'Friday' has had 100 million views to date, with Black currently working on her second single, 'LOL.'
By Gil Kaufman
Rebecca Black in her video for "Friday"
Photo: Ark Music Factory
There was a minute there when Rebecca Black's "Friday" video was, almost literally, inescapable. Whether the success of the viral hit was being covered on such unlikely outlets as CNN or NPR, getting parodied on late-night television, or just bouncing around from Twitter accounts to e-mail in-boxes and music blogs, the tune by the previously unknown 13-year-old had the kind of white-hot media buzz usually reserved for a Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber.
Well, guess what? The little $2,000 pay-to-play ditty-that-could can now claim to have surpassed such major label juggernauts as Bieber and Gaga. According to a Reuters report, the no-budget clip for Black's song has been viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube since it was released on February 10, surpassing the totals for Gaga's "Born This Way" and Bieber's "Pray" videos, based on numbers provided by Visible Measures, a company that tracks the performance of Web videos.
Scratch that. If you count spoofs, other versions and home-brewed takes on the song, it's actually been seen more than 200 million times. Crunching the same numbers for "Born This Way," it has generated 180 million online views, while "Pray" has racked up 65 million.
It doesn't seem as though Gaga minds the competition from the Ark Music Factory product, as she reportedly referred to "Friday" as "genius" recently. Black told us she "freaked out" when she heard the compliment from Mother Monster. "I'm 13 and I never thought Lady Gaga would even know my name. I'm the kind of girl that dances to Lady Gaga with a hairbrush in her room at night," Black told MTV News in late March before she notched her YouTube record.
Black is reportedly at work on her second single, "LOL," though a release date for that song has not yet been announced.
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