The video-sharing website YouTube enjoyed its tenth anniversary since its launch in 2005 last week. As part of its retrospective look over what has been trending in the past ten years, it published its own top ten list of the content that has been watched the most in the highly lucrative world of video gaming over that period. 'Minecraft' topped the list, with 'Grand Theft Auto' and 'League of Legends' completing the top three places.

The top five games that most interested viewers on the website were as follows:

  1. "Minecraft"

  2. "Grand Theft Auto"

  3. "League of Legends"

  4. "Call of Duty"

  5. "FIFA"

Some of the games featuring highly on the list benefited from an accumulated watchtime effect, resulting from them being part of a franchise or series of games. The fact that "Minecraft" as a single game was still more popular than the total for all of the "FIFA" titles combined, makes the findings even more amazing therefore.

Minecraft's beginnings

The "Minecraft" sandbox construction game was originally created by Markus Persson, a programmer from Sweden, in 2009.

It was developed and published by the company Mojang, who were bought by the giants Microsoft last year for a figure of around $2.5 billion.

Looking at the overall picture, YouTube's analysis considered that gaming was one of the major categories of interest to those using its video services. Fortunately for those logging on to look for content on the site, there is plenty to keep them interested. There are over 42 million Minecraft-related videos alone that are hosted on there.

Spotting trends

Spotting and acting on trends is a crucial part of how sites such as YouTube operate. So they are keen to do the analytics to back up their instincts. Such analysis further suggested that besides topping the gaming list, "Minecraft" was the second most popular term that people searched for on the site overall.

In the past it has been the latest music stars (such as Beyonce) who have figured prominently in the popular searches, but "Minecraft" outstripped them all last year.

YouTube's launch

YouTube was launched in America by three ex- PayPal workers, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim in 2005. Such was its almost immediate impact, that by the end of the following year Google had already stepped in to purchase it for a whopping $1.65 billion and it now operates as a subsidiary of Google itself.