Swedish gamer Felix Kjellberg - aka PewDiePie - had the most-watched YouTube channel in the second half of 2013, racking up 1.28 billion views on Google's video service.
Kjellberg ended the year with 19.9 million subscribers on YouTube, but in the first three weeks of January 2014 that total has increased to 20.8 million, according to stats published by online video industry site Tubefilter.
His videos were watched more than 224 milliontimes in December alone.
The PewDiePie channel launched on YouTube in 2009, but its most rapid growth came between 2012 and 2013.
Kjellberg's videos are a mixture of game walkthroughs, humour and enthusiastic swearing. "I'm just a guy from Sweden who likes to laugh and make other people laugh," as his YouTube profile puts it.
Kjellberg is represented by Maker Studios, one of the multi-channel networks (MCNs) that have emerged on YouTube in recent years, running networks of channels, cross-promoting them and signing sponsorship deals with brands. The company claims its network attracts 4.5 billion monthly views with more than 340 million people subscribing to its channels.
The Guardian's analysis of Tubefilter's monthly charts between July and December reveals that PewDiePie was followed by Turkish music channel MÜ-YAP (1.17 billion views) and musician Miley Cyrus (924.5 million views) in the overall rankings.
Musicians accounted for seven of the 10 most popular YouTube channels in the second half of 2013, with Katy Perry, One Direction, Rihanna and Thai music channel GMM Grammy joining MÜ-YAP and Miley in the upper reaches of the YouTube rankings.
US chat show The Ellen Show was the seventh most popular channel in the period, while another games channel, Sky Does Minecraft, ranked ninth. These top 10 channels alone accounted for 7.25 billion video views in that time.
British broadcaster the BBC ranked 50th for the six-month period with 273.1 million views on its official YouTube channel, outgunned by YouTube-born channels including Rooster Teeth (431.5 million), Smosh (430 million), The Fine Bros (385.6 million) and Machinima (367 million).
The Guardian’s analysis of the monthly Tubefilter charts also reveal a growing wave of popular YouTube channels aimed at children.
Five notched up more than 200 million views in the second half of 2013, led by Russian animated series Luntik with its 344.8 million views.
TuTiTu (274.8 million), Kids TV 123 (247.2 million) and another Russian channel Fixiki (239.4 million) were the others, while Russian channel Masha & Medved generated 213.6 million views between October and December alone, although its stats aren’t available for the three months before that, when it wasn’t on Tubefilter’s Top 100 chart.
Guardian
