Stuart Dredge 

Shakira beat PewDiePie as world’s most popular YouTube channel in February

Tubefilter chart rankings don’t lie as star’s Rihanna duet flies high, but British Minecraft channels also had a big month. By Stuart Dredge
  
  

Shakira's racy video with Rihanna made her the top YouTube star in February.
Shakira's racy video with Rihanna made her the top YouTube star in February. Photograph: PR

With nearly 2.3bn video views in 2013, Swedish gamer PewDiePie had the world’s biggest YouTube channel. In February 2014, though, he was no match for Shakira and Rihanna.

The music stars’ Can’t Remember to Forget You duet was released at the end of January, and made Shakira’s official YouTube channel the most popular on Google’s video service the following month.

According to industry site Tubefilter’s latest rankings, Shakira’s channel racked up 258.7m views in February, up 229% compared to her January figures.

The video has so far been watched 189.1m times on YouTube – a figure that includes the last two days in January and the first 13 days in March – with a separate audio-only version having reached 32.2m views too.

Shakira’s official YouTube channel was launched in September 2009, but nearly a tenth of its 2.7bn all-time views came in February 2014 alone. More than 780,000 people subscribed to her channel that month, taking her total subscribers past 3.1m.

PewDiePie – aka Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg – was the second biggest YouTube channel that month with just under 250m views, although he remains well ahead of Shakira for subscribers, having added 2.2m new ones in February taking his total to 24.4m.

The latest chart emphasises the diverse nature of the most popular YouTube channels, with a top 10 in which established music stars like Katy Perry (182.6m views in February), Justin Bieber (120.1m) and Beyoncé (119.7m) rub shoulders with toy reviews channel BluCollection (183.4m) and Minecraft-focused Stampy (159.3m).

Tubefilter claims that the top 100 YouTube channels generated 7bn views collectively in February, with several of them hailing from the UK (plus PewDiePie, who despite living and working in Brighton, is classed as Swedish by the chart).

Behind him, Stampy was the biggest British channel on YouTube in February with its 159.3m views, followed by One Direction (109.2m), The Diamond Minecart (62.5m), iBallisticSquid (61.6m), Yogscast (59.8m), and the BBC (50.9m).

It’s notable that four of these channels – Stampy, The Diamond Minecart, iBallisticSquid and Yogscast – are based on video game Minecraft, generating 343.2m views between them in February.

My beef: Shakira and Rihanna make life harder for bisexuals

 

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