Justin Bieber — Baby ft. Ludacris (2010)

Justin Bieber is the first genuinely platform-native popstar. Scooter Braun found him in 2007 by accident, clicking the wrong video while browsing YouTube and landing on a Stratford, Ontario boy singing Ne-Yo covers filmed by his mother for relatives. There was no showcase, no label scout, no talent competition. The discovery mechanism was the recommendation sidebar, which had never produced a global star before.

Baby, released on 19 February 2010, was the vehicle. The video is a shopping-mall bowling-alley set piece with a Ludacris verse, engineered precisely for a young audience that lived on YouTube rather than radio. It took the most-viewed video record from Evolution of Dance's successors and held it from July 2010 until Gangnam Style overtook it in November 2012 — the last time a Western pop single would hold that title alone.

The other record is the interesting one. Baby became the most-disliked video on YouTube and stayed there for years, accumulating dislikes at a pace that had no precedent. The dislikes were organised: forums, imageboards and comment sections ran explicit campaigns, and disliking Baby became a low-cost identity signal for anyone wanting to declare they were not the target audience. It was the first time the internet demonstrated, at scale, that it could coordinate contempt as a group activity — a behaviour pattern that would define the following fifteen years of online culture.

That backlash was inseparable from the fandom. Beliebers organised with equal intensity, mass-streaming releases, coordinating trending topics and defending Bieber across every platform, and in doing so wrote the operating manual that K-pop fandoms later industrialised. The dislike war and the stan war were the same phenomenon viewed from two directions, and both were rehearsals for the mechanics of modern online mobilisation.

YouTube removed public dislike counts in 2021, partly citing exactly this dynamic. Baby's climb from 500 million views in 2011 to 3.1 billion in 2026 — a 6.2x expansion — has long since detached from the controversy; most of its current traffic is nostalgia from an audience that was twelve when it landed and is now in its late twenties.