How Many YouTube Channels Are There? What the Data Shows in 2026

Short answer: nobody outside YouTube knows exactly how many YouTube channels there are, because YouTube doesn't publish a total. The best documented count we found is vidIQ's July 2026 study, which tracked 61,186,246 channels with at least one public subscriber. Channels with zero subscribers aren't in that number, so the real total is higher. The "115 million channels" figure you see on many stats sites has no source we could check.

What YouTube does publish is the number of channels in its Partner Program (more than 3 million) and how much video gets uploaded (over 20 million videos a day). Below are all the figures we could verify on October 18, 2026, with links, so you can cite them.

Official YouTube figures

YouTube shares activity numbers, not a channel count. These are the ones stated on YouTube's own pages:

The Partner Program line says "more than 3 million who have turned their passion into a business on YouTube." Those are the channels that earn a share of ad revenue, which is a small slice of all channels.

How many YouTube channels are there by subscriber count?

vidIQ took a snapshot of its public channel index on July 20, 2026. Its subscriber benchmarks study gives cumulative counts, which we turned into tiers by subtracting one row from the next:

And the milestone counts as vidIQ published them:

The median channel in vidIQ's sample had 508 subscribers.

One thing to keep in mind: the sample only includes channels with at least one public subscriber, and vidIQ says it covers "channels in vidIQ's public channel index, not every channel ever created on YouTube." Millions of channels exist only because someone made a Google account and never uploaded. So the share of channels above 1,000 subscribers across all of YouTube is much lower than 40.6%.

How many videos are on YouTube?

Two very different numbers get quoted, and both can be right.

• Uploaded ever: YouTube said in April 2025 that over 20 billion videos have been uploaded since 2005. That count includes Shorts and podcasts, and it likely includes videos that were later deleted or made private.
• Publicly visible: researchers at UMass Amherst built a random sample of YouTube by guessing video IDs, published as Dialing for Videos (McGrady, Zheng, Curran, Baumgartner and Zuckerman, December 2023). In their notes on the study, the authors say "the total number of videos is probably more than 13 billion," not counting private videos.

The same notes show how few videos get watched. Videos with more than 1,000 views were "just 13% of our sample," 4.9% had no views at all, and "the top sixteen videos account for more than half of all views in our sample."

What about the "115 million channels" figure?

You'll find "over 115 million YouTube channels" on many statistics pages. YTShark (February 17, 2026) says "As of 2026, there are over 115 million YouTube channels worldwide" but cites no source or method for it. Other pages we found repeat it without a source, and one widely cited stats page blocked us from opening it. Since we couldn't trace it to any count or method, treat 115 million as a guess, not data.

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If you need one number to cite, the safer phrasing is: "vidIQ tracked about 61 million YouTube channels with at least one subscriber as of July 2026, and YouTube says more than 3 million are in its Partner Program."

What these numbers mean if you're starting a channel

Put the two counts side by side. About 24.8 million channels in vidIQ's index have 1,000 or more subscribers, but YouTube says only 3 million or so are in the Partner Program. Subscribers alone don't get you paid. YouTube's eligibility page requires 1,000 subscribers plus either 4,000 qualified watch hours in the last 12 months or 10 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days, and then you still have to apply and be accepted. Our YouTube monetization requirements guide walks through the steps.

The other takeaway: a channel with 1,000 subscribers is already ahead of the median channel (508) in vidIQ's sample, and far ahead of the many channels that never got a single subscriber. The crowd is large, but most of it is inactive. What separates channels that grow is mostly regular uploads on topics people search for. If you want to know what 1,000 or 10,000 subscribers is worth, see how many subscribers you need to make money on YouTube.

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FAQ

How many YouTube channels are there in 2026?

YouTube doesn't publish a total. vidIQ's July 2026 study counted 61,186,246 channels with at least one public subscriber, so the full number, including channels with no subscribers, is higher. The common "115 million" figure has no traceable source.

How many YouTube channels have 1 million subscribers?

vidIQ counted 79,570 channels with 1 million or more subscribers on July 20, 2026, and 3,082 with 10 million or more. Only 17 channels had 100 million or more.

How many YouTube channels are monetized?

YouTube says more than 3 million channels are in the YouTube Partner Program, as of its May 11, 2026 blog post. Joining requires 1,000 subscribers plus either 4,000 watch hours in 12 months or 10 million Shorts views in 90 days.

How many YouTube channels have 1,000 or 100,000 subscribers?

In vidIQ's July 2026 snapshot, 24,813,187 channels had 1,000 or more subscribers (40.6% of the 61.2 million channels with at least one subscriber) and 792,376 had 100,000 or more (1.3%). About 4.8 million had 10,000 or more. Channels with zero subscribers aren't in the sample, so the share across all of YouTube is lower.

How many videos are uploaded to YouTube every day?

YouTube says over 20 million videos are uploaded daily on average, and over 20 billion videos have been uploaded since 2005.

Sources and method

We opened each source on October 18, 2026, and used only figures stated on the page. Tier counts in the subscriber table are our subtraction from vidIQ's cumulative "at or above" counts; the 1 million to 9.99 million row is 79,570 minus 3,082.

• vidIQ Research, "YouTube Subscriber Benchmarks 2026: What 61 Million Channels Reveal", July 2026. Snapshot of 61,186,246 channels with at least one public subscriber, taken July 20, 2026. Zero-subscriber rows (1,391,713 in vidIQ's source data) were excluded.
• YouTube Blog, YouTube Partner Program launch in Armenia, May 11, 2026. "More than 3 million" Partner Program members.
• YouTube Blog, "20 ways we're celebrating two decades of YouTube", April 23, 2025. 20 billion videos uploaded, 20 million per day.
• YouTube for Press. Daily uploads, Shorts views, countries and languages.
• YouTube Help, YouTube Partner Program overview and eligibility. Eligibility thresholds.
• McGrady et al., "Dialing for Videos: A Random Sample of YouTube", Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, December 2023, and the authors' study notes, December 21, 2023.
• YTShark, February 17, 2026. Included only to show where the 115 million figure appears; it gives no source.

Limits: vidIQ's index is not a census of YouTube, and its coverage can change between snapshots, so don't compare its counts with other trackers as if they measured the same thing. Public subscriber counts are rounded for many channels. The UMass estimate is from late 2023 and counts public videos only.