“10 years of Mining and Crafting!”
Minecraft. At some point in your life, you’ve probably heard of the popular sandbox game that has enamored the world for over a decade. Whether you grew up playing the game, or heard of others playing it, its influence is far spread. If you’re unfamiliar with Minecraft, it is a blocky open-world game that provides endless degrees of possibilities, typically marketed towards children. While the base game has the end goal of defeating the colossal Ender Dragon, hundreds of thousands of mods, or unofficial additions made to the game typically created by fans.
There are some people who make money by playing this game. These people are known as content creators and they use either streaming sites or media creation sites, such as Twitch or Youtube. There are literally hundreds of millions of people who play Minecraft. Even with a huge player base, becoming famous for making videos or streaming Minecraft is no easy task. However, there are some names that have made it to the top that you may be familiar with. Back then, there was CaptainSparklez, The Syndicate Project and Yogscast. More recently, GeorgeNotFound, TommyInnit, and, the topic of today’s post, Dream.
“Nice to meet you!”
If you’re familiar with the content creators and streamers of Minecraft, then you know who Dream is. Dream has not disclosed any personal information aside from his first name, Clay. Dream is an extremely popular Minecraft Youtuber with almost 30 Million subscribers. He is well known for his Minecraft challenge videos, the server he hosts, and most of all, his manhunt videos. His manhunt videos are a special type of challenge. While trying to speedrun Minecraft, his friends try to thwart his progress and kill him. This makes for epic gameplay and peak suspension, as you will never know what happens next! There are videos of him with up to 5 hunters all trying to kill him as he races to beat the game. People are captivated by his skill and finesse. Each of his videos rack up tens of millions of views, generating a tremendous amount of ad revenue. Dream wasn’t always this popular in the Minecraft community. Like all great minds, he had to start somewhere.
The first of Dream’s achievements began with none other than Pewdiepie. Pewdiepie was uploading Minecraft content and people wanted to know the world seed to replicate the world. Deciphering the world seed is an extremely difficult task without much information. However, Dream, with a team of other people, were able to discover the seed with only a few sets of coordinates. This is akin to solving an incomplete jigsaw puzzle. He uploaded a video obtaining the world seed and this is where the traction began. In addition to speedrunning and being an extremely skilled player, he started to incorporate his own personality to his videos. People enjoy his content, his achievements, and his personality. Yet, this alone was not enough to catapult his fame to where he is today.
“4815162342 lines of code!”
The Youtube algorithm played a tremendous role in Dream’s rise to fame. The Youtube algorithm is how videos are recommended to your feed. Without manipulating the algorithm, Dream would never have gained almost 30 million subscribers in the span of two years. Dream read over 200 books worth of information and used it to his advantage. While content creation, personality, and video games are something you don’t associate with discrete mathematics and algorithms, Dream combined these two separate fields to create the product of his Youtube channel. This style of thinking is known as collecting. While Dream isn’t the first to crack the Youtube algorithm, the methods he used to abuse it are creative.
The Youtube algorithm picks up on keywords said throughout the video. These are evidenced by the automatic closed captioning on videos. In Dream’s videos, he makes sure to say out loud at the start the topic of the video, as well as trending words like “Minecraft” or “challenge.” This makes the algorithm flag the video as these tags, making his videos more likely to be found via searching or recommended directly to people who like similar videos. One example of divergent thinking is hiding some of these keywords in the source code of his video, even if the video had nothing to do with these keywords. For example, if the trending videos at the time were “thousand degree knife,” he would hide the keywords “thousand,” “degree,” and “knife,” in the video’s tags so that the algorithm is more likely to flag his videos as trending. Instead of more popular trends, He would incorporate more Minecraft trends at the time, such as “Minecraft but lava rises every second.”
“Finally complete!”
At the time of this blog post, Dream is currently at 28.5 Million subscribers on Youtube. He will continue growing as a testament to his skill as both a player and as a content creator. There’s much more behind the scenes to content creation than you’d think. Some people’s successes were lucky and blessed by Youtube’s algorithm. Dream was cunning, deciphering it and creatively using it to his advantage.
“Look mum, I’m in a splash!”
The title of these sections were references to Splashes, randomized yellow text whenever you start up Minecraft. Thanks for reading!
Great post! I found the collecting aspect of Dream´s work especially interesting. Reading 200 books to help manipulate the YouTube algorithm is no easy task, but it again gives testimony to the benefit of reading as a source of knowledge and using that to create one's own success. Very cool stuff.
ReplyDeleteThis is awesome! I love getting to see something from my childhood broken down into something just as interesting years later. Learning Dreams development and their path to their now 28.5 million subscribers is super interesting! This is cool!
ReplyDelete