The short answer: the viral internet moments that built today’s web ran roughly from 2004 to 2015. Numa Numa showed a webcam clip could reach millions before YouTube existed. Rickrolling turned a link into a joke. Charlie Bit My Finger made home video a mass medium. Gangnam Style created the billion-view club, the Harlem Shake changed how Billboard counts hits, Ellen’s Oscars selfie set a retweet record, and The Dress split the planet over a photo. Each one changed a platform, a chart or a habit.
This guide covers those moments in the order they happened. For each one you get what it was, the date, why it spread, what it changed, and where it stands now. Every date and figure names its source. Where sources disagree, we say so.
The Timeline at a Glance
| Year | Moment | Where it spread | What it changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2004 | Numa Numa Dance | Newgrounds | Proved a webcam clip could go global without TV |
| 2005 | “Me at the zoo” | YouTube | The first YouTube upload; the platform’s starting point |
| 2007 | Rickrolling | 4chan, then YouTube | Made a hyperlink itself the joke |
| 2007 | Charlie Bit My Finger | YouTube | Made family video a mass-audience format |
| 2012 | Gangnam Style | YouTube | First video to 1 billion views |
| 2013 | Harlem Shake | YouTube | Pushed YouTube views into the Billboard Hot 100 |
| 2014 | Ellen’s Oscars selfie | Set the retweet record and briefly disrupted the service | |
| 2014 | Ice Bucket Challenge | Facebook, YouTube | Turned nomination into a fundraising engine |
| 2015 | The Dress | Tumblr, then everywhere | Showed a single image could become a science question |
2004 to 2005: Viral Video Before YouTube Had an Audience
The Numa Numa Dance went up on Newgrounds on December 6, 2004, according to the Newgrounds community wiki and Wikipedia’s entry on the video. It is a webcam lip-sync to O-Zone’s “Dragostea din tei,” and Newgrounds put it on its front page within the week. At that point YouTube did not exist yet, so a Flash portal was the natural home for it.
Its reach is also the first lesson in reading viral numbers. A 2006 BBC report ranked it the second most-watched viral video of all time with 700 million views, but that figure came from page impressions gathered by the marketing firm The Viral Factory, not from a single view counter. Newgrounds’ own counter showed about 15.7 million views by December 2011, per the same Wikipedia entry. Both numbers are “real.” They measure different things.
A few months later, on April 23, 2005, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded “Me at the zoo,” the date shown on the video’s own YouTube page. It is a few seconds of footage in front of the elephants and unremarkable on purpose. It matters because nearly every moment after it on this list happened on the platform it launched.
2007: Rickrolling and Charlie Bit My Finger
Rickrolling: the link is the joke
Rickrolling grew out of an older 4chan bait-and-switch called “duckrolling.” The Rick Astley version is generally dated to May 15, 2007, when a 4chan user posted a YouTube link to the 1987 “Never Gonna Give You Up” video disguised as the hotly anticipated Grand Theft Auto IV trailer. Know Your Meme and Wikipedia both give May 15; at least one meme-history site places the upload in February 2007, so treat the exact day with some caution.
Why it spread: the format needed no skill. Anyone could disguise a link, and anyone who fell for it immediately wanted to do it to someone else. The mainstream moment came on April Fools’ Day 2008, when every featured video on YouTube’s front page linked to the song.
Where it stands now: still running. Rickrolling is one of the very few 2007 memes that never really went away.
Charlie Bit My Finger: family video goes mass
“Charlie Bit My Finger” was uploaded on May 22, 2007. It is 56 seconds of two young brothers in England, one biting the other’s finger. There was no editing, no joke structure and no creator ambition behind it.
It spread because it was universal. Anyone with a sibling recognized it, and it was short enough to send around the office. By 2012, The Next Web reported it as the first user-generated viral video to pass 500 million YouTube views, and it was widely described as YouTube’s most-viewed video for roughly 2009 to 2012.
Where it stands now: in May 2021 the family sold the clip as an NFT for roughly $760,000, as reported by NPR and CBS News (NPR gave $760,999; the CBS headline rounded it). The video was taken off public view on YouTube as part of that sale, which made it one of the first famous clips to leave the site on purpose.
2012: Gangnam Style and the Billion-View Club
PSY’s “Gangnam Style” was posted to YouTube on July 15, 2012. On December 21, 2012, it became the first video ever to reach one billion views, as YouTube’s own blog announced that day (we read the post on September 23, 2026). The same post, written by YouTube’s culture and trends lead Kevin Allocca, reported that the video had passed one million views in close to 75 countries and that “Gangnam Style” was YouTube’s top rising search of 2012.
Why it spread comes down to a dance anyone could copy, a chorus that worked in any language, and a flood of parody and tribute videos that fed the original. Our full breakdown of why Gangnam Style became so popular walks through each factor in detail.
The counter story, told correctly
In early December 2014, YouTube said in a Google+ post that the video had passed 2,147,483,647 views, the largest number a signed 32-bit integer can hold, and that it had moved the counter to 64 bits. CBS News and TechCrunch covered the post at the time, and Guinness World Records lists it as the first YouTube video to require a 64-bit counter.
The popular version says Gangnam Style “broke YouTube.” It did not. Google told The Verge it had seen the limit coming months earlier and updated its systems in advance, as CBS News reported. The post was a joke about a fix already made, not an emergency.
2013: The Harlem Shake Changed the Charts
The Harlem Shake meme took off in early February 2013: a 30-second clip where one person dances alone, the beat drops, and a whole room suddenly erupts in costumes and chaos. The song underneath, Baauer’s “Harlem Shake,” had been released in 2012 and had sold very little until the videos started.
What made the format spread was the template. Every group could make its own version in an afternoon, and offices, sports teams and school clubs all did. The copies, not the original, drove the numbers.
The lasting change was on the charts. In February 2013, Billboard and Nielsen began counting U.S. YouTube views toward the Hot 100, and in that first revised chart the song debuted at No. 1. Billboard’s chart report from February 2013 credited it with 103 million YouTube views and 262,000 downloads tracked by Nielsen SoundScan. Critics at the time, including Slate, pointed out that many of those views came from fan videos that had little to do with the song itself.
Around the same time, short looping video was finding its own home. Vine had launched in January 2013 and built its culture around six-second clips until Twitter announced in October 2016 that it would shut the app down. The full arc is in our history of Vine’s shutdown, archive and revival.
2014: The Selfie, the Bird and the Bucket
Ellen’s Oscars selfie
During the Academy Awards broadcast on March 2, 2014, host Ellen DeGeneres posted a group selfie with a crowd of film stars. NPR and CNBC reported the next day that it passed 2 million retweets in roughly two hours and beat the previous record, a 2012 election-night photo. Twitter apologized for a service disruption of about 20 minutes during the rush, according to CBS News coverage that night.
Where it stands now: the record fell. Guinness World Records confirmed on May 9, 2017, that a teenager’s tweet asking Wendy’s for a year of free chicken nuggets had passed it, counting 3,430,500 retweets against the selfie’s 3,430,249.
Flappy Bird’s sudden exit
In early 2014 the simple tap-to-fly game Flappy Bird topped the app charts, and then its developer pulled it from the stores in February 2014. The removal made it more famous, not less. Our account of how Flappy Bird was pulled and what followed covers the dates and the copycat wave.
The Ice Bucket Challenge
In summer 2014, people filmed themselves pouring ice water over their heads, nominated three friends, and encouraged donations to ALS charities. The nomination mechanic did the spreading: every video recruited the next three. The ALS Association publishes its own account of what the money funded, and that is the best place to read about the results.
2015: The Dress
In late February 2015, a photo of a striped dress posted on Tumblr split viewers into two camps: blue and black, or white and gold. The dress was in fact blue and black, as the retailer confirmed. What made it spread was that there was no way to settle the argument by looking harder. Your eyes simply disagreed with your friend’s eyes.
It is also one of the few viral moments that turned into published research. Vision scientists studied it directly, including a set of papers in the journal Current Biology in 2015, which explored how assumptions about lighting shape the colors people perceive.
Viral Internet Moments Explained: Why These Ones Spread
Looking across the whole timeline, the moments that lasted share four traits:
- A copyable format. Numa Numa, the Harlem Shake and the Ice Bucket Challenge were templates. Imitation multiplied them.
- Low effort to join. Sharing a Rickroll link or a retweet took seconds.
- An argument or a reaction. The Dress and Charlie Bit My Finger gave people something to say, not just something to watch.
- A platform that rewarded sharing. Each moment rode a feature: the Newgrounds front page, YouTube’s featured slots, the retweet button, the Tumblr reblog.
The fourth point is the one most lists skip. None of these moments spread in a vacuum. Several of the platforms that carried them have since shrunk or closed, and our guide to the old web platforms that shaped the internet, then vanished covers them one by one.
How to Read a Viral Record Claim
This is where most “most viral ever” lists go wrong, so it is worth a section of its own.
- Ask what was counted. The 700 million Numa Numa figure counted page impressions across sites. A YouTube view count is a single platform’s own number.
- Ask when it was counted. A record figure is only true on the date it was measured. The Ellen selfie led for three years, then lost.
- Ask who counted. YouTube, Twitter, Billboard, Nielsen and Guinness World Records each measured differently, and a Guinness record is only as current as its last check.
- Watch for dramatized versions. “Broke YouTube” and “crashed Twitter” both describe real events in stronger words than the companies used.
We cannot verify current live view counts for every video on this list, so this guide does not quote them. The dated figures above are the ones a named source recorded at the time.
Frequently Asked Questions
What was the first viral internet video?
There is no single agreed answer, because “viral” was not measured consistently before YouTube. The Numa Numa Dance from December 2004 is one of the earliest with documented reach, and older clips circulated by email before it.
What was the first YouTube video to reach one billion views?
PSY’s “Gangnam Style,” on December 21, 2012, according to YouTube’s official blog post published that day.
Did Gangnam Style really break YouTube’s view counter?
Not in the sense of a crash. In December 2014 YouTube said the video had passed the signed 32-bit limit of 2,147,483,647 views and that the counter now used 64 bits. Google told The Verge it had prepared for this months in advance.
How did the Harlem Shake change music charts?
In February 2013, Billboard and Nielsen started counting U.S. YouTube views toward the Hot 100. The Harlem Shake debuted at No. 1 on that first revised chart, with 103 million YouTube views, according to Billboard.
Is rickrolling still a thing?
Yes. It began on 4chan in 2007 and reached the mainstream when YouTube rickrolled its own front page on April Fools’ Day 2008. It is still used today, which makes it one of the longest-lived memes of its era.
