The most-followed English language professional news publishers on Youtube collectively increased their subscriber count by a fifth over the past 15 months, Press Gazette analysis shows.
The same group of 56 news accounts also saw their all-time video views grow by a quarter over the same period.
The research is Press Gazette’s third ranking of news publishers on Youtube with at least one million subscribers, following earlier editions in June 2022 and October 2023.
We estimate that 115 English-language publisher accounts have more than one million Youtube subscribers.
Youtube is the world’s largest video streaming platform, reportedly now accounting for 10% of all monthly television viewing in the US and increasingly entrenching its position as a living room staple rather than something watched solely through phones and computers.
This month Piers Morgan, previously believed to be the highest-paid journalist in the UK, bought the rights to his Youtube show Piers Morgan Uncensored from employer News UK, declaring it was “clear from the recent US election that Youtube is an increasingly powerful and influential media platform”. The show, which began as a traditional broadcast programme on News UK’s TalkTV, has now outlived the linear channel on which it was founded.
The Sun is the most popular UK newspaper on Youtube with six million subscribers. The brand’s director of digital Will Payne told Press Gazette the platform is “really central to what we do”, adding that “our ambition for video is really, really significant”.
This year’s ranking is more than double the length of the last after new accounts were found and others passed the one million subscriber threshold for the first time. Several of the new entries are run by a publisher that was already featured in the last ranking: for example, although Vice News (9.2 million subscribers) appeared in 2023’s ranking, we overlooked the central Vice channel (18.7 million), Vice TV (2.6 million) and Vice Asia (1.6 million).
The flagship Vice channel enters the ranking at the top of the chart, ahead of both CNN (17.4 million subscribers), which had previously been number one, and the US ABC News (18 million), which has itself overtaken the Ted Turner-founded cable news network.
Other accounts that were missed in the previous ranking included news agencies Reuters (3.6 million) and the Associated Press (3.5 million) as well as news magazine programmes 60 Minutes (3.4 million) and Inside Edition (13.5 million). We have also added several major Indian publishers including NDTV (11.4 million), India Today (9.9 million) and CNN-News18 (8.9 million).
Some names on the list appear to have passed the one million subscriber mark since Press Gazette carried out our last ranking, including News UK’s (now Youtube-based) TalkTV (1.2 million) and the BBC World Service (1.1 million).
If you are aware of any news publishers with more than one million subscribers that have been left out of this chart please reach out to Press Gazette at bron.maher@pressgazette.co.uk.
Certain publishers that do well on Youtube, for example youth-focused explainer outlet TLDR News or The New Statesman, have been left out of the ranking because they do not meet the one million subscriber minimum criteria.
Press Gazette found ten professional news publishers with ten million or more subscribers, among them BBC News (17.2 million), Al Jazeera English (15.1 million) and Fox News (12.6 million).
The newspaper with the most subscribers is Gannett-owned USA Today (7.3 million), followed by The Sun (six million) and The Wall Street Journal (six million). The Sun is the most-watched newspaper account, however, with five billion views since its channel launched in 2007.
The channel with the most all-time video views is new entrant Inside Edition, with nearly 25 billion watches across its 36,600 videos. It is followed by Fox News, with 18.9 billion views, and CNN on 17.1 billion.
What are the top news influencer accounts on Youtube?
For the first time, Press Gazette has also created a table separately collecting together some of the biggest news influencer accounts on Youtube.
Whereas the main ranking focuses on large, traditional news companies, most of the accounts in the influencer table are fronted by an individual or a small group of people, and many (but not all) engage primarily in commentary or analysis of the news.
The influencer table below is not exhaustive. The accounts included were found through a mix of suggestions from the Youtube algorithm, third-party lists of news accounts and Pew-Knight research into news influencers that was published in November.
[Read more: Fifth of Americans regularly get news from social media influencers]
One of the influencer accounts, Piers Morgan Uncensored — which does do regular original interviews — featured in the 2023 ranking but this year has been moved across to the influencer table. Another publisher, The Young Turks, has been kept on the main ranking because it more closely resembles a traditional multi-anchor, opinion-led broadcaster than an influencer channel, but several of its affiliate accounts fronted by one or two people have been included in the latter table.
We have also included The Joe Rogan Experience in the influencer list. Although the channel does not have as much of a focus on the news as the other entries, Rogan’s interviews have repeatedly created agenda-leading news and the influence of his podcast is frequently contrasted with that of the traditional media.
With 19 million subscribers, Rogan is 300,000 followers ahead of the top publisher on Youtube, Vice. His channel has received nearly 5.8 billion views since it was launched in 2013, a figure just behind the all-time view count for BBC News.
Both sets of accounts, meanwhile, remain far behind the top non-news accounts. The Youtube channel with the biggest following at time of writing is Mr Beast, with 344 million subscribers.
Publishers with the highest average views per Youtube video
Once again topping the charts for the highest average Youtube views per video (calculated as all time views divided by total number of videos) is Vox, which focuses on explainer journalism on Youtube and brings in an average of two million views for each video. After Vice, Vox is also the most-subscribed publisher in Press Gazette's analysis that is not a legacy broadcaster.
In previous years there has been a large gap between Vox and the second-highest average publisher on this list: in 2023 the second-place publisher was DW Documentary, the long-form channel for German news agency DW, which had an average of 756,000 views per video.
This year however both Business Insider’s science-focused channel Insider Science and the flagship Vice channel close that gap with averages of 1.34 million and 1.25 million respectively. (Insider Science no longer appears to actively publish, but presumably continues to generate views and advertising revenue.)
Further down the list Vice and Business Insider both publish several of the top Youtube news channels for average views. As well as Insider Science, Business Insider’s self-named channel has received an average of 829,000 views per video, its Insider channel 660,000 and Insider Tech 388,000.
Vice News, similarly has an average of 507,000 views per video, Vice Asia has an average of 314,000 and Vice TV 263,000.
Many of the news influencer accounts perform comparably to the most-watched news publisher accounts. The Joe Rogan Experience, for example, has received an average of 1.7 million views on each of its videos, while legal analysis account Legaleagle averages 1.4 million.
Tucker Carlson’s videos, similarly, receive more views on average than sixth-placed DW Documentary, while videos by Piers Morgan and Ben Shapiro receive more views than videos by ninth-placed culture publisher Complex.
Which news publishers added the most Youtube subscribers, got the most views and posted the most videos since October 2023?
For those publishers featured in the last ranking — in this case including Piers Morgan Uncensored — it is possible to compare figures to see how they have performed between October 2023 and January 2025.
In general the publishers that saw the greatest Youtube subscriber growth over the period were already among the largest accounts by follower count. Of the ten channels to add the most subscribers since our last analysis, six appear in the top-ten of our list of the most-subscribed accounts and all of them appear in the top 25.
Both the largest overall growth and the second-largest proportional growth was seen at Turkish state broadcaster TRT World (8.8 million subscribers), which has added 4.3 million new followers since the last analysis.
There was notable growth among some smaller channels however: Piers Morgan Uncensored (3.6 million subscribers) added nearly 1.8 million subs over the fifteen months, just behind Fox News and ahead of NBC News. The Sun (six million subscribers) and Sky News Australia (5.1 million) each added 1.5 million new subscribers over the 15 months, the Daily Mail (4.3 million) added 1.4 million and E! News (2.3 million) added one million.
The most-watched publishers since the last ranking, similarly, tended to be the channels with the most subscribers, although the publisher with the most video views in the period was 19th-ranked MSNBC, with more than 3.7 billion.
MSNBC was followed by eighth-placed Fox News, with 3.4 billion video views, 20th-placed Indian news agency ANI News (2.7 billion) and the second-placed American broadcaster ABC News, with 2.5 billion.
Some big names in news, meanwhile, saw the least attention to their videos: The Economist cumulatively saw 35.3 million views to its videos, BBC News Africa 62.5 million and The New York Times 86 million.
The entire group of 56 accounts we assessed last year collectively received 42.8 billion views over the 15 months and added 56 million subscribers.
The most prolific publisher of videos to Youtube among the accounts featured in the 2023 ranking was Indian news channel WION (World Is One News), which posted more than 68,000 clips to the platform over the period, equivalent to around 150 a day.
It was followed by opinion-led Sky News Australia, which published nearly 50,000 videos, and ANI News with 35,000. The tenth- to sixth-most prolific accounts, including the UK’s Sky News, Fox News and GB News, all published around 40 videos a day.
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