Halifax’s Andrew Grantham made a splash with his talking dog.YouTube
YouTube has released its official Zeitgeist 2011 list, and the spirit of the times this year seems to be defined by children, songs, silly cats and dogs, comedy and advertising.
Of the 10 most watched videos in Canada, four of them featured kids or babies, five of them featured songs (most of them intentionally ridiculous), one featured a cartoon cat, one featured a talking dog, one was an advertisement starring a kid and another was an advertisement whose status on this list is suspect. (To view all 10, click here.)
At least six are intended to make viewers laugh, mostly through one song parody or another. The most laughable of them all, however, wasn't intended as comedy. But Rebecca Black's Friday video was probably the most mocked YouTube video of the year. It was also the one Canadians watched most.
In the No. 2 spot, Halifax's Andrew Grantham created a video featuring a talking dog (in voice-over, obviously) that has garnered 74 million views. You'll probably also recognize more CanCon in the top 10: Winnipeg's Maria Aragon, 12, who performed a cover of Lady Gaga's Born This Way, and Emerson, the baby from London, Ont., who alternately went from horror to giggles when his mom sneezed.
Of the two advertisements on the list, one seems completely deserving of top 10 status. Remember the Volkswagen commercial featuring a little kid dressed up as Darth Vader, marching around his house trying to use the Force? It's viral-tasticness earned it the No. 8 spot on the list.
But if you want to play a game of "one of these things is not like the others," it's the other ad on the list that seems questionable. Did people really love that 17-second Kijiji Canada ad in which a guy's stuff gets swooped up so much that it was the fourth most-watched video of the year? I'm guessing that it was placed before YouTube videos, meaning people were forced to watch it as much as they did. There's just no way people voluntarily sought this out in huge numbers.
There were more than 1 trillion playbacks on YouTube this year, or the equivalent of 140 views for every person on the planet. And Canadians are the largest per capita consumers of YouTube on earth. When you love singing kids and jokes and pets as much as we apparently do, it only makes sense.
The year's most popular videos from around the world can be found here.
What was your favourite viral video of 2011?
Dave McGinn