ByDiscord breaks the YouTube record for most viewed video under 24 hours by beating the GTA 6 trailer on April Fool’s Day 2024.
On April 1, 2024, Discord uploaded a video named “Discord Loot Boxes are here”.
Discord announced a new addition to its app, loot boxes. A completely free feature for users to test out on the day, it essentially gives out a handful of cosmetic items, all themed around a clown. The idea was simple, users could explore these virtual crates to uncover comical clown-themed cosmetic items, all in good fun.
But this video broke record.
It happened because Discord autoplayed the video in the Discord application in the background whenever users opened the app,hence playing their Lootbox announcement trailer on loop in the background in-app.
However, in adding the new feature, Discord seems to have accidentally viewbotted their announcement video of the loot boxes, driving a staggering amount of views on YouTube.
Marvin Witt, a software developer and Discord enthusiast, was among the first to notice this.
Discord had integrated the announcement video into its app’s notification system, causing it to autoplay whenever users accessed the platform. Each instance of the video being played through these notifications contributed to its skyrocketing view count on YouTube.
This broke the record for the GTA 6 trailer set by Rockstar Games as the most-viewed non-music video on YouTube in 24 hours with around 90 million views. However, this has been taken by Discord which has broken this Guinness World Record after registering a whopping 1.4 billion views in under 23 hours.
One of Developer’s initial reaction to the video surpassing 100 million views was “how the f*** is this video getting so many views”, they’re saying it was not intentional.
However, several fans have an issue with this record since Discord shared the video on their app. Since views gained on the Discord app are counted towards YouTube views, this helped the clip break the record.
So for now, the video has reached 1.4 billion (1,407,027,820) views in 23 hours. And we don’t know if YouTube will get involved in it and if it will be counted as legit views.