Minecraft becomes first game to top one trillion views on YouTube
Been around the block.
Minecraft, you probably don't need telling, is popular; it's sold over 238M copies since its launch in 2009 making it the best-selling game of all time, it claims over 140M monthly active users, and was enticing enough for Microsoft to spend an eye-watering $2.5 billion USD acquiring its developer Mojang back in 2014. And now here's another massive figure for the record books: it's officially the first game to surpass one trillion views on YouTube.
To celebrate the immense milestone, YouTube has launched a new website highlighting the creators and videos that helped Minecraft reach 1,000,000,000,000 views over the last decade - a figure that would, as YouTube points out to put it into some kind of perspective, amount to over 30,000 years if each view equated to just one second of time.
It's a fascinating record of Minecraft's YouTube history, shining a spotlight on the videos that have made the biggest impact over the game's lifespan. Nizzotch's Minecraft rollercoaster, for instance, was by far the most popular video back in 2010 - securing 4.03M views that year, putting it far, far ahead of its nearest rival - but that number is positively dwarfed by those seen today, where the most popular Minecraft videos routinely surpass 100M views.
YouTube also shares some interesting facts about the many Minecraft-focused creators on its platform, noting, for instance, that Mojang's game has been particularly welcoming for female creators - including Aphmau, who began uploading videos in 2012 and has now amassed over 11 million subscribers with her episodic story-telling role-play, generating the most views (3.17B in total) of all Minecraft creators.
On a page filled with staggeringly large numbers, however, perhaps the most impressive detail is that, well over a decade into its lifespan, Minecraft's popularity isn't slowly but increasing rapidly. "Believe it or not," says YouTube, "all that energy and output seems to be gaining momentum. As our data shows, it took around eight years for this community to generate 500 billion views, but only another two or so to double that and hit one trillion. What future heights they hit we can only guess at, but as with this milestone, it will be fun to watch it happen."