When YouTube released their Top 10 Viewed Videos of 2012, that meant a lot of videos that reached a very high level of engagement were left out of the party.  Last year, I found a handful of videos that also deserved to be mentioned.  YouTube is still hard to navigate when you are trying to narrow down a search properly for this type of list, as I complained about in that very post.  YouTube very much doesn’t want you to know this stuff.  But hey, it’s our secret.  The following videos either didn’t make the cut because they didn’t meet certain criteria or they didn’t collect enough views in time for the Top 10 list.

The Videos That Didn’t Make It: Other Top YouTube Smashes From 2012

I had to weed through 40 pages of a vague search to come up with these.  Some of these videos probably should have made the list.  Some of these would have made the list if they had been released earlier.  We’ve seen some absolutely amazing hits just in the past month alone.  Oh, by the way, “Gangnam Style” got another 90 million views since it hit a billion.  You ever get scared something is too popular?  Anyway, let’s go through the videos that didn’t make the cut:

Dragon Baby (Patrick Bolvin.  24 million views)

Look, if you put a baby in a YouTube video, the chances of it doing well rise exponentially.  If you make that baby fight a baby stuffed dragon with wicked awesome special effects, well, love is guaranteed:

‘My First Hardcore Song’ by 8 yr old Juliet OFFICIAL (thetinaxo.  24 million views)

If you can’t laugh and have fun with this, you are completely empty inside.  This little girl rocks the house and lets out her inner L7 about her dog, fishes, and toys:

Golden Eagle Snatches Kid (MrNuclearCat.  40 million views)

This is a video that would have for certain made the top 10 had it been released earlier.  Released a scant 2 weeks ago, this special effects video blew up and is being credited to three students from Canada’s National Animation and Design Centre:

I CAN SWING MY SWORD! (Minecraft Song) (Tobuscus.  25 million views)

It’s about guaranteed that if you can do something creative with Minecraft you can leverage its popularity to swing a huge hit, as Tobuscus did with this song:

“Minecraft Style” – A Parody of PSY’s Gangnam Style (Music Video) (Captain Sparklez.  40 million views)

Captain Sparklez did double-whammy leveraging with a combination of “Gangnam Style” and Minecraft. We talked about this one a couple of months ago, and it has since blasted off to over 40 million views:

DC SHOES: KEN BLOCK’S GYMKHANA FIVE: ULTIMATE URBAN PLAYGROUND; SAN FRANCISCO (DCshoesFILM.  37 million views).

We wrote about this amazing Ken Block ad for DC Shoes, which has become an annual tradition and gives us awesome footage of things we wish we could do if only we had the skills and a closed course:

Tomorrowland 2012 | official aftermovie (TomorrowlandChannel.  37 million views).

There’s a huge electronic dance music festival in Boom, Belgium and this 20 minute video takes in all the highlights.  I had no idea something like this was so popular:

Extremely Scary Ghost Elevator Prank in Brazil (dogproduction.  55 million views)

Released just over a month ago is this fantastic elevator scare prank, which would have definitely been in the top 10 had it been released earlier.  Unsuspecting passengers have to deal with a creepy girl and her creepy doll…both of which were not on the elevator when they got on:

Extremely Scary Corpse Elevator Prank in Brazil (dogproduction.  12 million views)

Just a week later we got to see the new prank, which raked in a bunch of views on its own:

So Real It’s Scary (LGBlogUK.  17 million views)

While we’re at it, we might as well continue this Halloween elevator madness with this ad from LG (which we talked about here), which made their new TV stand in as the floor of an elevator and got some passengers’ heart racing:

PEOPLE GETTING SCARED!!! (Thomas J. Tom.  25 million views).

Pranksters continue scaring the living daylights out of people with this hodgepodge of tomfoolery:

The Ultimate Girls Fail Compilation 2 (failarmy.  37 million views).

We men sometimes think of women as infallible when it comes to grace and intelligence and basically staying out of dangerous situations.  Oh, how this video proves that thought wrong:

Master Chief vs. Leonidas.  Epic Rap Battles of History Season 2 (ERB.  45 million views)

Either this genuinely didn’t make the cut, or YouTube wanted to make sure they “spread the wealth” because ERB’s “Obama Vs. Romney” was already there and they didn’t want to use three ERB videos.  That’s kind of like not wanting to give someone the Oscar because they’ve won too many, but anyway, Epic Rap Battles had two other videos that could have made the top 10.  Here’s one, pitting Master Chief from Halo and Leonidas from 300:

Mario Bros vs Wright Bros. Epic Rap Battles of History Season 2 (ERB.  40 million views).

ERB combined with Internet sensations Rhett and Link to create this battle between the video game plumbers and the forefathers of flight.  We took a look at this one earlier in the year as well:

The Key of Awesome! : Call Me Maybe PARODY! The Key Of Awesome #58 (barelypolitical.  21 million views).

Barely Political scored another parody hit of a popular song, this time casting the girl as one of those “Fatal Attraction” types:

The Cinnamon Challenge … by GloZell and her Big Behind Earrings (glozell1.  24 million views).

This is YouTube’s bread and butter: people doing things that they shouldn’t and then reacting to it in a hilarious way:

We hope you had a great time in 2012 watching videos…now it’s on to 2013 and hopefully even more fantastic content!