Minecraft passes 1 trillion views on YouTube

Minecraft is now officially the most-watched game on YouTube with over 1 trillion views on the platform.

YouTube is celebrating the mind-boggling milestone in a couple of fun ways. There's the animated music video above, packed with references to the game's history and popular creators over the years, and then there's this dedicated webpage that gives some alarming context as to how much time 1,000,000,000,000 views really amounts to.

Apparently, if each view were just one second long - and realistically, the average view is certainly much more than that - it adds up to 30,000 years of Minecraft views on YouTube. Likewise, if each view was represented by a 12" x 12" Minecraft block, you could build a stack that towered up from the Earth all the way to the sun and back - and still have about seven million miles to spare. It's nearly incomprehensible.

YouTube's webpage also gives a historical breakdown of the game's most popular trends, videos, and creators year by year, and you can filter it by region. For example, 2013 was the year of mini-games and mods, while speedrunning dominated 2020. Youtube also reveals that, "in a world long dominated by male creators," this year saw the rise of female creator Aphmau, known for her episodic role-playing videos, to the number one spot of Minecraft's most-watched YouTubers.

YouTube says Minecraft's popularity on the platform is one of exponential growth, taking eight years to reach 500 billion views, and just two more years to double that and reach 1 trillion. By that reasoning, it shouldn't be long before it hits 2 trillion, and we don't even want to think about how big a block tower that translates to.