YouTuber Dream has broken records and pulled in millions of views, but the man behind the avatar is unidentified. Dream is a YouTube channel with 16.4 million subscribers on YouTube is among the fastest-growing YouTube channels. Although he's faced controversy but the Minecraft expert is still one of the most loyal and devoted fans on the internet. Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.

Minecraft YouTuber Dream has rapidly risen up the creator ladder and has become one of the fastest-growing YouTube channels of 2020, and the second overall creator of the year, according to the platform. The unassuming green avatar who is adept at uncovering "Minecraft's" cavern-filled secrets has managed to garner over 16 million users in less than two years. What is it that is it that makes Dream so special and popular when there have been thousands of content creators building worlds with Minecraft's characteristic blocks?

Who is Dream?

Dream's life and identity are unknown, with the sleepy-named YouTuber opting to keep his identity secret. The avatar he uses online is a simple drawing with an emerald-green background. The design is well-known and easily identifiable to the typical "Minecraft" viewer.

As YouTuber Mysticat says, "Dream's branding is unprofessional but it doesn't mean it's not bad. Dream utilizes a Microsoft Paint drawn character that's hilarious and appealing to children, which is Minecraft's core target audience."

Although Dream launched his YouTube channel in 2014, it doesn't seem that he uploaded any videos regularly until July 2019. In his first video Dream "triggers" viewers by playing the game as violently as he can. He does this by putting blocks on top, killing sheep for their wool, eating rotten flesh, and even placing blocks on top.

After his first upload, Dream started posting content frequently. Felix Kjellberg, known online as the massively popular PewDiePie, had been playing "Minecraft" for his massive audience of over 100 million subscribers by the time he uploaded his first post. Dream found a way to re-engineer Kjellberg's "world seed," meaning, the randomly generated world that his "Minecraft" game had created, using techniques he had learned from forums. The video garnered 200,000 views within two days. Dream then created three videos that received over two million views each. Fake root At the end of July, Dream had gained 54,000 followers and his star was born.

For the next few months, Dream's channel will continue to gain millions of views and thousands of subscribers but his most memorable breakthrough moment occurred in November 2019. After uploading several videos that made use of the trending format "___ but ___ changes every time," Dream struck diamond. His video , titled "Minecraft but Items Drops are Random and Multiplied ..." went viral, pulling in 32 million views and bringing him 600,000 new subscribers.

Dream would upload frequently over the next year, gradually gaining hundreds and thousands of subscribers per month and millions of views. His "Minecraft Speedrunner vs." series, where Dream would choose to finish the game while certain NPCs (also known as non-player characters) pursued him, or had objectives that needed to be accomplished was a huge hit. He would also start working with GeorgeNotFound as an acquaintance and a potential participant on Dream's server for roleplaying which he founded in May of 2020.

Dream has been accused of cheating in Minecraft

Dream's channel was at its highest level of growth in subscribers with 2.6 million subscribers by August 2020, and Dream becoming the main character of the game. He uploaded a speedrun of the 1.14 version of Minecraft in March of 2020, and 1.15 in June, so when the 1.16 version was released later in the year, he needed to adopt it. He ended his run in fifth position and was happy with the position he was placed on the leaderboard.

Geosquare Moderator of the official speedrun forums, uploaded a YouTube video entitled "Did Dream fake his Speedruns Official Moderator Analysis" on December 11 in 2020. Geosquare and his fellow Minecraft moderators had looked over the livestream runs and believed that Dream had recorded events that were too likely to have occurred without the help of cheaters or mods. The mods analyzed the 29-page document and concluded that Dream was one in 1.75 trillion likely to have found the items required to complete the game.

Dream has denied any wrongdoing or cheating in multiple Twitter threads and videos. In his own video addressing the allegations made on December 23 Dream revealed a study which he had commissioned by his analysis of his company Photoexcitation which concluded that the probabilities of his run occurring were in fact 1 out of 100 million.

The speedrunning mods later released another five-page document dismissing Dream's study. Dream responded with one final tweet, writing that "this drama has been a stressful time for most of the Minecraft community and a lot of it was due to my initial response to the drama. I'm fully responsible for this."

Dream has been the victim of harassment, including doxxing

On January 1 2021, Dream fans managed to locate his home using a picture of his kitchen, which was posted to his second account and share the information, an invasion of privacy that's called doxxing.

Dream expressed his opinion about the incident in a Twitlonger post on January 7th. He also spoke about his ex-girlfriend who believes is spreading false reports. Dream denied the accusations and stated that he doesn't have any issues with YouTube. He also said that his friends who appear in his videos do not receive a cut of his revenue.

How Dream mastered the YouTube algorithm?

His knowledge of YouTube's algorithm is the reason for Dream's enormous growth in 2019 and in 2020.

He puts his keywords in the right places and makes the most of trends and creates thumbnails that fans would like to click. Similar to the genius of Jimmy Donaldson, the highly-popular Mr. Dream has learned how to be successful on YouTube, just like Beast.