Let's look at the top 500 creators on YouTube by views — because there's a valuable lesson hiding there that most YouTube gurus gloss over. Most people rank creators by subscribers (MrBeast leads with 487 million), but most of us actually want views, and I'd argue subscribers matter less than ever.
Quantity, not quality
Here's the lesson: the most-viewed channels grind out enormous quantities of videos. Even MrBeast's advice is to make one video that gets a hundred million views — which makes sense if you have a huge team. But T-Series has nearly triple MrBeast's views with about 26,000 videos to his ~980. Cocomelon has more views than MrBeast with twice the videos. SET India has 170,000+ videos; channels like ZTV, CNN, ESPN, and Al Jazeera all post staggering volumes. The exceptions are celebrities — Eminem with ~105 videos and 25 billion views, Rihanna, Taylor Swift — who get a pass. If you're not already a celebrity, quantity is the path.
What that means for you
If you're a solo creator at home, would it work better to make 52 videos a year or 2,000? In almost every case, 2,000 wins — because as a small creator you don't yet know which 50 videos to make, and trying to will niche you into boredom. So the move is to make quality videos as fast as possible and post every day. That's why I grind out six videos a day across my channels (42 a week) plus some live streams. Think of yourself more like a news agency than a celebrity. If you want YouTube to be simple: grind out videos. If you want help, watch my YouTube coaching playlist here.