Some insights about the 50 YouTube channels with the most subscribers

By César Heredia, data journalist

Maybe it’s not entirely a big surprise that T-Series, a music Indian channel, is the profile with the most subscribers on YouTube with 263 million people. T-Series is branded as the largest music record label with up to 35% of the Indian music market.

As the renowned channel says in its profile description, “T-Series is associated with the music industry from the past three decades, having an ample catalog of music comprising plenty of languages that covers the length & breadth of India.”

The second largest-subscriber channel on YouTube is the American entrepreneur and Internet personality MrBeast. with a community of more than 250 million followers.

It is no coincidence that these profiles come from India and the United States. These two countries gather at least 60% of the 50 YouTube channels with the most subscribers through April 14, 2024.

Where do the channels come from?

But here is the thing. Despite India having 36% of the 50 most subscribed YouTube channels, the most spoken language within the Big 50 on YouTube is English.

24 of the 50 YouTube channels with the most subscribers target English speakers (exactly 42%). Those channels gather 1,84 billion subscribers, while Indian-speaking channels collect 1,51 billion subscribers.

The Korean language lies in third place with a distant 6%. A curious thing is that 75% of South Korean channels have English as their primary language, not Korean.

Cyprus, Sweden, and Romania, all of them European countries, are also English-speaking channels.

Languages spoken among the 50 YouTube channels with most subscribers

Note: figures represent million subscribers. Source: Wikipedia

Russian, Spanish, and Urdu languages share 12% of the Big 50 quota, while Arabic, Bhojpuri, and Portuguese have 2% each.

There are only two Spanish-speaking channels in the 50 with the most subscribers: the Argentine children's channel El Reino Infantil (position 26th, 6, 63.6M), and the Chilean JuegaGerman, formerly known as HolaSoyGerman (position 49th, 49.7M). The only Portuguese-spoken channel comes from Brazil: Canal Kondzilla, with 67 million subscribers.

Russian-speaking Entertainment channels A4 and Get Movies have a media of 51,65 million subscribers. Both occupy the 42nd and 47th positions, respectively.

Among the main topics, 80% of the 50 most subscribed YouTube channels are labeled as Music (42%) or Entertainment (38%). Those are followed by Education (8%), Sports and Film (4% each), News and How-to (2% each).

Main topics

Note: figures represent million subscribers. Source: Wikipedia

Two-thirds of the 50 YouTube channels with the most subscribers (64%) are brands, like T-Series, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) -the most followed Sports channel worldwide- and Sony Music India.

Mr. Beast, Blackpink, Justin Bieber, Eminem, and Taylor Swift count as non-branded YouTube profiles. The full list is below: