How Many YouTubers Have 1M Subscribers? Data Reveals the Answer.
There are 41,900 YouTube channels with over 1 million subscribers in 2023. We can estimate this based on publicly available data.
YouTube doesn’t release many official numbers around channel size or growth across its platform. However, there is a way to roughly estimate how many YouTube channels have over 1 million subscribers, and that’s with publicly available data and a little bit of investigative work.
If we search “1M subscribers” on YouTube, we can easily find channels celebrating the milestone with a dedicated video. And they should, it’s quite an accomplishment! We can find a celebratory video published in the last week by using the filters available in the YouTube Search bar.
Once we have that, we can copy and paste the channel name over to a tool like SocialBlade, which catalogs millions of YouTube channels that have a minimum of 5 subscribers. SocialBlade will tell us where in the rankings our selected channel falls on the total list of YouTube channels in their database, and they also reveal how many channels are larger than the channel we’ve selected.
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The last channel I selected to investigate this data had recently published their 1M subscriber celebration video only 3 days prior. SocialBlade revealed that about 41.9k channels were larger at the time, which means about ~41k channels have 1 million subscribers or more.
Note: YouTube channels above 1 million subscribers often grow rapidly, so a single popular channel can quickly become an out-of-date source of information if only 1-2 weeks go by; they may have gained tens of thousands of subscribers by then. That’s why it’s important to check a channel that just recently crossed the 1M subscriber milestone.
We've done this every 3 months, once per quarter, for the past few years; I just set a simple calendar reminder and grab the latest number of channels with over 1M subscribers. Like most YouTube statistics, this number is a bit of a moving target. The platform is always growing. Keeping tabs on this number over time is how we've been able to collect a range of this data. I was honestly surprised how many channels have over 1M subscribers—congrats to those who have grown to this significant number.
But, that's not all! There are lots of other questions we can answer with publicly available data like the above. Let's explore even more.
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How many YouTubers have 100k subscribers?
In 2023, around 388,500 YouTubers have over 100k subscribers, which is 21% more channels than in 2022.
What's special about this milestone is that most CPM data shows that that 100k subscribers is enough to make a full-time living for many YouTubers. However, it does depend on the topics that the channel covers – some video topics are more advertiser friendly and command higher CPMs, or payouts per advertisement.
How many YouTubers have 10k subscribers?
In 2023, around 2,900,000 YouTubers have over 10k subscribers, nearly 6x more channels than those who've crossed the 100k milestone.
How many YouTubers have crossed each subscriber milestone?
| Number of subscribers | Total number of YouTubers |
|---|---|
| 10M | 1,200 |
| 1M | 41,900 |
| 100k | 388,500 |
| 10k | 2,900,000 |
Which YouTubers have the most subscribers?
The largest YouTubers grow much faster than your average YouTube channel. From the data we've seen, top channels can add millions of subscribers per week. So, who's at the top of the list right now?
- MrBeast (137 million subscribers)
- PewDiePie (111 million subscribers)
- Like Nastya (105 million subscribers)
- Vlad and Niki (94.9 million subscribers)
- BangtanTV (73.9 million subscribers)
- Justin Bieber (71.1 million subscribers)
- Dude Perfect (59 million subscribers)
- Marshmello (56.2 million subscribers)
- Eminem (55.6 million subscribers)
- Ed Sheeran (53 million subscribers)
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