Despite having long been surpassed by Luis Fonsi's global smash hit "Despacito ft. Daddy Yankee" in terms of total views, Adele's record for fastest video release to generate one billion views still stands as of April 2019. Released in October 2015, singer Adele's release "Hello" from her upcoming comeback album “25” racked up 100 million views in the first four days of being uploaded to YouTube and crossed the one billion view mark after 87.4 days.

Viral videos on YouTube

Music videos are among the most popular content on YouTube, regularly drawing huge audiences during highly-anticipated releases of leading artists. When Korean pop band BTS released “Boy with Luv feat. Halsey”, the music video generated 74.6 million views within the first 24 hours of release. This would already be remarkable on its own, but it is also significant because the record for the most streams in the first 24 hours by a music video had just been achieved by fellow K-pop group Blackpink less than a week prior to BTS’ upload. The average number of days for songs to reach one billion views on YouTube varies by year of release. Music videos with a billion or more views released in 2017 only took 171 days to reach that milestone, compared to the 290 days it took a billion-view video released in 2015.