This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

The most popular channel on YouTube now belongs to British gamer Daniel Middleton, whose Minecraft videos published as The Diamond Minecart were watched more than 402m times in July 2015 alone.

That was enough to make him the biggest channel on YouTube that month ahead of wrestling body WWE’s 399m views, according to the latest chart published by analytics firm OpenSlate and online-video industry site Tubefilter.

Another British channel, nursery-rhymes collection Little Baby Bum, was third in the rankings with 391m views in July, followed by BuzzFeed Video’s 382m views, and musician Taylor Swift’s 381m.

It’s a mark of The Diamond Minecart’s rise, as well as sharp increases in views for the WWE and BuzzFeed Video channels in 2015, that the two channels that have traditionally topped this chart by some distance have fallen out of the top five.

Gamer Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg’s channel was ranked sixth in July with 373m views, while toy-unboxing channel Fun Toyz Collector was seventh with 370m views.

However, PewDiePie remains the top YouTube channel by subscribers, with more than 38.6 million people having signed up to get updates on his new videos through the service by the end of July. The Diamond Minecart had 7.5 million, likely reflecting his young audience.

The top ten was rounded out by It’s Baby Big Mouth, Masha and the Bear and Popular MMOs, reinforcing the sense of YouTube as a service attracting huge audiences of children and gamers - with The Diamond Minecart’s child-friendly videos neatly straddling the two.

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Middleton was one of the big draws at the Minecon Minecraft conference in London in July, where he attracted a crowd of thousands of children and parents for a one-hour session blending live gameplay and answering questions from young fans.

Middleton is signed to multi-channel network Maker Studios, which also counts PewDiePie - born in Sweden but currently living in Brighton in the UK - and another child-friendly British Minecraft gamer, Joseph “Stampy” Garrett, in its roster.

According to the OpenSlate/Tubefilter chart, the top 100 YouTube channels collectively generated 17.3bn video views in July 2015, an 82% increase from the 9.5bn views recorded a year before in July 2014.