How the top 25 YouTube channels earned 144B views, 520M comments, and 1B likes

If you want to go big on YouTube, you don’t want do be a big corporate brand or repurpose content from the nightly news. You do want to talk about gaming, entertainment, or comedy — but ideally about gaming. And you most definitely want to have something to say.

The top 200 YouTube channels have published 186,950 videos which have gathered 144 billion views, 520 million comments, and a billion likes, according to an as-yet-unreleased study by social TV startup SimulTV, which has launched a social TV app for web and tablets. That’s some serious audience engagement.