The biggest channels on YouTube have more than doubled in audience size, with a toy unboxing show proving to be the most popular, according to new research.
In January, YouTube’s top 100 channels received more than double the views that they were seeing one year earlier, growing from just over 7 billion collective monthly views to 14.7 billion views, according to analytics from OpenSlate.
For much of 2014, the biggest star of them all was gamer PewDiePie, but he’s now been relegated into second place in the rankings by Funtoys Collector, the toy-unboxing channel formerly known as DC Toys Collector – and before that, Disney Collector.
The channel racked up 517.3m views on YouTube in January 2015 alone, well ahead of PewDiePie’s 417.9m.
However, both are well up on their view counts from a year ago: 175.6m and 266.5m respective views in January 2014.
The latest month’s top 10 is a mixture of music, games and children’s channels, including:
1. FunToys Collector (517.3m)
2. PewDie gaming channel (417.9m)
3. Taylor Swift (361.3m views in January)
4. Russian cartoon channelGetMovies (359.5m)
5. Nursery rhymes collection Little Baby Bum (302.1m)
6. Russian animated series Masha and the Bear (287.8m)
7. Games channel Popular MMOs (266.9m)
8. More toy-unboxing with Blu Toys (255.3m)
9. Child-friendly Minecraft gamer Stampy (252.9m)
10. BuzzFeed Video (239.4m)
View a sample video from Funtoys Collector, which has over half a million views alone, here: