The wheels on the bus go round and round... and those wheels have helped British YouTube channel Little Baby Bum overtake One Direction’s biggest hit on the video site’s most-viewed chart.
The channel’s Wheels On The Bus nursery-rhymes compilation was published in August 2014 and has since been watched more than 655m times, making it the 29th most-viewed YouTube video ahead of 1D’s What Makes You Beautiful’s 649m views.
While it’s a long way behind the 2.36bn views of Psy’s Gangnam Style music video, which tops YouTube’s chart, Wheels On The Bus is already snapping at the heels of hits including Avicii’s Wake Me Up, Adele’s Rolling in the Deep and Pharrell Williams’ Happy.
Little Baby Bum was founded in London in 2011 by Derek Holder and his wife, after they found themselves disappointed by the quality of nursery-rhyme videos on YouTube.
“I was a bit stunned by the lack of decent-quality stuff. There were hilarious videos: one was Baa Baa Black Sheep and it was actually a goat,” holder told the Guardian in March 2015.
“In others the sheep was grey or the lyrics were generally wrong. The animation often looked like the animation I grew up on in the 1970s and 80s... We thought why not combine our efforts and have a go? It can’t be worse than what’s on there already.”
Four years on from its launch, Little Baby Bum’s videos have been watched more than 3bn times on YouTube, with some 3m parents subscribing to its channel.
It’s now the second most popular YouTube channel, notching up 385m views in March 2015 alone, behind only another startling success-story aimed at children: toy-unboxing channel Fun Toyz Collector.
Wheels On The Bus was the video that kicked off Little Baby Bum’s growth, after the couple packaged together a number of their videos into a single 54-minute compilation.
“From a parental point of view, we know what a pain it is to keep pressing the ‘play’ button. If you’ve got one video that’s 50 or 60 minutes long, you can just press play and leave your child to watch it while you get something done,” Holder told the Guardian.
Little Baby Bum and Fun Toyz Collector are part of a wider boom in children’s videos being watched on YouTube.
In March, they were joined in the top five channels on Google’s online video service by Russian animation channels Masha and the Bear and Get Movies, with child-friendly Minecraft channels The Diamond Minecart and Stampy also drawing large audiences.
