If you played Adele’s video for “Hello” over and over again when it first came out, you certainly weren’t the only one. According to a new YouTube trend report, the melancholy music video was played an average of over one million times per hour within the first two days of its release.
Over the course of those 48 hours — beginning at approximately 12 a.m. PT Friday, October 23 — the video was viewed 50 million times. That makes it the biggest debut of any video on YouTube in 2015 and one of the most-watched music video debuts of all time.
“Adele Hello” was YouTube’s top search on October 23 and 24, and managed to rack up as many as 1.6 million views in a single hour. By comparison, the full trailer for Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakenspeaked at 1.2 million views per hour.
“Hello” also set the record for the most U.S. downloads sold in a week, with 1.11 million, according to Nielsen Music. It debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
According to Billboard, the song also joins Elton John’s Princess Diana tribute “Candle in the Wind” as the only other song to sell at least one million copies over a seven-day span. Elton’s song sold 3.4 million copies in its first week of release back in 1997.
