YouTube has carried on an annual tradition by revealing the search topics, creators, and musicians that received the most traffic on the platform during the 2024 calendar year. If you’ve been following major pop culture headlines over the past 12 months, the headliners of the report won’t surprise you, but a deeper dive into the data reveals the subtle ways YouTube is evolving with each passing year.
Not even a year full of controversy can stop MrBeast
Jimmy Donaldson spent 2024 addressing allegations stemming from his Amazon Prime Video series Beast Games and unrelated concerns about the working conditions at his North Carolina HQ. If you thought those negative headlines would put a dent in Donaldson’s popularity, well, no. For the fourth year in a row, MrBeast ranked as YouTube’s top creator.
YouTube’s current subscriber king has become so popular that he’s even bringing his supporting cast into YouTube’s year-end ranking as well. Back in 2021, Camilla Araujo was a little-known creator who showed up as Player 067 in MrBeast’s record-setting recreation of the Netflix series Squid Game. Flash forward to 2024, and Araujo now ranks among YouTube’s top ten trending creators, with nearly eight million subscribers on her namesake channel.
Subscribe to get the latest creator news
It would be unfair to Araujo to give MrBeast full credit for her rise, but Donaldson’s continued presence atop YouTube’s list of trending creators cannot be ignored. Of the ten U.S. creators who cracked YouTube’s year-end list in 2022, nine are out of the ranking in 2024. Only the #1 finisher remains the same.
Kendrick Lamar bested Drake (on YouTube, at least)
The high-profile feud between two of hip-hop’s biggest names dominated the pop culture conversation during the spring of 2024. Kendrick Lamar and Drake hauled in millions of views on their respective diss tracks while promoting further fan debates through their permissive licensing policies.
The general consensus is that Lamar won the war of words, and the YouTube data backs up that claim. The man known as K-Dot ranked among the top ten trending search topics of the year on YouTube, and his ultimate diss track — the inescapable earworm known as “Not Like Us” — was the top trending song on the platform.
Lamar will have an opportunity to continue his Drake-hating hot streak in 2025. He will perform at the Super Bowl in February, which will give him a chance to perform “Not Like Us” in front of millions of TV viewers. That would be an unprecedented level of haterade, but I wouldn’t put it past Kung Fu Kenny.
Shorts spawns pop culture hits — but not all viral soundbites top the charts
Much noise has been made about the overlap between the top songs on platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts and the nominees at award shows like the Grammys. YouTube traffic has boosted viral tracks from artists like Miley Cyrus, and that trend continued into 2024. Sabrina Carpenter, for example, emerged as a top search topic after seeing her music show up in multiple short-form trends.
YouTube Shorts can still be a kingmaker for up-and-coming artists, but long-term success may require more than just a brief appearance in a short-form meme. In 2024, YouTube’s ranking of the top ten tracks on Shorts included just a single record that also showed up on the general “top songs” list: Tommy Richman‘s R&B-infused bop “Million Dollar Baby”.
“Million Dollar Baby” was both an inescapable Shorts soundtrack and a veritable “song of the summer” candidate. Other vertical video faves seem to struggle to achieve that level of global penetration, though ongoing promotional efforts will continue to push viral tracks toward the mainstream.
