Views for the top 100 YouTube channels have grown 80% in a year

YouTube now attracts more than 1 billion viewers a month watching 6bn hours of video, with nearly 40% of it watched on mobile devices. Its top channels are taking advantage.

In fact, the monthly view-count for the top 100 YouTube channels has grown by 80.5% over the last year, according to new data published by online video industry site Tubefilter and analytics firm OpenSlate.

The former’s chart of the 100 most-viewed YouTube channels in July 2014 reveals that they collectively notched up 9.46bn views that month. That’s up from 5.24bn views in July 2013.

The big winner from the last year’s growth is PewDiePie, the alter ego of Swedish gamer Felix Kjellberg. Between July 2013 and July 2014, his monthly views nearly doubled from 221.6m to 438.9m, while his subscribers grew from 11.75m to 29.47m.

The second biggest YouTube channel in July 2014 was DisneyCollector, with its collection of toy-unboxing videos racking up 268m views in the month, putting it ahead of musician Shakira’s 226.6m views.

Gaming channels Stampy (199.6m views) and The Diamond Minecart (186.1m views) took fourth and fifth places in Tubefilter’s latest monthly chart.

It’s another mark of YouTube’s evolution over the last 12 months that DisneyCollector, Stampy and The Diamond Minecart did not feature in the top 100 chart for July 2013, meaning they had less than the 100th-ranked channel’s 32.6m views that month.

The July 2014 rankings reveal that music, games and comedy remain the three key categories for YouTube. Games in particular: in fact, a separate chart published by Tubefilter reveals that the 100 top gaming channels on YouTube generated 4.34bn views in July.

YouTube and parent company Google may have lost out to Amazon in the race to acquire games live-streaming service Twitch, but gaming remains one of the key planks in YouTube’s appeal as an alternative entertainment network.