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'Minecraft' becomes first video game to get a trillion views on YouTube
That’s a lot of blocks.
“Trillion” is just a ridiculous-sounding number, a figure so huge that it’s usually thrown around only in serious news articles about market caps or the national debt. But if you’re looking for a real-world use of the T-word that’s way more fun, block out space in your head for Minecraft — because it’s just become the first-ever video game to build its popularity, block by block, all the way to a trillion views on YouTube.
That’s according not to main Minecraft publisher Mojang Studios, but to YouTube itself, which this week commemorated the game’s meteoric viewer count with its own blog post marking the enormous 13-figure milestone. The video host, no doubt stoked to owe so many clicks to a game about building things from scratch, also served up a congratulatory clip that’s aptly backdropped by a repurposed version of Starship’s 1980s anthem “We Built This City.”
Check it out:
How do you begin to grasp a number that big? In its blog post, YouTube had a go at putting the Minecraft creative ecosystem’s online success story into relatable perspective.
“If each of those one trillion views were just one second long, that would add up to over 30,000 years. If each view were a Minecraft block 12 inches square, you could build a stack that reached from the Earth to the sun and back — with about seven million miles to spare,” the streamer calculated. “That’s how big one trillion views is.”
In order to arrive at the magic 1 trillion figure, YouTube said its Minecraft number-crunchers scoped out “all 12 years’ worth of daily uploads and views from tens of thousands of creators and millions of viewers,” meaning that the tally includes not only official Minecraft clips, but the legion of fans who’ve shown off their own inspired constructions over the years.
For longtime fans, there’s even a nifty calculator to help stack up your own video contributions to the 1 trillion total. Just plug in an estimated number of all the YouTube clips you’ve probably viewed over the lengthy course of your productive Minecraft career, and the embedded app will spit out your percentage. But unless you’re an absolute Minecraft mega-fan, just don’t expect your watch total to look impressive: We input our own estimated video view-count of 1,000 — only to learn that’s a mere 0.000000001 percent.
Looks like it’s time to get those numbers up. In the meantime, spelunk your way into the new Caves & Cliffs update, the latest Minecraft expansion that’s sure to set one of history’s most popular video games on the enviable path toward another trillion views.
