[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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Most of the channels in this week’s U.S. Top 50 operate primarily on YouTube Shorts, but the outliers tend to be bunched near the top. Half of the 14 charting channels that don’t bear the Shorts designation are ranked in the top 11 spots.
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The most successful channels on YouTube find ways to blend long-form and short-form formats, and this week’s top finisher fits into that category.
The Top 5
🥇 Toys and Colors is the leader of this week’s U.S. Top 50, though not by a wide margin. The kid-friendly hub would have finished third if it had taken in six million fewer views, but it pushed itself into the top spot by increasing its traffic by 44% week-over-week. That bump, which brought Toys and Colors up to 525.6 million weekly views, secured a #1 finish for a channel that landed just outside the top five a week ago. The multiformat approach is key to Toys and Colors’ growth; it is one of the few channels on YouTube to achieve a billion-view long-form video and a billion-view Short.
🥈 J House jr. moved up to second place in this week’s U.S. Top 50. The kid-friendly channel equaled its highest-ever placement in our ranking thanks to an 8% week-over-week traffic increase. That boost brought the Shorts standout up to 520.3 million weekly views. J House jr. now has more than seven billion lifetime YouTube views even though its main channel only launched in 2019. That’s the power of Shorts.
🥉 Alan Chikin Chow, a former #1 finisher in the U.S. Top 50, ranked third in our most recent update. The California-based comedian moved up from fifth place after increasing his YouTube viewership by 21% week-over-week. Chow, who scored 519.7 million weekly views during the first full week of August, is the highest-ranking individual creator in this week’s U.S. Top 50. He’s even higher than a certain creator who might be up next in the ranking — perhaps some controversies triggered that positional flip-flop?
🌟 In case you couldn’t figure it out, the controversy-ridden creator mentioned in the previous paragraph is MrBeast. The North Carolina-based star has become a regular in our U.S. charts, an occasional #1 finisher, and the only creator this year to get 1.3 billion views in a single week. But even with all those accolades, Jimmy Donaldson is stuck in fourth place in the U.S. Top 50 for the second week in a row. His recent PR nightmares have not hurt his viewership in a noticeable way, but in a week when the top three finishers all experienced huge upward surges, MrBeast’s 477.4 million weekly views were not quite enough to improve his ranking.
✨ Zack D. Films was the runner-up in the previous U.S. Top 50 chart, but this week, he fell back to fifth place in the ranking. The Shorts star got 444.6 million weekly views but couldn’t quite keep pace with the uppermost chart toppers.
Top Gainers
Last week, we discussed the impact the Olympics have had on the NBC Sports channel, which enjoyed a strong uptick in our U.S. Top 50. That channel gets a predictable growth spurt every time an Olympic year rolls around, but there’s a different NBCUniversal-owned YouTube channel that enjoys its periodic bumps at a similar interval.
I’m talking about the official YouTube home of MSNBC. As a reminder, any Summer Olympics year is also a presidential election year in the United States, and as one quadrennial phenomenon ends, another is picking up steam. With less than three months to go until Election Day, MSNBC has cracked the U.S. Top 50 for the first time this year. The news outlet grabbed the 50th and final place in the ranking by adding 113.5 million weekly views. That was 12% more traffic than the amount MSNBC pulled in during the previous seven-day measurement period.
Americans have plenty of options when choosing where to get their news on YouTube. So why is MSNBC in the Top 50 while other outlets are not? There are a few reasons behind the phenomenon: MSNBC is extremely active, posting multiple videos every single day, and its producers make use of all YouTube formats. On the long-form side of the platform, daily news recaps and videos featuring the Republican nominee often surpass the million-view mark.
Then, on Shorts, MSNBC supplements its (already significant) viewership. The channel has uploaded a dozen short-form videos with at least five million views apiece. Most of them were uploaded over the past couple of years, though this clip poking fun at Joe Biden’s age has already started to age like milk:
As Election Day draws near, MSNBC will have plenty more opportunities to upload viral Shorts, and it may even mix in a few streams as well. NBCUniversal typically offers live coverage on digital platforms as America goes to vote, though that stream could end up on the NBC News account — not the one belonging to MSNBC.
Channel Distribution
This week, there are 36 YouTube Shorts channels in the U.S. Top 50.
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