Of the top 100 most-subscribed YouTube channels, more than 20 are devoted to gaming. If you pay any degree of attention to YouTube, this fact probably doesn’t surprise you too much. However, newly released information regarding changes in the audience for these YouTube gaming channels is a little more surprising, highlighting that women aged over 25 are watching gaming videos on YouTube now more than ever.
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This news came after Google, which owns YouTube, shared insights into the video-sharing platform’s viewers, with the company’s pop culture and gaming insights lead Gautam Ramdurai saying: “Viewership among women has doubled year over year, and women over the age of 25 are the fastest-growing demographic for gaming content. YouTube data tells us that both men and women are spending more time per video with gaming than in any other content area. Women, however, are spending slightly more time watching each gaming video than men are.”
Minecraft was the second most popular YouTube search of 2014.
While data compiled in the past has frequently suggested that women account for 50% of people who would classify themselves as “gamers,” cynics often suggest that this data is skewed by tablet, mobile and Facebook games such as FarmVille being classified as games, which many feel are somehow not as worthy as being included in these studies as console or PC games. However, these insights released by Google show that the female audience is growing, regardless of whether these naysayers like it or not.
More data released by Google included Minecraft being the second most popular search on the site in 2014, sitting below the rather vague search of “music.” PewDiePie, the site’s most-subscribed content creator with nearly 34 million subscribers, was also in the top ten most searched topics.
The changes in YouTube viewership offer a great insight into not only the site, but also into the gaming community as a whole, with the audience for video games changing and becoming more varied than ever before. This information marks a big step in a great direction.
