French and German original channels on YouTube have attracted bigger audiences than UK sites, according to Anna Stuart, analyst at IHS.
French and German original channels have an average of 14 million views per channel, compared with the UK’s 11 million. There were fewer non-English language channels at launch, but they have been more than pulling their weight.
The three biggest sites are Motorvision, a German automotive channel run by MV Media (69 million views, 12% of all Original Channel views), French production company Black Dynamite’s comedy channel Studio Bagel (63 million views, 11% of the total) and Mediakraft’s German comedy channel Ponk (53 million views, 10% of the total).
All three of the top individual channels are non-English language. Because UK users move easily between home-grown and US content, one explanation could be that they do not concentrate their attention on UK output. The pool of professionalised online content in French and German is smaller, and therefore the original channels in those languages find it easier to stand out.
The most-watched genre is Automotive, with 40 million views on average per channel, mostly driven by the fantastically popular Motorvision channel. The huge amount of Entertainment channels launched (16 in all) have also performed very strongly, with 11.6 million views per channel on average.
Comedy dominates in the rankings by subscribers. Comedy channels Ponk (485,000 subscribers) and Studio Bagel (836,000 subscribers), the two outstandingly popular comedy channels, have 23% of the total original channel subscriptions.
The top three account for 33% of the total Original Channel views this year. In terms of subscriptions, the top 5 channels take 42% of the total.
