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On Temple Run's Billionth Download and Gangnam Style's Two Billionth View

Once you've praised something for reaching "a billion," what more is there to say?
Image: Themeplus/Flickr

In internet time, six million is a day, a billion could be forever, and two billion might as well never have happened.

Today we toast Temple Run for hitting the billion-download mark, long after the hype cycle outran the endless runner. To paraphrase Justin Timberlake playing Sean Parker-as-written-by-Aaron-Sorkin: a million isn't cool, but a billion is. In terms of money, I'd be cool with student loan forgiveness, but in Timberparkin is right: in terms of internet popularity, a million of anything is nothing. Unfortunately, by the time a billion is reached, generally “cool” has moved on.

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The exception to this rule might be "Gangnam Style," which was the first Youtube video to grab a billion views, and it did so while still retaining enough cache to have NFL players doing Psy's pony-strut and, memorably, a fairly sizable cross-demographic at a wedding I attended. But, if you're like me, it has been a while since you thought about Gangnam Style. It's hard to know how to celebrate Gangnam Style's second billionth view. As its beloved most watched video, Youtube rewarded Gangnam Style with another trademark Youtube Easter Egg for the occasion, which is cute, even if it was weird to see Gangnam Style again after all this time.

Image: Youtube Screengrab

Our relationship to games is obviously different than our relationship to super smash semi-novelty songs. In those cumulative snatches of a minute or two on the subway, or potentially in sustained fits of procrastination, people have logged 32 billion games of Temple Run, which the company said added up to 216,018 years of game-play and 50 trillion meters of baboon fleeing fun, according to the game's developer Imangi Studios. I take personal pride in knowing that approximately a thousand of those games were my doing, as well as 10-15 of the meters. I am bad at Temple Run.

People haven't really moved on, but the hype cycle has, if ever if focused on Temple Run. In the hype cycle's defense, though, there's just not that much to say about Temple Run as a game, other than to focus on its success, its simplicity, and its sort of exceptional player stats: Temple Run 2 got more than 20 million downloads in its first four days in the App store back in January 2013. Sixty percent of its players are female, and its most popular market is China, followed by America. It's not Angry Birds.

Thing about cool is, it's based on a certain amount of being in the know, which means that there's people outside of the know. And it's hard to feel in the know once a billion people are savvy to something, that's pretty diluted. Perhaps this is the irony. While a billion is cooler than a million, maybe a few dozen is even cooler. All depends on how many microtransactions you can get, I guess.