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Psy's 'Gentleman' knocks 'Gangnam Style' to No. 2 on YouTube charts

One hundred million views on YouTube: What took "Gangnam Style" two months to rack up, "Gentleman" did in four days.South Korean rapper Psy's music video "Gentleman" has hopped to the top of the YouTube charts a week after its release, breaking all kinds of records along the way.A week in, the video's already been watched 200 million times. The day it was released, the video was watched 38 million
South Korean rapper Psy performs \"Gentleman\" during his concert \"Happening\" in Seoul April 13, 2013. Psy performed his new song \"Gentleman\" in public ...
Psy performed his new song \"Gentleman\" in public for the first time on Saturday at a concert at Seoul's World Cup stadium on April 13.Today

One hundred million views on YouTube: What took "Gangnam Style" two months to rack up, "Gentleman" did in four days.

South Korean rapper Psy's music video "Gentleman" has hopped to the top of the YouTube charts a week after its release, breaking all kinds of records along the way.

A week in, the video's already been watched 200 million times. The day it was released, the video was watched 38 million times around the globe, the most single-day views for any YouTube video ever, writes Kevin Allocca on the YouTube official blog. The previous single-day view record holder was the the controversial Kony 2012 video, which got 30 million views in 24 hours.

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Over the week "Gentleman" rose to top spot on the YouTube charts, knocking Psy's other hit to second place. (That's in spite of being banned by a South Korean broadcaster for abuse of public property, for a sequence in the video in which Psy kicks a traffic cone out of his way.)

Old favorite Gangnam Style was the first video to ever hit a billion views on YouTube, and chart watchers predicted at the time that it would be a while before anyone, Bieber's "Baby" included, would ever touch that record.

With the head start Gentleman has, perhaps those chart watchers will be proven wrong.

Nidhi Subbaraman writes about technology and science. Follow her on Twitter and Google+.