- Discord's April Fools' Day prank video crushed YouTube's GTA 6 view record but at a sneaky cost.
- The Discord app loot box popup made users autoplay the embedded video that counted towards the YouTube views.
- Discord's video on YouTube currently has 627 million views, dethroning the GTA 6 trailer record of 90 million views in just 24 hours.
April Fools Day is supposed to be a day of pranks, so when Discord’s Loot Box video on YouTube went live, people thought the views had to be a mistake! The infamous YouTube video has already surpassed 627 million views in just 24 hours. This makes it the most viewed non-music video in 24 hours. Want to know something even more shocking? The video has surpassed the widely famous GTA 6 trailer, which had 90M views in the first 24 hours. However, Discord might not have beaten the GTA 6 trailer record in the right way to achieve this feat.
Discord Gets YouTube Views with In-App Popup
Although the video has a huge view count, many folks didn’t feel it was legitimate. Incidentally, that suspicion was proven to be correct, as numerous Discord users noticed an in-app popup for the Discord April Fools video in the Discord app.
This pop-up kept playing the video on a loop in the background. As you might be able to tell, this led to the view count catapulting. So, if you clicked the Loot Box prompt on the bottom right of Discord, congratulations—you’re part of it.
Users on different social media platforms have already pointed this out and shared their points of view. One such user said this should be disqualified from any record. An X user, @NueM4rvin, immediately took it to social media and shared their views.
If Discord did indeed do it deliberately, the view count will keep increasing every time a user opens the Discord app. User u/Tyler123839 on Reddit expressed their anger by saying:
“Even if each user restarts their client only once per day that’s still hundreds of millions of views each day. That pace is ridiculous. If they wanted it could definitely break baby shark’s video in less than a month. With normal videos you get a drop off at some point but there would be no reason for the number of discord restarts to drop off.”
Even though the loot box feature has left after April Fools, the damage has already been done. Discord’s official YouTube channel never had a video with more than 10M views before this. So, it all but confirms that the views in Discord’s YouTube video are from the embeds and popups.
What do you think about Discord manipulating users into clicking the popup and counting views toward their April Fools video? Do you think Discord deserves to beat the GTA 6 trailer in view count? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
