This year's Video Music Awards was MTV's most successful thing ever

Beyoncé's baby is already working his or her magic! (We're all hoping for "her," right?) While the celebrity spawn has yet to even leave the womb, it has already been at the center of the spectacle known as the 2011 Video Music Awards, which, it turns out, happened to be the most-watched thing MTV's ever done, ever.

Ever! The broadcast drew in a record-setting, history-making, Jo Calderone-despiting 12.4 million viewers. To help put that in perspective, here are some notable moments from MTV's thirty-year history that were seen by fewer 12.4 million people, if any at all:

• Singled Out

• That one episode of Real World: Seattle where the black guy slaps the white girl with Lyme Disease in the face

• Kurt Loder

• All those Korn videos on Total Request Live

• Jersey Shore

• The first VJ competition where the ignoble Jesse Camp defeated that nice-looking guy whose name no one remembers

• Spring Break Cancun '97

• Dave Holmes! His name was Dave Holmes

• Everything else, ever

So there you have it: definitive proof that MTV is more relevant now than it used to be when it wasn't really that relevant in the first place.