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Most schools have now reopened their doors after the winter holidays, but children’s content is still the most-watched YouTube category in the United States.
There are three kid-friendly hubs in this week’s U.S. top five. Those channels are trailing a pair of chart leaders who are regulars in the U.S. Top 50.
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Chart Toppers
MaviGadget just eked its way past MrBeast to claim the #1 spot in this week’s U.S. Top 50. If the YouTube Shorts channel had gotten one million fewer weekly views across its library of machinery-focused clips, it would have been forced to settle for second place. Instead, MaviGadget got its first #1 finish of 2024 during a week when it collected 509.6 million views. At its current rate of viewership, MaviGadget will reach 20 billion lifetime YouTube views before the end of February, but it will need to avoid repeating this week’s 7% viewership downturn.
MrBeast will not be the #1 finisher in all 52 (or so) of the weekly U.S. charts we plan to publish in 2024, but Jimmy Donaldson might not fall out of the top five across the entire year. That would not be too much of a surprise, since Donaldson is the most-watched creator in his home country. This week, the main MrBeast channel wound up in second place in the U.S. Top 50 with 509.1 million weekly views. That hub leads all chart entrants in terms of subscribers; Donaldson counts 231 million supporters on his main channel.
There’s a big drop-off between second and third place in the U.S. Top 50. The #3 spot is where the run of family-friendly channels begins. Toys and Colors, which earned several #1 finishes toward the end of 2023, placed third in the chart during the second full week of January. Its bright, sharply-produced videos collected 370 million weekly views, which was 33% less traffic than the total it posted during the first week of the year. Toys and Colors now reaches more than 50 million subscribers on its primary YouTube home.
BigSchool is up next in the U.S. Top 50. For the second week in a row, the short-form animation hub finished fourth in our all-American ranking. Its classroom-set videos (hence the name) pulled in 311.8 million weekly views. Next week, BigSchool can graduate into two higher numerical categories: It is about to reach 20 million subscribers and nine billion lifetime views.
Vlad and Niki is back in the U.S. top five. The kidfluencer channel rounded out the upper echelon of this week’s U.S. ranking by picking up 293.5 million weekly views.
Top Gainers
Creators like Amouranth have established lucrative revenue streams on OnlyFans while continuing to stand out on safe-for-work platforms like Twitch. Until recently, the Amouranths of the world haven’t made as big of an impression on YouTube Shorts, but that’s starting to change. Channels are using suggestive thumbnails and situations to pull in huge view counts, and savvy creators are finding ways to plug their OnlyFans through 60-second videos.
Maddie Price is one of those resourceful Shorts users. On her YouTube homepage, Price makes her intentions clear. She has a chili pepper in her channel banner and the phrase “I know you’re curious” in her About section. Her active OnlyFans account gives us an idea of how her earnings break down.
A visit through Price’s most-watched Shorts shows that she has mastered the art of temptation. A lot of those videos are too NSFW to share here, so I’ll embed one that is merely suggestive.
Price is not the first creator to dominate YouTube through the power of suggestion, but she’s posting huge numbers on Shorts. During the second week of January, she added 104.5 million weekly views, which was good enough to put her in 45th place in the U.S. Top 50. It’s her first-ever Top 50 finish; she only launched her YouTube account in November 2022.
In her YouTube videos, Price makes an effort to keep the proceedings PG-13. Some observers may cry foul over a creator who pushes into sexual territory on a platform that reaches millions of young kids; maybe the U.S. Congress will raise that point when it questions tech CEOs in a child safety hearing later this month.
Channel Distribution
This week, there are 38 YouTube Shorts channels in the U.S. Top 50.
