A glossary of YouTube terms
Plain-English definitions of the metrics and concepts behind every Alaxia profile — subscribers, views, CPM, Topic channels, play buttons and more.
The vocabulary of YouTube, defined plainly. These are the terms you'll meet across the directory and in our reports.
Audience metrics
Subscribers — people who have opted in to a channel's updates. The headline measure of a channel's following. YouTube publicly rounds the figure above 1,000 (e.g. 12.3M), so two channels can briefly appear tied.
Views — total times a channel's videos have been watched, counted across its whole history. A better measure of cumulative reach than subscribers, and the basis of ad revenue.
Hidden subscriber count — a channel can choose not to display its subscriber number. On Alaxia these channels are ranked by views instead and badged accordingly.
Engagement — how actively an audience watches, likes and comments relative to its size. We surface a simple proxy, average views per video.
Money
Monetization — earning revenue from a channel, principally through the YouTube Partner Program (a share of ad revenue), plus memberships, Super Chats and more.
CPM / RPM — cost per mille is what advertisers pay per thousand ad impressions; revenue per mille is what the creator actually keeps per thousand views. They vary hugely by country and topic, which is why public view counts can't be turned into reliable earnings.
Channels and content
Handle — a channel's unique @name (e.g. @MrBeast), introduced by YouTube in 2022.
Uploads playlist — the automatic playlist of everything a channel has posted; it's how Alaxia retrieves a channel's latest videos.
"– Topic" channel — an auto-generated channel YouTube creates for a music artist's catalogue. It isn't run by the artist, so Alaxia excludes these from rankings.
Shorts — vertical videos under a minute, YouTube's answer to TikTok, launched 2021.
VTuber — a creator who performs as an animated avatar rather than on camera.
Recognition
Play Buttons (Creator Awards) — physical awards YouTube sends at milestones: Silver (100K subscribers), Gold (1M), Diamond (10M), and the rare Custom and Red Diamond (100M).
Verified channel — a checkmark confirming a channel's identity; it denotes authenticity, not quality or ranking.
On Alaxia
Notable — our bar for inclusion: a creator or organization with a public record (a Wikidata entry, usually a Wikipedia article) and a YouTube channel. See our editorial standards.
Edition — a country-specific ranking, such as Spain or the United States, served on its own subdomain.