BLACKPINK's 'Ice Cream' hits 1 billion YouTube views

BLACKPINK's "Ice Cream" with Selena Gomez crossed 1 billion YouTube views on April 15 at about 4:12 p.m. KST, with YG Entertainment confirming the milestone through Yonhap and Billboard separately matching the billion-view jump the same day. The mark arrived five years, seven months, and 18 days after the video first premiered on August 28, 2020, a timeline that shows just how durable BLACKPINK's catalog remains in the platform era. For a group already operating at absurd scale on YouTube, this is less a surprise than another proof point. "Ice Cream" was always a polarizing pop swing, but it kept streaming, kept pulling casual viewers, and kept feeding the crossover chemistry that made the Selena Gomez feature matter globally. In 2026, with BLACKPINK already back in the headlines for the DEADLINE era, the billion-view jump lands like a reminder that the group's older hits still move like current events.

According to Yonhap's agency-cited report, "Ice Cream" became BLACKPINK's 10th billion-view video overall, extending the group's lead as the K-pop act with the deepest billion-view catalog on YouTube. Billboard counted the clip as the group's eighth video to reach the milestone, while Korean fan-facing tallies often isolate official BLACKPINK group music videos only. That is why coverage can land on different totals without actually conflicting on the core fact. Either way, the bigger takeaway is not just one more round number. It is how BLACKPINK keeps turning older video assets into current traffic.

That distinction matters because BLACKPINK's solo clips and performance-heavy side releases have inflated the broader total, but the core group-video count still tells the cleaner story for fans tracking the quartet's shared catalog. Either way, the headline is the same. BLACKPINK and Selena Gomez built a collaboration that outlived the usual feature-cycle hype and kept compounding views long after release week. As reported by Billboard's milestone write-up, that cross-market confirmation matters because it shows the song still reads as relevant in both catalogs. If you need more proof that BLACKPINK's visual catalog is one of K-pop's most durable traffic engines, this is it. We already saw the group's larger global muscle in our coverage of BLACKPINK's Billboard Hot 100 record, and this new YouTube mark fits that same pattern of long-tail dominance.

Why the Ice Cream milestone still matters in 2026

"Ice Cream" reached No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2020 and remains one of BLACKPINK's most recognizable English-heavy crossover singles, as reported by Billboard. According to Billboard's chart context, the collaboration still reads as one of the clearest early bridges between BLACKPINK's YouTube scale and US pop-radio visibility. That chart peak gave the track instant visibility, but the billion-view jump says something bigger about staying power. Plenty of K-pop collaborations spike early and fade once fandom goals move on. "Ice Cream" did not. The video kept pulling viewers because it sat at the intersection of BLACKPINK's visual precision, Selena Gomez's pop reach, and an era when YouTube still functioned as the clearest scoreboard for global fandom size. It also helps that the video is unmistakable. The pastel sets, toy-box styling, and candy-colored absurdity are not subtle, but that is exactly why the clip remains easy to revisit and easy for casual listeners to remember.

BLACKPINK's YouTube machine is still unmatched

Billboard confirmed that "Ice Cream" now sits alongside BLACKPINK staples like "Pink Venom" and "DDU-DU DDU-DU" in the group's billion-view tier, while Yonhap's agency-cited total shows how much deeper the broader catalog has become. That list is ridiculous on its own. It also explains why BLACKPINK keeps resetting the standard for what K-pop scale looks like on video platforms. This is not just about one hit getting lucky in the algorithm. It is a repeatable catalog pattern, and it strengthens the case laid out in our BLACKPINK DEADLINE breakdown that the group has turned every era into a long-tail asset. Fan reaction across Reddit and X has been exactly what you would expect, equal parts celebration, scoreboard posting, and another round of debate about where "Ice Cream" ranks in the group's discography. We will be honest. It may never be every Blink's favorite BLACKPINK single, but a billion views is a brutal way to win the argument that the song stuck.

What this means for Selena Gomez and the crossover legacy

For Selena Gomez, Billboard noted that "Ice Cream" is her fourth video to cross 1 billion views, which keeps the collaboration relevant inside her own catalog and not just BLACKPINK's. That matters because the song worked as more than a one-way K-pop expansion play. It gave BLACKPINK a bigger English-language pop bridge at a crucial moment before The Album fully arrived, and it gave Gomez one of the more visually distinct collaborations in her video history. In hindsight, "Ice Cream" looks less like a novelty feature and more like an early blueprint for how K-pop and US pop could share space without flattening each other. Billboard's framing also confirms that the milestone carries weight beyond K-pop-specific coverage. The song was playful, divisive, hyper-commercial, and very online. That was the point. Five years later, the view count says the formula held.