Trending This Week on YouTube: Taylor Swift and Ice Bucket Fails

August 22, 2014

It was a week like a bucket of ice water to the face. On Spotlight, we made a timeline of the news out of Ferguson, Missouri, logged the most-viewed #icebucketchallenge videos, and toasted the Swedish invasion (with lingonberry juice, naturally).

Here’s what else we watched rapturously:



Taylor Swift - Shake It Off

This week, we were blessed with two late-breaking entries for the “song of the summer” crown from two diametrically opposed pop stars: Taylor Swift and Nicki Minaj. On Monday, Taylor dropped her surprise video–an ode to shaking off your haters featuring a lot of awkward shimmying and perfectly art-directed outfits–and in stunning proof that the girl’s still got it, the video has racked up 26M views and counting. Listen to all the other song of the summer contenders here.



Grady Riley - Ice Bucket Challenge Fail

When alien anthropologists study life on Earth, what will they make of the great celebrity wet T-shirt contest of 2014? We’ve counted over 300 million total views of ice bucket challenge videos, but what’s more, the A.L.S. Foundation announced yesterday that they’ve gotten over $41 million in donations thanks to the super-viral campaign.. While everyone from Oprah and Bill Gates to Kermit and Bieber has taken the plunge, the big trend this week was ice bucket FAIL videos, of which this was the most-watched.



Kruszon1984 - ДТП мотоциклист

The title’s in Russian, but the insanity of this video is universally clear: a dash cam captures a man making an incredible recovery from a motorcycle accident. Though the jury’s out on whether it’s real or not, the suspense is infectious, and in three days, it’s had more than 7 million views. How do you say “holy smokes” in Russian?



Mashable - Simply Genius Shower Thoughts With Nick Offerman

If you’ve ever trolled Reddit, you’ll know that there’s a lot of random wisdom lurking within. Mashable has brought one of the most profound subreddits, ShowerThoughts, to life with this great little video starring Nick Offerman. More, please.

-- Claire Stapleton

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