Now that’s what we call a wrecking ball. Miley Cyrus’ official Vevo channel notched up 924.5m video views in the second half of 2013, making her the most popular musician on Google’s video service.
How do we know? We’ve been crunching data from online video industry site Tubefilter, which has been publishing a monthly global Top 100 YouTube Channels chart since June 2013 – December’s came out yesterday. We’ve stripped out data on music channels from July to December to find out who the most popular artists were.
For artists whose data we have from that six-month period, Cyrus comes top by some distance, ahead of One Direction, Rihanna, Eminem and Avicii. These figures are for the artists’ official channels, not videos uploaded by other YouTube users featuring those artists (e.g. TV show clips, live videos shot by fans etc):
Why the italics in the previous paragraph? There are a couple of important artists whose data we don’t have for the entire six-month period: Katy Perry and Lady Gaga. Neither featured in Tubefilter’s chart for July 2013, nor did they feature in the June rankings – so we can’t use the latter to calculate the missing month.
Even based on just August to December, both were hugely popular though: Perry’s channel garnered 695m views, which would put her in a strong second place in the table above. Gaga’s channel notched up 324.5m views for the five-month period, putting her in eighth place between Psy and Selena Gomez.
We’ve also looked at how many subscribers each artist signed up during the second half of 2013 – fans signing up to receive updates when new videos were added to their channels, which is an area YouTube has been putting a lot of focus on in the last year.
Rihanna ended 2013 with the most subscribers: 12.1m, ahead of One Direction’s 11.2m and Eminem’s 10m (we’ve added Katy Perry and Lady Gaga back in here, as we have official stats):
Of these artists, it was Avicii and Miley Cyrus who grew their subscriber totals the best in the second half of 2013 though. Avicii’s net additions were just over 3m, a rise of 303% between the end of July and the end of December. Meanwhile, Cyrus added 4m subscribers, up 273%.
One more thing to point out: none of these artists, not even Miley Cyrus, was the most popular music YouTube channel in the world in the second half of last year.
Turkish industry site MU-YAP notched up 1.2bn views on its YouTube channel between July and December – although we’ve had to provide an estimate for its July figures based on its total at the end of June and at the start of August, since it was absent from Tubefilter’s chart in July.
Other non-artist channels you should be watching include GMM Grammy (582m views in the second half of 2013), EDM Channel Spinnin’ Records (526.8m), Elektra Records (377.4m) and SM Town (363.1m).
We can’t stress enough that we’re standing on the shoulders of Tubefilter in analysing all this data: we recommend adding the site to your bookmarks / RSS reader to keep tabs on its data and coverage of the YouTube ecosystem.
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