Squid Game leaps past Game of Thrones with 17 billion views on YouTube

Game of Thrones fans have been making YouTube content for 10 years, and a lotta people have watched it. Squid Game blew past it in a couple of months.

If you’re really into a TV show or movie, sometimes just watching it isn’t enough. Sometimes you want to see how other people feel about it, so you hop on Reddit or Facebook or YouTube or TikTok to see what they’re saying. In the heyday of Game of Thrones, for instance, there was a whole cottage industry of fans who would go on YouTube to react to the episodes, discuss the lore, parody iconic scenes and more, and that’s all in addition to the trailers and teasers HBO would release itself.

In the 10 years since it premiered, videos about Game of Thrones has amassed some 16.9 billion views on YouTube, according to Variety. That’s from around 420,000 uploaded videos, with an estimated 233 million engagements. That’s impressive, and it gives you perspective to understand how mind-boggling it is that Squid Game, Netflix’s new sci-fi drama series about people forced to play deadly children’s game in hopes of winning a huge cash prize, has gotten 17 billion YouTube views since it dropped in September.

Squid Game has racked up around 533 million engagements based on 129,000 uploaded videos, both to YouTube and the TikTok knockoff YouTube Shorts. There are all kinds of Squid Game-themed videos out there, including a lot of people recreating the games and some very popular animations. This one has amassed nearly 100 million views in just over a month:

“In 10 years looking at YouTube, we’ve never seen anything quite like this,” said Jared Naylor, vice president of audience development at analytics company Vobile. It’s nice to know that something like Squid Game can come out of absolutely nowhere and get a death grip on people’s imagination like this.

Squid Game is airing on Netflix right now. And creator Hwang Dong-hyuk has confirmed that there will be a second season. After the first was such a smash hit, how could there not be? You’ve gotta create more fodder for the internet, right?

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