Minecraft videos top the YouTube charts with billions of views
Children and adults alike aren't just playing Minecraft in their millions: they're watching YouTube videos made using the blocky-looking game - and those videos are racking up billions of views.
Children and adults alike aren't just playing Minecraft in their millions: they're watching YouTube videos made using the blocky-looking game - and those videos are racking up billions of views.
Now online video firm Octoly has published a report aiming to quantify that, claiming that by June, Minecraft videos had been watched 30.8 billion times, with only 183 million of those views coming from the channel of Mojang, the game's publisher.
That's nearly three times the total views for videos about Grand Theft Auto, which Octoly estimated was the second most popular gaming brand on YouTube with nearly 12 billion views, ahead of Call of Duty (10.2 billion), Angry Birds (six billion) and Halo (4.8 billion).
The company claims that since June, Minecraft videos have been watched another 16 billion times, taking its total to 47 billion views. "In June, our Octoly360 system found 81,000 separate YouTube creators talking about Minecraft," explained Octoly. "Today there are 147,000 creator channels with Minecraft videos, almost double."
Minecraft being so far ahead of rival brands will not come as a surprise to anyone who's been following the game and/or the evolution of YouTube over the last couple of years.
In a chart of the top 100 YouTube channels in September 2014 published by industry site Tubefilter, using data from analytics firm OpenSlate, child-friendly Minecraft channel Stampy was the third biggest channel in the world with 189.6 million views that month.