YouTube's most popular gaming videos are not what you expected
Gaming is one of YouTube's most lucrative categories, but the top-watched videos are not what we were expecting.
Let's Play videos have made a millionaire of PewDiePie and provide a very decent living for countless other gamers, so you'd expect these kinds of videos to be among the most popular gaming content on Youtube, right?
Wrong. According to a list of the most watched gaming-related YouTube videos, as compiled by Redditor minimaxir, the most popular gaming video in YouTube's history is Cars 2 HD Gameplay Compilation, with over 188 million views:
The official Minecraft trailer is in second place, with a trio of Angry Birds videos following behind, each with over 100 million views.
Given how familiar the Angry Birds and Minecraft brands are, these inclusions make a lot of sense. But what about this weird Cars 2 phenomenon, or Just Dance Kids 2 The Gummy Bear Song (Wii Rip), with nearly 50 million views?
Gaming sleuth Superannuation brought this matter up on Twitter recently and got a pretty reasonable-sounding explanation from Randy Greenback:
Greenback even dug up a couple of other examples of hugely popular non-gaming related YouTube videos whose views are almost certainly derived from the decadent west's favourite babysitter, Mr iPad.
It's likely something similar is responsible for other weird heavy hitters on the list, too. Although I was pleased to see good old Leeroy Jenkins made it in there.
Minimaxir says the list, which was compiled with a couple of tools and pulled from YouTube's API, may not be perfectly accurate, but if you hop over to popular gaming channels and compare views with these juggernauts it sure looks like they're ahead of the game.