For most of 2013, the most popular YouTube channel in the world belonged to PewDiePie, an early-twentysomething Swede called Felix Kjellberg who posts videos of himself playing games and cracking jokes.
In November, though, he was beaten into second place on Google’s video service by a music channel, but it didn’t belong to Miley, Katy or any other individual star. Instead, the biggest YouTube channel in the world last month belonged to MÜ-YAP, the Turkish Phonographic Industry Society.
This admittedly shouldn’t come as a shock to Music Ally readers, as we’ve been covering MÜ-YAP’s popularity on YouTube all year.
In November, the channel – set up to deliver Turkish music to fans around the world – recorded 232m views according to the monthly chart of industry site Tubefilter, which tracks YouTube’s top 100 channels. It notes that the MÜ-YAP channel now has more than 4.3bn all-time views, with 2.3m people now subscribing to its stream of videos.
MÜ-YAP is interesting because it appears to be a volume game, uploading as many as 90 videos in its busiest weeks. And while some have views in the low millions, many more notch up tens of thousands.
Sheer weight of numbers appears to be driving the channel’s overall popularity, as it’s become a comprehensive collection of Turkish music. MÜ-YAP hasn’t really talked publicly (in Western media, at least) about its YouTube strategy, but as 2014 kicks off, we’re sure other industry bodies around the world will be mulling whether they can follow a similar path.
Some more general stats from Tubefilter’s Top 100 for November: the 100 channels racked up 6.8bn views between them, with music videos site Vevo accounting for 24 of them.
Individual artists riding high in the chart included Katy Perry (third biggest YouTube channel in November with 172.4m views), Eminem (fourth with 165m), One Direction (sixth with 155.2m), Miley Cyrus (seventh with 154.1m), Rihanna (eighth with 136.3m) and Justin Bieber (tenth with 103.3m).
So, seven of the 10 biggest YouTube channels in November were music-focused, showing the importance music continues to play for YouTube.
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