Daily archive

You are shown a music video and its view count. A second video arrives without one, and you say whether it has more views or fewer. Get it right and that video becomes the known one. Get it wrong and the run ends.

Eleven videos make ten calls, and ten out of ten is a perfect day. Everybody gets the same eleven in the same order, worked out from the date.

The numbers are live

View counts are read from the YouTube Data API when the puzzle loads, not stored in the game. So they are the real current figures, and they move. A video you narrowly called yesterday may have passed the one you compared it against.

The pool is 157 hand-picked music videos, deliberately mixing all-time monsters with merely enormous ones. If every pair were Despacito against an album track the game would be trivial, so the list is built to keep comparisons close.

What people get wrong

• Chart success is not view count. A song can be everywhere on radio and stream well while its video does modest numbers. What you are ranking is the video, and the video is a different product.
• Age beats popularity more often than you expect. A 2012 video has had over a decade to accumulate. A huge 2023 release is often still behind something you had half-forgotten.
• Watch for kids and karaoke. Nursery-rhyme-adjacent and endlessly-replayed videos accumulate views in a way that has nothing to do with whether anybody rates the song.
• The gap between one and two billion is enormous. Once you are in that range, small differences in your intuition are worth hundreds of millions of views. Anchor on the number you can see rather than on your sense of scale.

Streaks

Your streak counts consecutive days played and lives in your own browser rather than on an account. Miss a day and it resets. Clear your site data and it goes too, which is the trade for not making you sign up for anything.

The other four dailies

This is one of five. Artistle is the guess-the-artist game, Medley is Connections for songs, Before or After asks which of two songs came out first, and Daily Blind Ranking makes you rank ten artists without knowing who is coming. Missed one? The archive goes back to each game's launch.