[Editor’s Note: Tubefilter Charts is a rankings column from Tubefilter. It’s exactly what it sounds like; a top number ranking of creators, channels, and broadcasters based on statistics collected within a given time frame from a growing number of online video and social media platforms. Check out all of our Tubefilter Charts with new installments every week right here. For just the Live.me Top Broadcaster Rankings, click here.]
Scroll down for this week’s Tubefilter Live.me Top Broadcaster Rankings.
It’s our first installment of our shiny new weekly Tubefilter Chart of the Top 50 Live.me Broadcasters. And before we check out who’s currently reigning supreme, trending up, and/or trending down on the burgeoning live broadcasting application, let’s give the latest iteration of our Tubefilter Charts some context.
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The Genesis Of Tubefilter’s YouTube Charts
We published our first Tubefilter Chart way back on May 31, 2013 just weeks after Billboard began to factor YouTube views into the calculation of its Hot 100 chart rankings. We wrote then how the incorporation of YouTube into Billboard’s calculus represented a seismic shift in how mainstream media and the public at large perceived the world’s largest video sharing site. “What was once considered an entertainment platform an echelon below television, music, and film,” we said, “is now being recognized as an entertainment platform as integral to assessing the current state of pop culture as radio and record sales.” A lot has changed since.
YouTube now has over a billion users worldwide who are consuming hundreds of millions of hours worth of programming every single day. And the platform’s status within the general consciousness and domestic and worldwide entertainment industries can only be described in terms of ascendance. Homegrown YouTube stars have been featured on billboards, in glossy magazines, and on broadcast and cable television commercials in order to market themselves and the medium that gave them their massive audience. Meanwhile, premium studios and more traditional distribution platforms have tapped YouTube creators to headline a growing number of projects, all while YouTube itself is busy courting major A-list celebrities to join a site those celebrities would’ve scoffed at just a few years ago.
While YouTube has grown into a massive global powerhouse in entertainment, the Tubefilter Charts have provided industry insiders with invaluable insight into the specific individuals and broader trends that ebbed into prominence and flowed into obsolence on the platform. Now we’re going to do the same for another nascent entertainment medium.
Live And Live.me
Research firm MarketsandMarkets recently forecasted live video will be a $70 billion (with a “b”) industry by 2021. Within that astronomical figure will likely be revenue generated by the legacy players in the infant industry. Facebook Live, YouTube, Twitter, Periscope, and even Instagram will battle for dominant marketshare, but among the heavyweights are a number of upstarts gaining traction at an incredibly fast clip.
Live.me, born out of the Beijing-based Cheetah Mobile, first started letting users broadcast themselves and watch the broadcasts of other individuals around the world in April 2016. In the short nine months since, the live broadcasting platform has been embraced by mainstream celebrities, established online creators, musicians, fans, and a brand new crop of homegrown talent that’s very good at getting the attention of its peers. The app now features hundreds of thousands of hours of live broadcasts daily and reported it processed over $1 million in payouts to creators as of October 2016 by way of its gifting economy. That number has only increased, providing a lucrative opportunity for a handful of Live.me stars to leave their regularly scheduled jobs and focus on the platform full time to the tune of solid five and six-figure annual salaries.
The fanfare, audience, and cash is reminiscent of those early days of YouTube, when the site began to garner significant audience and fostered a micro-economy inside which talent could make a comfortable living. It would’ve been great to have the Tubefilter Charts back then, to see the movement of individual channels up and down the rankings and catch wind early on of more macro trends on the site. That’s why we’re launching the Live.Me Top Broadcaster Rankings now. They’ll help shine a spotlight on the unique creative class gaining traction with the app and provide the industry with some insight into what’s popping on the platform.
Methodology
The Live.me Top Broadcaster Rankings highlight the must-know channels on the platform. Live.me users already know that inside the application there are charts for Top Diamond Earners, Top Gifters, and users with the most Followers. These are valuable data points, but upon closer inspection, none of them on their own can capture the category of live broadcasting. We’ve spent a lot of time at Tubefilter poring over data provided by Live.me and have come up with a ranking system that’s timely and representative of which broadcasters are performing well on the platform. The rankings are calculated based on a combination of Time Spent Viewing Broadcasts, Fans, Diamonds Earned, Volume of Virtual Gifts Received, Comment Rate, and the Overall Interaction Rate Across Broadcasts.
We’ll dive into the specific broadcasters who are making moves up the rankings in future weeks, but for now check out the below to see who’s doing live broadcasts well and the rising stars you should acquaint yourself with on the platform. If you don’t yet have Live.me, you can download the app right here. Just search for the user listed below in the application and tune in.
Launched in April 2016, Live.me is a fast growing live broadcasting community which lets people discover new content, build a following, and earn cash rewards, no matter who they are. Live.me is geared towards surfacing daily entertainment and provides the tools to make the most of being live, in the moment. The mobile app is available on both iPhone and Android.
