Body slamming US stars beat nursery-rhymes channel Little Baby Bum with 456.4m views of their videos, boosted by Summerslam 2015

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

WWE wrestling, children’s nursery rhymes and Turkish music videos were the biggest hits on YouTube in August 2015, according to the latest chart of the online video service’s top channels.

The American wrestling channel topped that month’s chart of the most-viewed YouTube channels, published by analytics firm OpenSlate and industry site Tubefilter, with 456.4m views of its videos.

That put WWE – boosted by clips from its annual Summerslam event – ahead of British children’s music channel Little Baby Bum, whose videos were watched 448.4m times in August.

Turkish music channel netd müzik ranked third in the chart with 433.6m views, with Minecraft gamer The Diamond Minecart (394.5m) and BuzzFeed Video (373.5m) rounding out the top five.

The WWE has been growing its YouTube views and audience steadily over the last two years. In August 2013, its videos were watched 41.8m times, making it the 52nd most popular YouTube channel according to the OpenSlate/Tubefilter chart.

A year later, in August 2014, the WWE was the 15th biggest channel on YouTube with 149.4m views. Its monthly views have thus tripled in the past year, while its number of subscribers on YouTube has nearly doubled from 3.9 million to 7.7 million in the same period.

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That growth is partly the result of YouTube’s overall growth. In August 2014, the service’s top 100 channels’ videos were watched 10.2bn times, but a year later that total was 17.4bn – year-on-year growth of 70.6%.

YouTube itself prefers other metrics to chart its growth. The company says its overall “watch time” – the amount of time people watch videos for – has grown by 60% in the last year, while its number of active daily users is up 40%.

The latest OpenSlate / Tubefilter chart also highlights a relatively lowly ranking for gamer Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg, who for a long time owned the most popular channel on YouTube.

In August 2015, his channel dropped out of the top 10, with 302.7m views making it the 11th most popular on YouTube. However, PewDiePie remains the most subscribed-to channel, ending August with 39.5 million subscribers. The channel also recently reached the milestone of 10bn total views.

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