President Trump is ranked 87th, which is higher than ABC, PBS, NewsMaxTV, and lower than Fox News at 54th, but marginally lower than CNN ranked at 80th, and 82nd ranked MSNBC, based on the top 250 SB YouTube ranking list. In the month of November, 2020, President Trump's YouTube channel has received 165 million views on his YouTube channel. Fox News saw a massive drop from 140M daily views since election day to 42M daily views by Nov 30th. NewsMax TV is crushing it on YouTube, with its video views gaining from 77 M to 200M weekly views past the elections (100M of those could just be Fox viewers). President Trump's YouTube team seems to be winning the message war when compared to MSM.
The chart below shows the SocialBlade[SB](TM) top 250 YouTube channel rankings as of Dec 2nd, 2020. There are 3 key metrics for the reader to notice; 1st is the Rank, 2nd is the Subs, and third is the Uploads. Subscribers (Subs) gives a tally of people who possibly could be getting notifications pushed to their phones. Fox News has 6.62M, CNN has 11.5M, MSNBC has 3.84M, President Trump has 2.36M, and ABC has 10.5M, all ranked among the top 50 to 100 by SB.
The uploads number gives the reader an idea of the effort the channel has to exert to maintain the subs. It also tells the content generation capacity or rate of upload for these organizations. For example, FOX, CNN, MSNBC, and ABC have to churn out content in the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands to get to this rank. Unlike President Trump or Saturday Night Live, PewDiePie maintained their ranking by just curating or creating a few thousand videos. What this amounts to is the engagement of their subscribers to their messaging. [However, the viewership of content in the last 30 days needs to be a complimentary metric to true engagement factor).
So how engaged are viewers (American Citizens) to President Trump's and non-MSM media, which tends to have the same messaging as him? His YouTube channel has gained 200M to 300M new views. [The SB has 2 dashboards for NewsMax, Weekly/Monthly which shows different numbers, one contradicting the other, so we went with the Weekly numbers, which we believe is more accurate.] NewsMax subscriptions jumped by 1.2M (600K to 1.8M) since Nov 1st and viewership jumped from 79M views to 193M on Nov 30th. One America News (OAN) also saw a jump in its subscribers from 55K to 330K (a 6 times jump) and its video views from 9M to 25M, according to SB.
Main Stream Media that are in the top 100 YouTube channels including Fox, CNN, MSNBC, and ABC are in the top 100 channels on YouTube. Fox had a big drop in the monthly gained subscriptions - 200K . This could mean three things, viewers are no longer motivated to click on viewing their videos and hitting the subscription button, or they are viewing their videos but have decided to not get a subscription, or there were people who subscribed at the same rate as Oct 2020, but there were a lot of unsubscriptions. This marginally affected Fox's monthly total views, which dropped 30M from their October numbers of 358M. Could shows like "The Five," "Tucker Carlson," "Sean Hannity," and President Trump's videos be helping them? Only a closer look will clarify this.
CNN and ABC saw similar trends of 200K subscriptions increase and 200M total video views.
MSNBC's subscription rise was in tens of thousands, and its total video was in the tens of millions range. This trend could mean that MSNBC has a base that sticks with them, just like Fox.
The Final Chart shows the reader day-to-day details of the subscriptions and video views. President Trump seems to pull in on his YouTube channel a daily average of 4M views, 27M on a weekly average, and 118M views in November. In 2020, his YouTube channel got 1.4 billion views on his channel. Vice President Joe Biden has 104M views for the year, a 20M gain in November compared to President Trump's channel. Someone who is tagged as the most popular Democrat and is called an impressive social media operative has only 1.1M views on her channel. This could mean that she does not produce much content or that the majority of her popularity comes from MSM's talking about her. Senator Bernie Sanders got 44M views.
Comparing Fox News and NewsMax, unsubscription drops off on Fox News, and gains in NewsMax. It also shows a rise, with NewsMax tripling from the day of the election, going from 500K to 1.6M consistently. These numbers are as not as high as President Trump's daily numbers or Fox News, but the subscription numbers have been gaining daily in the 10K ranges.
ABC has a troubling trend almost like CNN and unlike MSNBC views. Their daily views dropped from 53M post election day down to 4.3M on Dec 2nd, 2020. The week after the election, they were consistently in the 30M to 20M range, and it kept dropping from there to 5M daily view. CNN's post election coverage was daily views in the 15M to 20M range the post election week, down to 4.5M Dec 2nd, 2020. However, ABC and CNN's narratives seem to be losing viewership as they do not seem to be bringing the viewers back as they did post election day.
MSNBC does not have the ABC big drop where the viewership ranges from 7M to 9M, occasionally jumping to a max of 12M, and had 10M views on Dec 2nd, 2020. This, again, must be MSNBC's base coming back for daily updates.
If consistent viewership is the story and increase in the views in metrics, then MSM have something to be worried about and the non MSM channels something to be hopeful about. We think this message is reflected in the SB graph below.
Conclusion: President Trump's YouTube team needs to continue in regular intervals (almost daily) what they have been doing in November, in December and January. The MSM needs to change something to bring back the audience they lost post election night (for example ABC lost 50M views, and CNN lost 15M views).
