Better than GTA VI and MrBeast, this video has 1.4 billion views in 24 hours: Discord's blunder

A video posted to YouTube by Discord quickly surpassed 1 billion views.

1,400 million views in less than 24 hours, which is a dream number for any YouTube channel in the world. This is not a new trailer for GTA VI, the upcoming Avengers movie, or the latest Mr Beast video, but rather a video posted by Discord.

Discord abused an April Fool's joke

Without doing so intentionally, Discord simply developed a “View Bot”, i.e. an automated way to artificially increase the number of video views.

This video titled “Discord Loot Boxes are here” is a short 17-second video posted on April 1, 2024. It is actually April Fools’ Day for the brand. For 24 hours, the platform has integrated the function of opening a fake loot box into the popular chat app.

To illustrate this function, the small button that appeared on the app actually opened a YouTube video. As a result, all Discord apps around the world opened this popular video repeatedly for 24 hours.

Screenshots from Discord developers show that they were surprised by the artificial popularity of this video.

Demonstration for advertisers?

This weekend, another piece of news related to Discord came out: the platform will prepare for the arrival of advertising to increase its revenue. Coincidence or not, we can say that there is no better demonstration than this April Fools' Day and the views recorded on this video on YouTube.

In fact, Discord can say something like: “In less than 24 hours, this video has been viewed more than 600 million times on our service. This could be your ad next time.An argument that may hit its target.