Double rainbows, Rico, and Old Spice: The year on YouTube

It’s time to rewind back through the YouTube videos that people in New Zealand and around the world were watching and searching for in 2010. These lists of most-watched videos reflect the people, places and events that captured our collective attention and imagination throughout the year. During 2010 you all watched more than 700 billion YouTube videos, and uploaded more than 13 million hours of video. We met new faces, some new words and phrases entered our shared lexicon, and we celebrated as some new YouTube partners hit the big time with millions of views. Remember these moments?

• It started with a crime scene, and ended up on the Billboard chart: when Antoine Dodson met the Auto-tune the News guys, a viral hit was made.

• He’s an orange and, yeah, he’s pretty annoying. And that’s been the key to this channel’s meteoric rise in 2010: in less than one year, more than one million people have signed up for a regular dose of wise-cracking citrus.

• Paul “Yosemite Bear” Vasquez’s emotive footage of a spectacular rainbow in Yosemite National Park caught the attention of a few pop culture sites and comedian Jimmy Kimmel, whose Tweet helped make this clip and the “double rainbow” one of the most beloved memes of 2010.

And now … the moment you’ve all been waiting for … here are the most-watched videos of 2010, compiled based on the view counts of videos uploaded during 2010 (in some instances aggregated across multiple versions of the same video):

In New Zealand, the most-watched YouTube videos were:

1. Paul Henry Acceptance Speech - Qantas Film & Television Awards 2010
2. Air NZ - Happy Hour
3. Air New Zealand - Crazy About Rugby - Safety Video
4. Old Spice | The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
5. TIK TOK KESHA Parody: Glitter Puke - Key of Awe$ome #13
6. Yosemitebear Mountain Giant Double Rainbow 1-8-10
7. Boy New Official Trailer
8. Teenage Dream(with me)
9. Air NZ - The Intimate Art of Touch
10. christchurch earthquake 4.38am 4 Sept 2010

Globally, the most-watched YouTube videos were:

1. BED INTRUDER SONG!!! (now on iTunes)

2. TIK TOK KESHA Parody: Glitter Puke - Key of Awe$ome #13

3. Greyson Chance Singing Paparazzi
4. Annoying Orange Wazzup
5. Old Spice | The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
6. Yosemitebear Mountain Giant Double Rainbow 1-8-10
7. OK Go - This Too Shall Pass - Rube Goldberg Machine version
8. THE TWILIGHT SAGA: ECLIPSE - Trailer
9. Jimmy Surprises Bieber Fan
10. Ken Block's Gymkhana THREE, Part 2; Ultimate Playground; l'Autodrome

The most-searched for queries on YouTube during the year show what was on our collective minds as 2010 played out. Like Google Zeitgeist these lists reveal the interests, issues, and entertainment that connected us - is that what you were searching for each month?

Most searched for terms during 2010 in New Zealand, by month, were:
January - Haiti
February - Luge
March - lady gaga telephone
April - omg usher
May - airplanes (b.o.b.)
June - billionaire
July - cody simpson
August - teenage dream
September - christchurch eathquake
October - dikshit
November - what’s my name

For more reminders of the people, places and events that played out on YouTube during 2010, visit youtube.com/rewind or check out YouTube trends for more detailed lists including the most-watched videos in the US.

Posted by Mia Quagliarello, YouTube Community Manager.