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We’re back, with apologies for missing the last two weeks of data. A lot of people are involved in assembling our weekly rankings of the Google-funded YouTube channels, and too many of us were away at the end of August. We’re working to streamline things so it doesn’t happen again. But the lost weeks mean I can only analyze the change in channel rank, not in views, for the week that ended last Wednesday.
Overall, Thnkr is the week’s big winner measured by rank. It jumped 34 spots to No. 40 — based in part on the site’s intriguing videos tied to the political conventions and speeches. Other gainers include: The Chopra Well (+24 to No. 52), CafeMom Studios (+21 to No. 54), Kin Community (+19 to No. 50), and Awesomeness TV (+18 to No. 6). Decliners include Fawn Inc (-32 to No. 53), Comedy Shaq (-22 to No. 81), H+ Digital Series (-17 to No. 45), NOC (-16 to No. 38), and U Look Haute (-15 to No. 73). There were 82.6M views, the highest number we’ve seen since May when we began tracking the YouTube channels. The top 10 channels accounted for 55% of all views. Awesomeness TV joined that group, and DanceOn made room by falling three places to No. 12.
Close watchers will notice a few changes in the lineup. We’ve added Above Average Network and H+ Digital Series, which were launched after we began tracking the Google-funded channels. Reserve is a new name, but not a new channel: It used to be Taste & Access. And we don’t have stats for 3V Fitness Fail, Alchemy, and Tasted because our data provider says they did not show any new views in the week. In addition, we had trouble getting last week’s rank info for Mondo Media, which throws off its week-over-week change.
VidStatsX supplies our data with one exception: YouTube provides views for the shows it funds on Mondo Media. Channels highlighted in beige are the ones that were launched before Google introduced its original channels program in November. Here’s our latest ranking:
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It’s a shame that YouTube doesn’t police their own website. Many top YouTubers over the years have “jacked views”, where they use programs to auto-reload pages to pump up their view numbers, resulting in them getting in the “Popular” section, as well as many more revenue off the advertising.
Translation: These users are, in a sense, stealing money from YouTube/Google.
The dead giveaway is when a video has something like 200,000 views, but only 1,000-2,000 “likes” and an even lower number of comments. And questions are often asked of the viewers through annotations asking the viewer to comment their answers, making the video appear more popular than it is.
Slowly, there is more and more great content on YouTube, but hopefully there’ll be a day when YouTube wakes up and sees what these top YouTubers have been doing all along. It’s shady, and a few of the worst offenders are in this rankings list. I will not name names, but the numbers do not lie.
The problem I think is that google almost has the incentive NOT to stop users from “pumping” views. After all–it gives them more “hits” which then they can sell to advertisers.
It would be great if deadline didn’t only report on Google financed channels. It makes it look like they’re the only ones that are important or matter. In fact though there are many more views on non-Google channels and many talented content creators waiting to be noticed by Hollywood.
It isn’t just boosting views, it is literally buying them. Those ad units you can skip also can be bought to count as views. Hence you will see many of the top 10 of this list have big numbers but no engagement – you then will see they hide their analytics so you don’t see “view from ad” – as well as you usually can find a “i saw this as an advertisement” left as a comment somewhere if the channel doesn’t delete them. This list needs to start tracking that somehow to have a list of real views vs. bought views to really know who is and isn’t successful.