Top Rightwing Youtubers

Summary

We compared the view counts of over 50 rightwing Youtubers and found that across his three channels, Tim Pool dominates the field, having received over 102 million views over the past month. He beats out Steven Crowder, his closest competitor, by more than 50 million views.

Tim Pool’s lead in views is so substantial that even if you combine the views of both Crowder and Pool’s next closest rival, BlazeTV, they would still not add up to Pool’s view count.

When considering average views per video, a slightly different picture emerges. This time Pool is in the number 3 spot, beaten out by the Conservative Twins and Salty Cracker Youtube pages.

Methodology

In order to understand who the most viewed rightwing YouTubers are and where Tim Pool places in this ranking, we decided to redo and expand our earlier analysis answering this question. Rather than focus on ranking the YouTubers by subscriber counts, which can be misleading, we chose to focus on their view counts over the past month.

Total Views Section

To draw together a list of the top rightwing YouTubers, we searched Google, Reddit, and Twitter for lists of the top rightwing creators and then supplemented these lists by asking our Twitter followers to suggest any names we might have left off. Our followers rose to the occasion and provided several useful additions. A full list of included creators can be found here.

To get to the total view counts for each creator, we manually searched for each of their channels on the social media analytics website SocialBlade. Any Youtube creators who had more than one channel had all their channels numbers combined into one figure to truly reflect their total monthly views. These views were then added to the spreadsheet linked above. Finally, a chart was created based on these results.

An important note is that we are not including mainstream media organizations in this analysis. If we did, organizations such as Fox News would still beat Pool by over 100 million views, however, they also have a more extensive back catalog, hundreds or thousands of employees, and often release more frequent videos.

Another caveat for our analysis is that despite our best efforts, we may well have missed other more prominent rightwing Youtubers. Any creators suggested by readers will be added to future investigations.

Average Views Section

To get the results for the average views section, we noted the views of the most recent 10 videos from each of the top 10 rightwing YouTubers. Where a YouTuber had more than one channel, we chose their 10 most recent videos regardless of which of their channels these videos were from. We ignored any videos published within the last 24 hours to not advantage/disadvantage any YouTuber who had only just posted a video. We then calculated the average views across those 10 videos.

Results

Consistent with our previous analysis, we again identified that the top rightwing YouTuber by view count over the past month is Tim Pool. And once again, he beats out his competition by more than 50 million views.

Moving down the list, the next four most successful Youtubers Steven Crowder, BlazeTV, The Daily Wire, and Liberal Hivemind, are all within a similar ballpark of views ranging from over 51 million monthly views for Crowder to just under 36 million for Liberal Hivemind.

After this, views drop down another level for the remaining five creators in the top ten list. Once you get past the 11th most-watched rightwing YouTuber (Ben Shapiro), the viewing numbers take another big dive into the single million digits level and below for the remaining 50 creators included in the analysis. 

The top ten YouTube creators, by view count are listed in the graph below. A full list of all 50 and their monthly views can be found here.

After looking at the raw total number of monthly views, we decided to add another dimension to our analysis and look at the average views per video for the top ten creators. In this analysis, we find that Tim Pool comes third with Conservative Twins (alternatively known as the Hodge Twins) and the creator Salty Cracker beating him in views per video. Amazingly the highest budget creators such as PragerU, The Daily Wire, and BlazeTV, come near the bottom half of the graph this time. This is partially explainable by the varied content they produce – some producers/hosts are less popular than others. We would also strongly caution against drawing too much of an inference from this data as only ten videos were used to create the average views per video graph. Future analyses will include a greater number than this.

Discussion

Interestingly the YouTubers who receive the most mainstream media attention, for example, Dave Rubin, Jordan Peterson, and even Ben Shapiro (who just missed out on getting onto the graph) don’t appear in the top 10. Instead, the creators dominating the chart are drawn from three fairly different groups.

The first group is larger independent rightwing media outlets such as BlazeTV and The Daily Wire, who create highly produced news and commentary content. The second group is men shouting at a computer, for example, Tim Pool and Liberal Hivemind. This group probably has the best margins because their videos require incredibly little effort and have low costs. Finally, the third group falls somewhere between these two extremes, for example Steven Crowder and the Conservative Twins. Female creators are notably underrepresented on the list; the first –  Abigail Shapiro (Ben Shapiro’s sister) – only appears in the 21st position.

One explanation for why the Youtubers who receive the most views don’t receive the most media attention is because “man shouts at computer for hours each day”  isn’t a particularly compelling news hook. That may be a problem. And it might be more important than many people realise.

Each year millions of people around the world spend millions of hours watching the creators included in our analysis. Many of the top creators upload daily – sometimes multiple times – and these repeat contacts help build a powerful relationship between them and their audience. Anyone who doubts this need only interact with their fans online. People critical of the creators often end up receiving avalanches of harassment, which often moves beyond angry online comments to death threats and real-life danger. The viewers also cement their relationships by collectively giving millions of dollars to the YouTube creators via donations and buying their merchandise.

With the 2020 election rapidly approaching, it is inarguable that the creators on our list will shift votes. What remains undetermined is the number of votes they’ll help shift and the electoral importance of the votes.

Conclusion

Tim Pool continues to dominate the rightwing Youtube sphere drawing in millions of views per day across his three main channels. From a total views perspective it’s hard to see how anyone can beat him. Not only does he receive more than double the views of his closest rivals, his channels and view count continue to grow. Last time we ran our analysis in July, he was receiving around 20-30 million fewer monthly views, and at this stage, an end to his growth isn’t in sight.

Rightwing creators dominate the attention economy on Youtube. Their influence has already been felt in the run-up to the 2016 and 2020 American elections and in the years between. At the current rate, it doesn’t look like this influence is going away any time soon. If anything it’s only getting stronger. While some of the most extreme YouTubers and those with the best branding have been the subject of numerous stories many others have not faced any serious inquiry despite their influence, wealth, and view count.

Perhaps it’s time that “angry man shouts at computer” becomes a story worth investigating.

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