Have you ever wonder how the views on YouTube were distributed? Well wonder no more.  Below you will see a graph of over 250,000 channels that are tracked by SocialBlade YouTube Stats where horizontally on the X axis you have total number of views, and vertically on the Y axis you have how many views they received in the past 30 days as of May 10th 2012.  From the graph you can see the higher you go up the more popular channels are currently, and the further the the left you go you can see how how quickly their popularity has sprung up (since they may have gotten a large amount of views in the past 30 days but they haven’t added up yet long term).

For example you’ll see that TheEllenShow has exploded recently while machinima continues to chug along steadily.  Lastly you can see how universalmusicgroup has badly abandoned their channel and failblog, well, failed to keeps its audience.

This graph has also confirmed something I have long suspected, the vast majority of channels are clumped towards the bottom left, but it is interesting to see there at least is some distribution down there as well.

In December YouTube formerly launched “Cosmic Panda” allowing, and even encouraging users to switch their channels to the new format with the warning that soon everyone would be forced to switch at some point. Well, three months later that day is finally here. On March 7th all users will be automatically converted over to the new format much to the dismay of many.

There are countless comments, forum posts, videos and more all complaining about the new layouts but at SocialBlade we are all about the YouTube Stats, so I wondered, how many channels actually have changed over? Does everyone hate them? Or is it just a vocal few?

The numbers as it turns out are pretty interesting. To study the data I looked at two groups. One was a cross section of 313,429 channels, the other was the top 100 YouTube channels.

If you look at the top 100 most subscribed channels, 70% of them are using the new channel layout and only 30% are still on the old layout.  If instead you look at YouTube as a whole and look at the pool of 313,429 channels that SocialBlade collected data on then the numbers go the other way, 59% are on the old layout and 41% are on the new.  Though the YouTube at large number is much greater just think about the top 100 number.  That’s 30 of the largest YouTube channels out of 100 that still don’t want the new layout.  That’s a big deal!

There of course are a number of reasons why the majority of channels haven’t switched over yet, one maybe just being that people are lazy, but it still is interesting none the less to see that there is a small majority holding out.

If you haven’t switched over yet why haven’t you?  I know one of the major reasons that I haven’t switched is the extreme lack of free text.  One of the channels I run is a channel for daily video creators challenging themselves to make a video a day for an entire year on YouTube called The YouTube Orbit and on there I list everyone that is a part of it.  Once the new layout is permanent I won’t be able to list everyone.

Most of the other changes for me personally aren’t that big of a deal whereas I see their benefit, but that one has been a deal breaker.  Let us all know in the comments your thoughts!

One of the requests I’ve received numerous times over the years is for a way to embed Social Blade YouTube Stats on external websites and as of this week you can now do that! This feature is currently in beta but seems to be working well so far so if you’d like to get a box like you see below here for your own site, at least at the moment stop by your stats page and look below your main stats table for the embed code.  Be aware again this is in beta so things may change, and I hope to in the future allow for more customization of it but leave your thoughts in the comments below too!  Enjoy!

SocialBlade has had tremendous growth over the past year (just hit the 2 million pageviews a month marker!) with much of this growth being outside of the United States.  Big shout outs to everyone in Germany, the UK, Canada, Spain, and all the other countries of the world!  I am happy to announce today that preliminary work has begun on adding localized support for your countries!  Starting today, the YouTube estimated earnings feature, one of SocialBlade’s most popular features will now show in euros or pounds if we detect you are from one of those countries that use them!

There’s still a lot of work to be done to fully support all the countries of the world translating everything into the different languages and using more then three currencies but I think this is a good first start! What do you think? Please leave a comment with your username, country, and language if you’re in one of the countries that uses the euro and its not showing up for you.  I added a whole bunch in but may have missed a few

One of the problems many websites run into as they grow up is that they were not built very well to scale.  Classic example, twitter. Over the past year they’ve gotten much better but for several years fail whales were flying left and right.  While there are no whales here at Social Blade being thrown at you I have been constantly working behind the scenes changing the way things are done to try to make things go faster.

I knew right from the start that since I am not a DBA the database structure I was building to store all the user info was not the best.  I mean it worked, and worked pretty well for a small user base but as I mentioned in yesterday’s blog Social Blade now tracks over 100k YouTube channels and from a data structure perspective that’s no small task.  One of the problems with the structure I created was I stored everything in one massive table and updating that table to get the ranks sorted for people has taken longer and longer as the database has grown.  What once was a minute long task had grown to several hours.  If you ever visited the site in the morning from around 6am-9am ET and noticed long load times this is why.

Graph showing the systerm load on the server. The higher up the graph goes the slower the site gets. Major improvement is shown after Monday. Wed night still has a small spike which shows my work here is not done, but its much better!

Today I’m happy to announce that at least that problem has been resolved! The past few days I’ve updated the way that data is stored and we’re now back to a really quick update which doesn’t slow the system down!  Are there still many things I need to improve? Yes.  As more and more of you keep visiting its a constant learning experience for me which is great.  So in short the reason I wanted to share all of this with you was to let you know that in between the times of adding new features there still is work going on in the background to improve the stability of the site and keep SocialBlade as the best place to go to track your youtube stats!

When I created SocialBlade back in February of 2008 it really had one purpose, provide data on every story that hit the front social media news site digg.com in order to help posters judge their effectiveness.  Later on the site was expanded to also rank a list of top diggers where people could compare themselves to everyone else.  Since August on 2010 however, though digg isn’t quite dead yet the ‘wow’ factor of digg has been lost. We are more likely to get the news from twitter, facebook, reddit or google news rather then digg, so as a result the social blade digg statistics have become less relevant as well.  Also, though now on hiatus Social Blade ran a weekly webshow on social media news from 2009 until 2011.

Fortunately however that’s not all we do here! In the summer of 2010 a once popular YouTube stats site closed its doors for good (so they claimed then) leaving a void in the days of those who now were addicted to YouTube Stats instead of digg stats (myself included).  It was this direct event that caused me to play around with the YouTube API and over that weekend recreate all of the features of the other site that I used to use as well as add some new ones too.  Immediately the word of the Social Blade YouTube Stats site spread and people started adding their channels in. Social Blade YouTube Stats was alive!

The last 14 months since Social Blade YouTube Stats has launched have been amazing.  When we launched there were only about 10,000 channels we were tracking and the site was getting less then 1000 pageviews a day.  In September of this year we reached the milestone of one million pageviews a month and today we have reached 100,000 channels being tracked daily with the most popular & most active users on the site’s channels tracked hourly!  Each day we continue to grow in terms of page views and channels tracked and I can only imagine where we’ll be a year from now!

I just wanted to thank everyone that has supported us over the past few years.  I have so much more planned that I’d like to get coded up and out to you all so stay tuned! Today I’m also launching this blog where I’ll try to keep you all updated on new features, improvements, analysis on YouTube and other related social media topics and more!  If you’re new to SocialBlade take a stop by the YouTube Stats site today and add your own channel and join in on the fun!