Who’s winning YouTube?
Also inside: the Democrats’ fundraising blitz, TikTok rolls out some new updates, and more
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YouTube proved to be a massive cultural hub last year – and a pretty major blind spot for politicos and pundits, especially on the left, when it comes to organic content. Understanding the ~vibes~ on YouTube was a huge priority for me coming into 2025, and I’m excited to share that we will have a *new* YouTube chart to track the most-viewed channels here in the US week over week.
More on that below, but first…
Digital ad spending, by the numbers:
FWIW, U.S. political advertisers spent about $11.4 million on Facebook and Instagram ads last week. Here were the top ten spenders nationwide:
We have yet another addition to the trend of Dems running Meta ads to fundraise off of the Trump chaos: Sen. Mark Kelly is running fundraising ads nationwide on Facebook + Instagram from his campaign disclaimer, Mark Kelly for Senate, condemning Trump’s pardons of the J6ers and taking swings at Elon Musk. Since this is now such a trend, it bears noting that overt fundraising ads (on their own) are not necessarily the same thing as actual resistance/activism. If you’re looking for examples of resistance-type ads that are not as explicitly geared at fundraising, check out these new ads from MoveOn.org offering tools for holding ICE accountable
American Conservative Union, which organizes CPAC, was up this past week with IG ads running nationwide that feature clips of Doug Burgum, Stephen Miller, and others who spoke at the 2025 CPAC. The ads link directly to CPAC’s Instagram and appear to be an effort to grow that account.
Meanwhile, political advertisers spent just over $1.9 million on Google and YouTube ads last week. These were the top ten spenders nationwide:
The battle for the open Wisconsin Supreme Court seat is continuing to heat up: the Dem candidate, Susan Crawford for WI, is now up in the top Google + YouTube ad spenders as of this past week with a fundraising ad. Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s Building America’s Future PAC continues to hammer her with attack ads challenging her record targeted at Wisconsinites.
On X (formerly Twitter), political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $1.3 million on ads in 2025. According to X’s political ad disclosure, here are the top spenders year to date:
…and lastly, on Snapchat, political advertisers in the U.S. have spent around $127,600 on ads in 2025. Here are the top spenders year to date:
The Dem fundraising blitz (see above) has now made its way over to Snapchat, with Sen. Chris Murphy running several new Snap fundraising ads nationwide.
Who’s winning YouTube?
If there was one thing that was clear to me at the end of last year, it was this: pundits, politicos, and those who still mostly get their info from legacy media were simply not paying enough attention to YouTube. So, a big 2025 priority for me was to dig into what’s going on with organic, cultural content on the site.
Why? Because, as new research from Pew shows us, more Americans use YouTube than any other platform. A whopping 85% of adults reported that they had been on YouTube in 2024. And we’re starting to see key types of content – namely podcasts or “vodcasts” (video podcasts) – really take root on the platform.
To that end, I am excited to say I’m partnering up with Tubefilter, which pulls data from the YouTube API and provides a week-over-week look at what the most viewed channels in the US are. Moving forward, I will be including a top 10 chart with their data each week. Two things to note: first, this accounts for the total amount of views this past week on *all* public videos on each channel (not just, for example, the new ones published this past week). Second, I am filtering out top YouTube channels that are geared solely at children.
Here is this week’s chart:
Question for my reader (re: the deeply splintered Internet that all of us exist on): before looking at this chart, how many of these people had you already heard of?
My guess is only a handful of them (but if it’s more, big props!). This is wild, given that each of these channels is enormously powerful if they are bringing in this amount of eyeballs in just one week.
It’s also worth noting that very few of these key YouTube players are overtly political – and most seem to intentionally stay away from it. But one of the major lessons we learned from 2024 was that non-political, cultural figures who express their personal beliefs – whether consciously or not – can influence culture in a big way and thus, of course, have a big impact on electoral politics and government.
An example of this: Mike Mandell AKA Law By Mike, who received 150+ million views on his channel this week and who has a whopping 11.2 million YouTube subscribers, has a bio that reads “Educating YOU About Your Most Important Legal Rights” but expresses no clear partisanship and seems to largely stay away from highly contentious rights like abortion, immigration, etc. However, for example, one of his latest YouTube shorts (with 6.1+ million views in 24 hours) doesn’t paint cops in a very flattering light; it’s not overtly political or partisan… but also isn’t not political in this day and age. And it’s definitely got a lot of eyes on it.
That’s the kind of thing we’ll be keeping an eye on week-over-week with this chart.
Another interesting thing I saw in this week’s YouTube stats: The only legacy news organizations that seemed to be high up on the most-views list were MSNBC with 113 million views, Fox News with 99 million views, and Forbes with 93 million views.
That’s all I’ll touch on for now – but stay tuned for the new weekly chart! And if you want to chat about YouTube/have some thoughts or tips, you can reply to this email.
More from around the internet:
It’s been a big week for TikTok announcements: they’re updating their site to be more user-friendly and in line with the app experience (thank GOD), they’re expanding their services for local businesses in the US, and it looks like they’re going to get another extension from Trump.
For others in tech world, especially Dem tech world… things aren’t going as well. There appears to be chaos afoot at ActBlue, with several senior staff members departing, and NGP VAN is getting some competition and had a pretty scathing NYT article (gift link) drop.
Gavin Newsom had an unexpected guest for the first episode of his new podcast, and this clip from Newsom’s X/Twitter seems to be garnering a lot of… attention.
This is pretty common knowledge at this point, but if you need some numbers to show folks, Morning Consult is out with new analysis showing that social media is where people turn to get their daily news, followed by video streaming services.
Dance creators used to rule the Internet, but now, they say YouTube is pushing them out.
That’s it for FWIW this week. This email was sent to 24,019 readers. If you enjoy reading this newsletter each week, would you mind sharing it on X/Twitter, Threads, or Bluesky? Have a tip, idea, or feedback? Reply directly to this email.
Thanks for the YT focus.