Hello, and happy Friday.

For the third time in (roughly) as many years, this month I’ve spent a good chunk of my waking hours manually sifting through Youtube in a bid to produce this: Press Gazette’s latest ranking of the biggest news publishers on the platform.

There’s no authoritative list out there of all the news accounts on Youtube, so any effort like this will probably always produce something incomplete. But as the ranking gets longer — this time around I found 115 publisher channels with at least one million subscribers — we’re able to speak with greater confidence about trends in news on Youtube.

In the 15 months since we last updated the ranking, the 56 news accounts we assessed last time attracted 42.8 billion views and added 56 million subscribers. The top ten most-viewed publishers over that time together accounted for 23.4 billion of those watches, with MSNBC, Fox News and Indian news agency ANI News the top performers.

It’s even more vexing to corral together the top news influencer accounts, but this year we’ve also taken a look at stats for the likes of Joe Rogan, Piers Morgan and Megyn Kelly to see how their Youtube channels compare to those of the big news organisations.

While I was trawling Youtube, my colleagues were speaking with some of those organisations about their efforts on the platform. Charlotte Tobitt heard from The Sun about how they became (we think) the second-largest English-language newspaper on Youtube, beaten only by USA Today.

Video platforms aren’t the only thing we’ve spent our week on. We also have the latest ranking of the top 50 news sites in the US in December, showing an unsurprising pullback for top publishers as they come down from election highs, and Charlotte has tracked the big new publisher AI deals that have kicked off 2025 — including Google’s first AI news deal, with the AP, to provide real-time information for its Gemini tool.

And finally, some UK news with potential international ramifications. The slow gears of government regulation have finally begun to turn in the UK as the country’s competition watchdog has begun an investigation into Google search. The investigation, findings from which are due by October, will look into the role Google search plays in the UK market and could result in the service being given “strategic market status”.

That would make Google subject to conduct requirements, potentially including bargaining over payments to the news industry, and a failure to abide by those requirements could see the company slapped with a fine equivalent to 10% of global annual revenue.

Have a great weekend.

Bron

Biggest news publishers on Youtube: 100+ publishers have more than 1m subscribers

The most subscribed publisher account on Youtube is Vice — but it's narrowly beaten by Joe Rogan.

Read more

Youtube tips for publishers: Consistency, niche, SEO and community building

Press Gazette understands that Youtube publisher revenue share in the UK varies from £2 to £5 ($2.50 to $6) per 1,000 video views. A video has to be watched for at least 30 seconds to count as a view.

Read more

Who’s suing AI and who’s signing: Major deals with Google, OpenAI and Mistral start year

Google’s deal means the Associated Press will “deliver a feed of real-time information to help further enhance the usefulness of results displayed in the Gemini app”.

Read more

Top 50 news websites in the US: New York Times extends its lead

Among the 50 most-visited news sites in the US only 11 grew their visits month-on-month in December. Some 32 sites grew their total number of website visits year-on-year, according to Similarweb.

Read more

UK competition regulator to investigate Google search dominance and impact on news publishers

The CMA said the investigation “will assess Google’s position in search and search advertising services and how this impacts consumers and businesses including advertisers, news publishers, and rival search engines”.

Read more

How The Sun became biggest UK newspaper on Youtube with 6 million subscribers

The Sun’s Youtube watch time in terms of hours was up 40% in July to December compared to the same period in 2023, while its average watch time per video was up 127%, according to director of digital Will Payne, who attributed the growth to effort put into improving the content.

Read more

Also on Press Gazette:

• Top 50 news websites in the world: December sees traffic dip post US election

• Six things publishers should do now to protect themselves from AI scrapers

• 2025 journalism job cuts tracked: Washington Post, Huffpost and Vox layoffs start year

• News media trends for 2025: AI threats, Google search decline and subs slowdown

• Newsflation: Online news subscriptions in UK stay level as print cover prices surge

• Climate change scepticism almost extinct from UK national press