These Brands Had The Biggest YouTube Channels In 2017 (Study)

Divimove, a Berlin-based online video company owned by the RTL Group, has once again compiled findings on the most active — and successful — brands who are creating original content on YouTube. Ninety percent of the world’s top 500 brands (per Brand Finance‘s annual report) have at least one YouTube channel of their own, Divimove found.

Media brands do the best on YouTube of any business category, with these types of companies counting on average 1.1 million subscribers — followed by technology (950,000 subscribers), food and beverage (400,800), automobile (225,270), and apparel (207,000). Divimove based its findings on total subscriber numbers and subscriber growth throughout 2017, as this more accurately reflects organic growth than view counts, which are driven in part by pre-roll campaigns.

The biggest individual players within the five aforementioned categories are Warner Bros. (4.7 million subscribers), PlayStation (6 million subscribers), Red Bull (6.6 million subscribers), Ford (1.4 million subscribers), and Nike (700,000 subscribers). And the brands that experienced the most subscriber growth in 2017 in the media, tech, and food categories were Bloomberg (50%), Tencent (247%), and Subway (173%).

Finally, Divimove sought to determine how YouTube activity impacts subscriber growth, and found, unsurprisingly, that brands who posted regularly were drastically more likely to experience growth. Inconsistent channels, on the other hand — who posted a large amount of videos in a short burst and then remained relatively inactive for the rest of the year — were far less successful in this respect.

Check out a chart illustrating the most active types of branded channels on YouTube in 2017, courtesy of Divimove, below: