Top 50 Gaming channels in Australia
Gaming is YouTube's largest single category by hours watched. The biggest gaming channels routinely cross 50 million subscribers and post billions of lifetime views, fuelled by an audience that watches streams, Let's Plays, walkthroughs, esports highlights, and reaction content for hours at a time.
Australia is the smallest tier-1 YouTube market by population but punches above its weight in creator output. Australian RPMs are similar to UK levels (slightly below US), and Australian channels often build large international audiences because the cultural and linguistic distance to North America is small enough that content travels easily.
The leaderboard
33 channels
The gaming channels winning in Australia.
Long-form dominates: 20+ minute Let’s Plays and walkthroughs out-earn shorter videos thanks to multiple mid-roll slots per view.
Series and franchises matter: viewers subscribe to a Minecraft channel for Minecraft, not to its random vlog uploads.
Tier-1 RPMs despite the smaller population: Australian audiences trigger premium ad inventory.
Strong international travel: Australian content frequently builds 50-80% non-Australian audiences.
Gaming in Australia, answered.
Real questions about how the gaming niche operates inside the Australia market. Still curious? Get in touch.
Top gaming channels with 5–20 million monthly views typically earn $15K–$80K/month from YouTube ads alone, depending on watch time, mid-roll placement, and audience country mix. Brand sponsorships from gaming peripherals, energy drinks, and game launches usually add another 2–4x on top of ad revenue. The very top channels (50M+ subs) routinely clear seven figures per month from the platform plus brands.
There's no minimum. The Partner Program threshold is 1,000 subs + 4,000 watch hours, which a focused new creator can clear in 3–6 months by posting 2–3 videos a week on a single game with a clear hook. The harder gate is consistency: most creators quit before they hit 1,000 subs, not because the threshold is too high, but because they shipped 8 videos and gave up.
Two things: thumbnail/title craft and series structure. Channels that win the click war on the same game routinely 3–5x channels with identical content quality. The other compounder is series: a channel running an obvious 'episode 1, 2, 3' format gets binge-watched, and binge-watching is the single strongest signal YouTube uses to rank a channel inside its category.
Easily, and most established Australian channels do. English-language Australian content with universal subjects (food, fitness, tech, lifestyle) typically builds 50-80% non-Australian audiences over time. The cultural and linguistic distance to North America is small enough that content travels naturally without localisation.
Slightly below UK, well below US. Australian RPMs typically run 60-75% of US rates, similar to the UK. The advantage Australian creators have is that their audiences often spill into US, UK, and Canadian viewers, who all earn closer to tier-1 RPMs. A channel with 40% Australian and 60% US viewership would earn similar to a pure US channel.
