Gangnam Style YouTube views

Gangnam Style YouTube views and U.S. legal sports betting revenue have, between 2018 and 2023, risen together at a correlation of 0.981. A 2012 music video with no new business model accumulating views, and an entirely new American industry measured in billions of dollars arriving almost overnight. Both, in their own slow and fast ways, are parlays.

Gangnam Style views climbed from about 3.1 billion in 2018 to over 4.9 billion by 2023, still accumulating more than a decade after release because YouTube's long-tail recommender does not know the song has already peaked. U.S. legal sports betting revenue exploded from roughly $400 million in 2018 to over $10.9 billion by 2023 after the Supreme Court struck down PASPA and state after state legalised. The confound here is simply time — any two monotonically increasing series will correlate almost perfectly — but it is also the internet as infrastructure, quietly delivering nostalgia and bet slips through the same pipe.

Six years of two lines rising together can describe a decade measured in view counts and wagers. The video and the parlay both live in the phone.