Gaming videos are popular on YouTube. That’s not exactly a stunning revelation, but the numbers the company is boasting for 2018 are nearly unbelievable. 50 billion hours worth of gaming content was viewed in the last year. Some quick math translates that to 5.7 million years worth of trailers, lore breakdowns, and sick Fortnite plays.
Ryan Wyatt, YouTube’s gaming boss, says this is the division’s biggest year yet. “We have 200 million logged-in users watching gaming content every day. We’ve been excited with some of the products we’re rolling up. We crossed a big milestone where we hit 50 billion hours of gaming watch time in the last 12 months.”
In the full interview with VentureBeat, Wyatt also discusses the top 10 gaming videos of the year – those include five Fortnite videos, a pair of Nintendo trailers, the Fallout 76 teaser, Black Ops 4’s multiplayer reveal, and that time some cops tried to play GTA5 without breaking any laws. “From my perspective, a big part of it is that all the videos showed such wide diversity. It’s great gameplay. It’s trailers. It’s a bit of both the creator and the publisher community.”
Despite Fortnite’s massive presence there, it’s still only the second biggest game on YouTube, according to company’s annual rewind feature. We’ve heard some conflicting things about the Minecraft versus Fortnite battle on the video service, but this seems to confirm the block builder is still on top.
YouTube has had something of a rocky relationship with its creators over the past year, especially in regards to monetisation, and Wyatt says the company has “absolutely” addressed those problems. “We had to go through a lot in the last year, and we feel like we’ve come out the other end of that. Creators are monetizing better than they ever have on the platform.” He does add that “we’re still going to keep improving and introducing new options.”
Whether those efforts are enough remains a topic of debate among creators, but there’s no doubt that the platform will continue to be a massive part of the gaming landscape.
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