Baby Shark YouTube viewsUS public EV charging stations
American public EV chargers and Baby Shark YouTube views, both at numbers a 2015 reader would have called scientifically impossible. The toddler watching for the seven-thousandth time and the Tesla owner plugging in for the fortieth, on the same calendar of impossibility.
Baby Shark crossed one billion YouTube views in 2018 and continued accumulating to over 13 billion by 2022, becoming the most-viewed video on the platform. US public EV charging stations grew from about 16,000 in 2016 to over 60,000 by 2022 as federal infrastructure spending and EV adoption expanded the network. Two completely unrelated infrastructures scaling in the same six years: a children's song's playcount and the country's high-voltage charging footprint. Both are products of a network effect kicking in at roughly the same time. Different pluses.
The 2010s and early 2020s rewarded persistence. The song and the charger both kept adding zeros.
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Want to learn more about why correlations like “Baby Shark YouTube views” vs “US public EV charging stations” don't prove causation? Read our guide to statistical thinking.
