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Double Date lost 9% of its YouTube traffic week-over-week, but that decline wasn’t significant enough to keep the Australian couple channel out of the #1 spot in our Global Top 50 ranking. With the powers of Cadel and Mia and Jasmin and James combined, Double Date racked up 1.74 billion weekly views during the first full week of November.
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The 11th month has also been kind to channels that translate cultural phenomena for distribution around the world. Here are some insights related to that trend:
Globalization is shaking up YouTube Shorts
Thomas Friedman famously wrote that the world is flat, and that idea is showing up on YouTube Shorts in a big way. The home countries of Top 50 channels don’t always tell the whole story, since those hubs are sometimes devoted to international translations that port popular short-form uploads from one language to another.
There are recurring routes on which these cultural commodities often travel. Asian countries that are well-represented on Shorts, such as South Korea, India, Japan, and Vietnam, often find their exports targeted for translation. When the channels from those nations are trading in universal themes like family, morality, and technology, they’re even more likely to reach another region’s YouTube viewers.
Slick Slime Sam is one of the channels that has found success through this cross-cultural process. The videos that show up among the Slick Slime’s most popular uploads do not appear to be produced in the channel’s native home of Thailand. Instead, they feature a specific, colorful style that is associated with kid-friendly content produced in former Soviet republics like Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.
Slick Slime Sam, indeed — while I’m pretty sure the (English translation) of the Thai channel’s handle refers to the hub’s ameboid mascot, this particular strategy is indeed slick and crafty. Without doing anything other than repurposing content that was originally intended for a different culture, Slick Slime Sam made its first appearance in the Global Top 50, breaking into the charts in 49th place. With 375.3 million weekly views, the channel brought its lifetime YouTube tally close to ten billion.
This strategy is hardly a one-off thing. In fact, it’s showing up across our Top 50 ranking, with many channel owners learning that the videos that work the best in one country can in fact work in any country — especially when young children are the intended audience.
You would think, for example, that a channel called Korean drama production would hail from the peninsula mentioned in its name, but no. The titles of its most popular videos are in Hindi, which suggests that a creator in the Indian subcontinent is paying attention to the premier pieces of family media coming out of East Asia. If viewers are concerned about the confusion, they’re not showing it: Korean drama production has been on the up-and-up of late.
Data via Gospel Stats
As YouTube continues to diversify its set of linguistic tools, we’ll probably see more channels like these in our charts. The potency of this trend reflects the world we live in: For as much as people may claim that YouTube is American-centric, the Asian family channels may be the ones who are truly dictating the platform’s culture.
Channel Distribution
Here’s a breakdown of the Top 50 Most Viewed channels this week in terms of their countries of origin:
- India: 20
- United States: 10
- Australia, Canada, Pakistan, and Türkiye: 2
- Austria, Bangladesh, China, Egypt, Germany, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Russia, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand: 1
This week, 40 channels in the Top 50 are primarily active on YouTube Shorts.
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