YouTube's top 10 games channels watched 2.2bn times in January

The 10 most popular games channels on YouTube generated more than 2.2bn video views in January alone, led by Let’s Play gamer Felix ‘PewDiePie’ Kjellberg with 417.9m views that month.

PewDiePie topped the latest monthly chart of YouTube games channels published by online video industry site Tubefilter, based on data from analytics firm OpenSlate.

PewDiePie was joined in January’s top 10 by Popular MMOs (266.8m views); Stampy (252.9m); The Diamond Minecart (210.8m); Markiplier (208.1m); Jack Sceptic Eye (201.2m); Vanoss Gaming (183.8m); Vegetta (177.8m); Juega German (127.3m); and El Rubius (108.8m).

That’s nearly 2.2bn views between the 10 channels. How are they growing? You can gauge that by a comparison to Tubefilter and OpenSlate’s chart from six months ago, in July 2014, when the top 10 YouTube games channels generated 1.6bn views.

Meanwhile, the 100 most popular channels in the chart’s collected views grew by nearly 40% from 4.3bn in July 2014 to nearly 6.1bn in January 2015.

Multi-channel network (MCN) Maker Studios accounted for four of the top five games channels in January – PewDiePie, Stampy, The Diamond Minecart and Markiplier – while Popular MMOs is signed to rival Fullscreen.

The chart is the latest reminder of just how big games has become as a category on YouTube, rivalling music and children’s videos as its most popular content.

There’s a crossover with the latter and games in channels like Stampy and The Diamond Minecart, which are aimed at the huge audience of young Minecraft fans. Both are likely to benefit from this week’s launch of a dedicated YouTube Kids app.

YouTube gamers have also become powerful influencers within the games industry, with developers and publishers jostling to persuade the most popular channels to feature their games in Let’s Play videos – often paying for the privilege.