It’s estimated that there are over 80 million videos on YouTube and as of August 2016, Justin Bieber’s ‘Baby’ is the most disliked, with 6.6 million dislikes. The video was uploaded in 2010, it was the second to reach a billion views, after Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’ and it’s currently the 14th most viewed video with 1.4 billion views. It’s got more than twice as many dislikes as the next most disliked video, ‘Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare Reveal Trailer’, so how come people dislike it so much?
An annoyingly catchy song
There are some catchy songs, like the aforementioned ‘Gangnam Style’, that people do like no matter how many times they hear it. Then there are some like ‘Baby’, which start to grate on you after a while. The song was hugely popular with teens and tweens, but many people outside of that demographic not only found the song catchy, they found it annoyingly catchy because the lyrics are just too repetitive: the word ‘baby’, for example, is sung a total of 54 times. The chorus goes ‘Baby, baby, baby oh / like baby, baby, baby no / like baby, baby, baby no’ which many think is just lazy writing.
Bieber’s bad behaviour
Though the video has over 4.9 million likes, it’s received far more dislikes partly because of Bieber’s bad behaviour. Though he made a record-breaking comeback with his album Purpose, before that he had a couple of years of bad press, which turned quite a lot of people against him. And what do people do when they don’t like someone? They go online and try to bring them down. Bieber’s always had a loyal fan base with millions of fans around the world keen to buy his music no matter what happens in his personal life, but there will always be those who won’t defend his bad behaviour and will criticise him online and dislike his videos as a way of saying they don’t like him because of what he’s done.
Will it ever be beaten?
While the song’s popularity has peaked, it is widely known as being the most disliked YouTube video and for that reason alone, it will surely continue to get more dislikes as people who haven’t yet it seen it watch it to find out what all the fuss is about. Whether another video will overtake it any time soon remains to be seen.