2013 was the first year at IMVDb that we collected lots of data, every day. We decided it might be interesting to look back at 2013 through the numbers that we've been gathering over the past twelve months. So, here is our first annual music videos by the numbers report!

Psy Came Out On Top

Putting together a list of the most viewed music videos in any given year is not as straightforward as you might think. First of all, the list varies by the organization putting it together, based on what their criteria is for what is a music video. Second, we were not able to find any lists that take into account the total views for a video across different versions, something that we consider to be important when comparing view stats. For intance, not counting the unrated version of "Blurred Lines" in addition to the main version robs that total number of almost 29 million views. The numbers below are the sums of whatever number of sources we have, and it makes a difference in the final tally.

Below are the most viewed videos of 2013 based on our numbers and our criteria for selection. Despite being off the cultural radar, Psy managed to come in at number one by an amazing figure of more than 200 million views. The rest of the chart followed the hot topics and trends of 2013: Miley, asking what the fox says, and more. Check out a playlist of the top 50 most popular music videos of 2013 here.

Miley Cyrus Had The Most Views in 2013

Using views as a metric, Miley Cyrus had the biggest year of 2013 with more than 830 million views stretched out over three videos (not even counting her featured spots in videos like "23"). In terms of who got the most out of each video, Psy came in first with more than 614 million views for just one video, "Gentleman". Here are the top 10 artists in 2013, ranked by total views across all the videos they released over the year.

More Than 6,000 Music Videos Were Released in 2013

We have 6,162 music videos in the IMVDb database that were released in 2013. Did we get all of the music videos released in 2013? No, but we got most of them. This number will probably be up to 7k to 8k when all is said and done. Keep in mind that we only list music videos that fall under certain criteria, so lyric videos, live performances, and other misc music-related videos are not listed in the database. 

Monday and Tuesday Were the Most Popular Days to Release Music Videos

In 2013, as the week went on, less and less music videos were released. Weekdays were the most popular days to release a video, but if a video came out on the weekend, it most likely came out on Sunday.

When you look at the average view counts for each video released on each day, videos released on weekends did better in the long term.

13,671 Were Videos Were Added to the Database

In 2013, IMVDb more than doubled the size of the database and added almost 14k music videos to the database. Here is our growth over time:

Music Videos Were Released All Over the World

Where we do have country of production data for music videos, putting that data together paints an image of just how many places are making music videos. As you'd expect, most videos come out of Europe and the United States, but videos are also being released in places like Malaysia and Peru. You can browse the data by country here.

It has been a huge year for growth at IMVDb, and we want to thank everyone who has added data or visited the site for your support. We have much more planned for 2014.

Adam Fairholm is the co-founder and lead developer of IMVDb. You can find him on twitter at @adamfairholm.