The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge seems tailor-made for the era of social media. As of yesterday, more than 28 million people had either posted, commented on, or “liked” a challenge on Facebook. The phenomenon also has gotten rapid circulation on YouTube: According to analytics startup Tubular Labs, the Ice Bucket Challenge has been viewed 43.5 million times across 24,357 different videos. And it’s showing no signs of slowing down.
Of course, most of the views come from videos of celebrities participating in the fundraiser. These are the most popular challenge videos on YouTube, by number of views (as of Monday afternoon).
1. Bill Gates
2. Robert Downey Jr.
3. Paul Bissonnette
4. Jimmy Fallon (and friends)
5. Triple H
6. Chris Pratt
7. Ronda Rousey
8. Conan O’Brien
9. Vince McMahon
10. Carrie Underwood and Mike Fisher
Bill Gates has a commanding lead on the rest of the group. His video has more shares (16,000), tweets (2,000), and YouTube comments (3,000) than anyone else’s.
Note: These numbers are increasing by the second, and they don’t quite tell the whole story. Many of these celebrity videos have both been posted to YouTube multiple times and also copied and uploaded to other platforms like Facebook and Vine.
Arguably the ALS Association has more important metrics to concern itself with—and those figures have been impressive, too. The group reported today that it received $15.6 million in donations from July 29 to Aug. 18, up from $1.8 million in the same period last year. The contributors include 307,598 new donors to the association.
