5 December, 2022
Minecraft is now the most watched video on YouTube, with more than 1 trillion views.
YouTube celebrates the amazing milestone in several fun ways. The animated music video is above and includes references to the history of the game and its creators. There's also this dedicated webpage which gives alarming context about how long 1,000,000,000,000 views actually takes.
It is estimated that each view could be viewed for just one second. However, it would add up to 30,000 years worth of Minecraft views on YouTube. If each view were represented by a 12″x12″ Minecraft block, it would be possible to build a stack that towered over the Earth, all the way to and from the sun, and still have seven million miles left. It's almost impossible to comprehend.
YouTube's website also provides a history of YouTube's most-watched videos and creators, year by year. You can filter it by country. Speedrunning was dominant in 2020, while mini-games were the most popular year of 2013. Youtube also revealed that “in a long-dominated world by male creators,” this was the year of Aphmau, a female creator who is known for her episodic role playing videos. She rose to the top spot on Minecraft's most-watched Youtubers.
YouTube claims Minecraft's popularity is due to its exponential growth. It took eight years for 500 billion views to become popular, and two years to double that to reach 1 trillion. It shouldn't take long for Minecraft to reach 2 trillion views, and it's not hard to imagine how large a block tower this translates into.