We’ve touched on the subject of popular YouTube channels before, talking about how users like PewDiePie and others have managed to make a tremendous living setting up videos for the channel and interacting with their fans. However, it appears that their popularity is growing higher than anyone could’ve anticipated.
A new report from online video industry site Tubefilter and analytics firm OpenSlate indicates that the video channel still attracts more than one billion viewers a month, watching six billion hours of video. 40 percent of that traffic comes from mobile devices as well.
Out of those, the top 100 YouTube channels have managed to grow over 80 percent in viewership over the last year. A chart for July 2014 shows that the videos have collectively gathered 9.46 billion views for that month alone, up over 5 billion from July 2013.
Leading the pack is PewDiePie, also known as Swedish game personality Felix Kjellberg. For the year spanning from July 2013 to 2014, he’s managed to increase from 221.6 million views to 438.9 million views, and has nearly tripled his subscriber base from 11.75 million to 29.47 million.
Closely behind are DisneyCollector with 268 million views for the month, Stampy with nearly 200 million views, and The Diamond Minecart with 186.1 million views.
Out of all the videos features, it seems that music, games and comedy continue to be tremendous draws. TubeFilter’s report shows that the top 100 gaming channels by themselves managed to generate 4.34 billion views for July 2014 alone.
With the competitive video market set to grow from new offerings by Amazon (with its recently acquired Twitch services) and Yahoo!, it’ll be interesting to see where YouTube goes from here. One thing’s for sure – no matter what the competition may throw its way, it’s bound to keep a very large audience.
Source: The Guardian
