the view count in handwriting. Commitment.

You literally are amazing- like imagine another KZfaqr that explains math are basically so boring to watch, but you make it interesting and entertaining ! You are doing animation, entertaining math and more! You are really awesome! Plus you created the first ever object show in the world! You were doing animation (with your brother) when you were a kid! That is awesome! I don’t know if you realize how you are amazing- Continue like that! Bye !

I thought it was gonna be what was the click-rate between children compared to adults along with an overall clickrate, but the lesson on rounding numbers like this should be more visible to the word like bfdi

This is why I am subscribed to the CaryKH KZfaq channel, I get to watch epic spreadsheet content about funny shark song. 👍

Love this video! Ty for sharing :)

really wish some of these platforms had an "i'm not afraid of big numbers" mode

My personal theory is that teachers keep making kindergarteners watch baby shark😂

Whenever I watch these videos and I don’t understand *anything* , but he explains stuff so we’ll that I actually get what he’s talking about! Props to you, Cary.

Decent analysis video! Thanks for uploading!

Because some of the comments also pointed out that localization also have some importance, I would like to know if there's any Indian here can explain this matter in relevance of their interesting digit groupings like lakh, crore, and beyond.

I miss when it was gangnam style

Surprisingly interesting! Long time viewer would love more :)

So glad you're allowed to post these random data vids! And please do more, as you can tell by the mysterious lack of decimal point, we do watch these videos! So keep them coming, because (in my opinion) posting regular low-quality vids is much better than posting very irregularily! (also I just realised no decimal point could mean you have anything less than 1,100 views, I'm sorry)

This was so interesting!! I'd absolutely watch more shower-thought-y videos of yours

5:35 triggered my regex ptsd

Ngl, the animated character made this video a listening experience

The full view count is sometimes covered by the like count because of the new "download" and "clip" options making that info bar wider, as well as the word "dislike" instead of the dislike count. I literally need to zoom out to view this video's full view count

Update from about a day after this video was posted: Baby Shark officially has over 11B views now! Also, haven't seen anyone mention the thumbnail art, but I like the hand-drawn style.

Very nice observation on how 2.72k literally takes more characters than 2725, just a baffling choice by youtube

7 minutes! Glad you uploaded!

I love the way that you animate your avatar, for it is very engaging.

There are videos which are much more deserving of 10B views than baby shark

Added nuance: for the first views after passing each power, there seems to be only one sig fig. For instance, 1000-1099 views is always just 1K instead of 1.0K views

Thank you! I’ve been wondering this!

baby shark needs 1/8 of despacito's full viewcount to register a single change. I feel like this view of it really highlights the power of this sort of breakpoint in formulas.

After 3 days it’s now 11B :0

9:27 Actually, they would provide more information with the exact same character count, because they actually use commas in numbers.

Another carykh video! Can’t wait to see the next one ;)

The video you showed with 8 views is gonna become the most viewed video after this lol

1:49 did anyone see the bfdi 1a over there

I thought the title said "the man behind baby shark's viewcount" and I was expecting the story of some guy watching it on repeat religiously

Well made video Cary!

Many thanks, information was certainly important.

3:29 Cary: *tries to make an Australian slang-like word* Cary: sIgFiGs

I couldn't stop watching baby shark.

Wow, thanks for giving me new vocabulary: tetration!

1:18 hearing carykh say this felt surreal

I have watched baby shark 0 times and plan to keep it that way

Cary's channel is slowly becoming Film Theory but educational

this is why I'm subscribed to you

this video is rich in random cool info lol

baby Shark hit 11B views already.

This is how you turn something seemingly uninteresting and invisible into very interesting, noticeable and entertaining.

yo man i love your content. i feel like you don’t have to animate all the mouth movements do exactly dude, your videos are great with or without them.

something about the fact that the most viewed video on youtube is one of these popular baby videos that babies watch a kajillion times every day so they get inflated view counts. just kind of makes me upset

finally someone did the math

I love how you drew the baby shark and mother shark

Great video as always. Remember back in the day when Gangnam Style overflowed the 32-bit view counter? Seems like nothing compared to the views videos are getting now, haha!

"There's no such thing as a fractional view" Also Cary, 3 minutes earlier: "The average human out of all of them has watched Baby Shark 1.38 times" (I know this is an average number, not actual statistical data towards KZfaq or the point of the video)

0:57 That is some excellent comedic timing.

I had a baby shark cube plushie that was small and had a speaker unfortunately I lost it baby shark will always be my childhood

5:38 was an "ahaa" moment for me. That is a really great way to show us why that is. Thank you!

It's kinda sad that none of the 10 most popular videos are real, user created videos.

How this can happen: repeat watchings and probably watching the video on half speed. the video is also highly linked throughout the net and collects automated views by surf-bys

jeez! i remember when this channel only had 80k subs…

If I designed a large number display system, I'd establish a max character length, say 4, and use nested "E" notation. 1: 1 9,999: 9999 10,000: 10E3 10,999: 10E3 99 billion: 99E9 100 billion: 1E11 999 billion: 9E11 1 trillion: 1E12 A googol minus one: 9E99 Nine googol: E100 Ten googol: E101 1,000 nines in a row: E999 1,001 nines in a row: 9EE3 Googolplex: EEE2 2 Googolplex: EEE2 Googolplex squared: EEE2 Googolplex to the googol'th power: EEE2 Googolplex to the power of googol to the 10 millionth power: EEE9 (largest number able to be displayed)

0:27 “69 69” had me dying