Top YouTube channels, ranked by live data.
Browse the biggest channels in 14 niches, pulled directly from YouTube's API and ranked by real subscriber count. Refreshed every 24 hours, free to read, no signup.
Top channels in your country.
Each country is a separate leaderboard built from YouTube's regional search results.
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How this data works.
Where the rankings come from, how often they update, and what's coming next. Still curious? Get in touch.
Directly from YouTube. We call YouTube Data API v3 (search.list + channels.list) once per day, pull the top channels in each niche, and cache the result. Subscriber count, total views, and video count come straight from YouTube's own statistics endpoint, the same one YouTube Studio uses.
By live subscriber count, descending. We search for channels matching each niche query (e.g. "gaming youtube channel"), filter out anything below 500K subscribers (cuts random small channels that share a name with a popular one), then rank what's left by subs. The number you see is the count YouTube returned during the most recent refresh, which is shown as the "updated" timestamp.
Once every 24 hours. The refresh runs at 05:30 UTC and replaces each category's cached list wholesale, so departed channels don't linger. If a channel changed name, hid its sub count, or fell below 500K subs, it drops off the next refresh.
Two common reasons. (1) The channel is below the 500K subscriber threshold, which we use to filter out small same-named channels that show up in YouTube's search results. (2) YouTube's relevance-sorted search didn't surface it within the top 50 candidates for that niche query. We don't curate a hand-picked list, so a channel either matches the query strongly enough to surface or it doesn't.
Yes. Use the free Channel Stats Checker to pull stats for any channel by URL or handle. No subscriber threshold there, and it works for channels of any size.
Within a 24-hour window. YouTube's public API returns subscriber counts rounded to the nearest hundred (or thousand for large channels), so they're close to live but not second-by-second. For the precise to-the-second count of a single channel, use the channel's own about page on YouTube.
Because YouTube's search-by-name returns lookalikes. Search for "drake" and you get the artist plus thousands of channels named after him by random users with 5 subs each. Filtering at 500K guarantees the leaderboard shows real, established channels and not noise.
Yes. The next iteration adds country dimensions (top channels in each niche by region: US, UK, Canada, Australia, India, etc.) and per-category landing pages with the full top 50 for each niche. This page is the v1 hub — drilldowns are next.