In the most productive and socially responsible use of Twitter we’ve encountered this week, or possibly ever, a group of Taylor Swift fans – Tayter Tots, as they are called by absolutely nobody – have banded together to try and push the singer’s ‘Shake If Off’ video to a billion views on YouTube.
As MTV News report, director Mark Romanek, the man behind the video, started the #ShakeItOffTo1Billion hashtag, presumably for the lolz, and to see if it would catch on. That it did, blowing up across social media, and even inspiring a rival movement to get ‘Blank Space’ to a billion views. (At this time, there is no such campaign for poor old ‘Style’).
Though this milestone may seem arbitrary and meaningless, in the grand scheme of things … actually, that’s all we’ve got.
FWIW, the ‘Blank Space’ video is currently at just over 718,000,000 views, while ‘Shake It Off’ is sitting at around 704,000,000, putting them at number 15 and 16 respectively in the list of YouTube’s all-time most-watched videos. Psy‘s ‘Gangnam Style’ sits at number one, with just under 2.3 billion views, while Justin Bieber‘s ‘Baby’ is second, with an unreasonably high 1.15 billion.
The rest of the Top 10 is rounded out by the likes of Katy Perry‘s ‘Dark Horse’ and ‘Roar’, LMFAO‘s ‘Party Rock Anthem’, Eminem and Rihanna‘s ‘Love The Way You Lie’, Shakira‘s World Cup song ‘Waka Waka’, J-Lo and Pitbull‘s ‘On The Floor’, Psy‘s inexplicably popular ‘Gentleman’, and, of course, ‘Charlie Bit My Finger.’
However this necessary and vitally important campaign goes, it will probably be more successful than the #TayForHottest100 movement from earlier this year.
Photo: Jason Merritt via Getty Images
