It used to be that having a million YouTube views was cool. It used to be that 800 million views would be enough to make you YouTube's most watched clip, but now not even a figure of 2,147,483,647 views is enough to contain the chronically popular Gangnam Style music video by Psy. YouTube has announced this week that it's upgrading its view counter after the K-Pop video surpassed its old 32-bit limit, which was set on the assumption that nothing would be so pervasive as to be watched more than 2.1 billion times. At the time of writing, Gangnam Style is nearly 5 million views above the earlier limit, so YouTube's promise of "bigger and bigger numbers" is already being put into effect. Going to the video page and hovering over the view counter will show an animated math easter egg — can you figure it out?
Update 1:50PM, 3 December 2014: Google has clarified for The Verge that its counter was never actually broken. "We saw this coming a couple months ago and updated our systems to prepare for it," says the YouTube proprietor, "so we updated to a 64-bit counter (9,223,372,036,854,775,808 max — that's 9 quintillion)." Guess that gives Psy a new objective to aim for.
