With 60 more YouTube Original Channels on the way, now is as good a time as any to take a closer look at the top-performing YouTube channels. The video sharing site has thousands of Partners, but the folks over at OpenSlate have synthesized the one thousand most influential and wide-reaching ones into a neat infographic that displays, among other things, the views, comments, and reach generated by YouTube’s most popular creators.
Feel free to peruse this lengthy beast at your own pace, but the one stat that sticks out to me is only 23 of the top 1000 channels are part of the YouTube Original Channels Initiative. Part of me understands this (as so many of the top channels are just dudes setting Minecraft houses on fire or music video outlets for rappers who like dancing
), but I feel that the visibility and funding generated by inclusion in Google’s project should make it prohibitively easy to gain views and reach. Perhaps they’ll improve this number the second time around, but it goes to show that having a big-name backer doesn’t guarantee success.OpenSlate’s analytics platform runs on a ‘SlateScore‘ that ranks channels not just by views and subs but also by influence, consistency, and engagement. By these metrics, PewDiePie is the #1 channel on YouTube, with Tubefilter favorites like Phil DeFranco, Machinima, and Ian Hecox (of Smosh) not too far behind.
Click here to view the infographic in high-res.
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