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Minecraft YouTube Videos have been Watched 47bn Times

Adults and kids alike aren't playing Minecraft in their millions. They're watching YouTube videos made using Minecraft and they are getting billions of views.



Octoly, an online video company, has published a report that aims to quantify this. It claims that Minecraft videos were watched 30.8 billion times in June 2014. Only the 183 million views came from Mojang, Mojang's publisher.



It's more than three times the views for videos on Grand Theft Auto, which Octoly believed was the second most popular gaming brand on YouTube with more than 12 billion views, which is ahead of Call of Duty (10.2 billion), Angry Birds (six billion) and Halo (4.8 billion).



According to the company, Minecraft videos have been viewed an additional 16 billion times since June, bringing its total to 47.4 billion views. "In June, our Octoly360 system found 81,000 different YouTube creators discussing Minecraft," explained Octoly. "Today there are nearly twice as many creator channels with Minecraft videos than there were in June," Octoly explained.



Minecraft being so far ahead of rival brands shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who has been following the game and/or the evolution of YouTube over the last few years.



Tubefilter published a chart listing the top 100 YouTube channels in September 2014. It utilized data from analytics firm OpenSlate to reveal that Stampy the channel, which is a kid-friendly Minecraft channel, was the third largest with 189.6 millions views.
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Also popular that month were channels with a heavy or complete Minecraft focus, such as Vegetta (eighth in the world with 164 million views in September) and The Diamond Minecart (10th with 161.8 million views).).



Mojang has been a partner to its YouTube community since the early days of Minecraft and has avoided copyright disputes with video creators and taking a hands-off approach to the content of their videos.



"We have many people who earn a living making videos about Minecraft. The economics of it all how many people make a living off this one IP - is pretty awesome," Mojang's chief operating officer Vu Bui told the Guardian in October.



"That isn't a problem and I would say that it adds value to Minecraft the experience to observe people who are extremely talented doing things. We've essentially outsourced YouTube videos to a global community of millions of people and the content they create is more creative than anything we could create ourselves."



YouTube is a large part of the reason why Minecraft is such a strong, well-loved gaming brand in 2014 - and it's also a notable factor in Microsoft's decision to buy Mojang for $2.5bn this summer.



Microsoft isn't just buying a game that has sold over 54 million copies across console, mobile, and computer platforms. It's also purchasing one of the largest television brands in the world. Despite the fact that the game's massive popularity is online instead of on traditional television.


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