[Editor’s Note: Tubefilter Charts is a weekly rankings column from Tubefilter with data provided by GospelStats. It’s exactly what it sounds like; a top number ranking of YouTube channels based on statistics collected within a given time frame. Check out all of our Tubefilter Charts with new installments every week right here.]
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On YouTube, 2023 began the way 2022 ended: With a lot of Shorts content and huge viewership all over the world. YouTube’s TikTok competitor has made space in our charts for all sorts of content categories, and creators from Europe, Asia, and South America have flourished.
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There’s one other aspect of this chart that has remained consistent since 2022. The channel at the top of this list is the same one that dominated YouTube over the past 12 months.
Chart Toppers
For T-Series, the new year picked up where the old one left off: At the top of our Global Top 100. The Indian record label is YouTube’s all-time leader in terms of both lifetime viewership and subscriber count. In January 2023, it kept up its world-beating pace by collecting 2.9 billion monthly views. To put that number in perspective, there are 14 channels in this month’s Global Top 100 that don’t even have 2.9 billion lifetime views.
Cocomelon – Nursery Rhymes ranked second behind T-Series — as it often does — in January’s Global Top 100. The California-based producer of animations and jingles led January’s U.S. Top 100 chart, but it didn’t quite accrue enough viewership to beat out T-Series in the global ranking. Over 31 days, Cocomelon collected 2.6 billion monthly views. This was also a big month for Cocomelon for other reasons. The channel now has more than 150 billion lifetime views.
In 2022, T-Series, Cocomelon, and SET India established themselves as the “big three” channels in our weekly charts. Thanks to SET India’s third-place finish in the latest Global Top 100, that leading triumvirate held its usual positions in the monthly ranking. The South Asian, Sony-owned hub, known for delivering TV-adjacent content, picked up 1.9 billion monthly views during the first month of 2023. It also surpassed 150 million subscribers on its primary hub.
Zee TV has a lot in common with SET India. Both are from the world’s second-most populous country, both are tied to Indian TV channels, and both made the top five of our Global Top 100. Zee TV was able to reach fourth place after picking up 1.6 billion monthly views. That was a huge upward move for the Indian channel, which finished just inside the top 50 a month ago.
Another Indian channel rounds out our latest global top five. StarPlus reaches a local audience of 25 million subscribers with its array of well-produced content. In January 2023, it counted 1.6 billion monthly views.
Top Gainers
Do the same channels that succeed on TikTok strike it big on YouTube Shorts? The Global Top 100 provides a partial answer to that question.
The list of top short-form hitmakers is not consistent across platforms. Khaby Lame, who is the most-followed personality on TikTok, doesn’t have much of a presence on YouTube. However, it’s become clear that many of the biggest draws on YouTube Shorts are doing little more than importing viral videos from the other buzzy short-form platform.
Take Radmiru, who hails from Russia. In January 2023, Radmiru was one of the most successful creators on YouTube Shorts. He snagged 679.8 million monthly views, which put him in 76th place in the Global Top 100. Two months ago, his 30-day total only accounted for about 50% of his current monthly sum, so that tells you how fast his channel is growing.
The thing is, Radmiru is not too different from Khaby Lame. Like his Italian counterpart, he tests lifehacks from TikTok while putting his own comedic spin on them. One of his viral YouTube Shorts clips stuffs four of these hack tests into a single brief video. The result? More than 200 million views.
With the arrival of TikToks, Shorts, Reels, and other identical vertical video formats, it initially seemed as if the competing platforms might attempt to recruit their own stables of short-form stars. Channels like Radmiru show what’s actually going on: All of those formats are competing for views on the same videos. If you missed one of Radmiru’s videos on his YouTube channel, you’re just as likely to find it on TikTok, where he has nearly 14 million followers.
Shorts will advance a lot in 2023. We’ll see if the same types of content continue to thrive across all TikTok-like formats, or if some of the copycats begin to distinguish themselves. So far, the new year’s trends look a lot like the ones we just experienced in 2022.
Channel Distribution
Here’s a breakdown of the Top 100 Most Viewed channels this month in terms of their countries of origin:
- United States: 22 channels in the Top 100.
- India: 19 channels in the Top 100.
- Russia: 14 channels in the Top 100.
- Vietnam: 7 channels in the Top 100.
- South Korea: 5 channels in the Top 100.
- Japan, Pakistan, and Turkey: 4 channels in the Top 100.
- Germany: 3 channels in the Top 100.
- Brazil: 2 channels in the Top 100.
- Argentina, Belarus, Canada, Cyprus, Egypt, El Salvador, France, Hong Kong, Israel, Latvia, Moldova, Netherlands, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, and United Kingdom: 1 channel each in the Top 50.
This month, 60 channels in the Top 100 are primarily active on YouTube Shorts.
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