Reaching one million subscribers in YouTube is a dream for many YouTubers and the road to million is not definitely easy. It takes years for many and most often, thousands of videos. But here , 87 YouTube channels that was created in 2018, took less than a year to reach this milestone.
Before we start, let’s first get an overview about the overall subscriber-base in YouTube. YouTube categorizes it’s top performing creators with three different awards. Silver play, channels with over 100K Subscribers, Gold Play – Channels with more than 1 Million Subscribers & Diamond Play – channels with more than 10 Million subscribers. Out of the 20 Million plus active channels available today, currently we have 90.87K channels are in Silver play club, 10.2K channels are in Gold play club and 359 channels are Diamond play club members. In other words 101.4K YouTube channels worldwide has more than 100K subscribers, 10.5K YouTube channels worldwide has more than 1 Million subscribers and 359 channels worldwide has more than 10 Million subscribers.
We digged deep and analyzed the subscriber growth of the channels created in 2018 from different countries and categories, which we believe is the best sample to get the real understanding on the YouTube channels growth in recent time. Here is what we found out.
- 87 YouTube channels created in 2018, has got Million Subscribers within year itself, which is 185% upwards when compared to previous year (47 channels created in 2017 has reached Million subscribers then).
- Overall 4,322 Youtube channels has reached the 1 million subscriber milestone this year, which is 378% upwards against previous year (1635 channels reached the this landmark in 2017)
Time taken to reach 1 Million Channel Subscribers
These 87 channels took an average of 167 days to reach the milestone and to surprise, 18 of these channels took less than 100 days to reach 1 million subscribers. Kenia OS, YouTube channel of the controversial Mexican YouTuber took just 5 days, followed by Juki Dog, another Mexican channel, which took 20 days and Gabroever, also from Mexico, which took 29 days to reach the mark.
Countrywise Distribution
To our surprise, Mexico leads the chart of the highest no. of 2018 channels that reached 1 Million subscribers in a year. 14 Mexican channels has reached this milestone, followed by 12 channels from US, 11 channels from India, 5 channels from Turkey and 4 channels from Indonesia.
Categorywise Distribution
Without any surprise here, Entertainment channels (Film & Entertainment, Music) are the fastest growing channels followed by Lifestyle channels and Gaming channels. Cooking & Health channels and Sports category channels created in 2018 also witnessed fast growth.
No. of Videos Uploaded
One common myth among the creators is more no. of videos leads to more subscribers. But reality is more than 63.22% channels that has reached 1M subs in a year has uploaded less than 100 videos while only 12.64% channels has uploaded over 1000 videos in this calendar year period. The mantra “Quality over Quantity” is proved again.
Best time to Upload
Popular belief is that uploading in midweek will help you grow subscribers and views. But our findings from this fast grown channels prove otherwise. These popular channels uploaded more videos in Fridays and Saturdays and the videos posted on these two days gained more popularity in terms of views and subscription than others.
Branded Channels vs Creator Channels
We have also analyzed the split between Branded Channels and Creator channels in the race of 1 Million subscribers in a year. Channels owned by Brands, which normally comes from a clear strategy, quality video and market reach plan had a highest success ration when compared to creator channels. Out of the 87 Channels, which has reached one million subscribers in 2018, 62 channels belonged to Brands and 25 channels belonged to the creators.
We believe that all the information in the blogpost will help you to get an understanding about the YouTube Millionaire club and If you need any specific insights and support for your YouTube Channel, Pls. feel free to reach us (support at brandmaxima.com). We are very happy to assist you.
You can also give a try of our YouTube Analytics to get over 50+ actionable insights about your own YouTube Channel or a competitor channel. We also offers a free BrandMaxima YouTube Analytics Chrome Extension to get quick insights right inside your browser, which is available for download at Chrome Webstore.