About this chart race
In 2011 the entire top ten fitted inside 5.2 million subscribers. Ray William Johnson led on 5.2M, just ahead of nigahiga on 4.9M, with Smosh and Machinima level on 4.0M. That winning total is about one per cent of what it takes to lead the same list in 2026.
PewDiePie took first place in 2013 on 17.1M and held it for six straight years, finishing 2018 on 79M. That was the tightest year in the race: T-Series ended 2018 one million behind on 78M, went past during 2019, and closed that year on 123M against PewDiePie's 102M.
The five T-Series years, 2019 to 2023, took the leader from 123M to 256M and changed what the rest of the table looked like. Individual creators were pushed out by children's channels and music catalogues — Cocomelon, SET India, Kids Diana Show, Like Nastya, Vlad and Niki and Zee Music Company. At the end of 2021 MrBeast and Kids Diana Show were dead level on 86.6M.
MrBeast went past T-Series during 2024, ending that year on 340M against 282M, and reached 512M by August 2026. The 198M gap between first and second is the widest the race has ever seen, and PewDiePie, still on 110M, no longer makes the top ten. Channels that disappear from earlier years did not lose subscribers — the bar to stay in the top ten simply rose past them.
Counts are taken from year-end snapshots of published rankings. YouTube's own auto-generated topic channels are excluded, as are its corporate channels, which trackers counted in the early years because new accounts were subscribed to them automatically.
This animated ranking shows how subscribers changed across 36 series between 2011 and 2026. The bars re-order themselves as the years advance, so overtakes are visible as they happen rather than hidden inside a table. Use the list on the left to choose exactly who competes, drag the slider to jump to any year, or open the table view to read the underlying numbers.
As of 2026, MrBeast leads with 512.0 million subscribers.
Included in this race
MrBeast, T-Series, Cocomelon, SET India, Vlad and Niki, Stokes Twins, Kids Diana Show, 김프로KIMPRO, Like Nastya, Zee Music Company, WWE, PewDiePie, 5-Minute Crafts, Justin Bieber, Canal KondZilla, Dude Perfect, Ed Sheeran, Eminem, HolaSoyGerman, whinderssonnunes, Taylor Swift, elrubiusOMG, Katy Perry, Rihanna, One Direction, Smosh, nigahiga, JennaMarbles, Machinima, Epic Rap Battles of History, Ray William Johnson, freddiew, CollegeHumor, FPSRussia, Shane Dawson, Annoying Orange.
Source
Data from Wikipedia, Social Blade and VidStatsX (archived year-end snapshots). Every figure shown comes from this source — nothing is estimated or generated.
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