SocialBlade.com is great. What a fantastic idea— a database of the World’s Top YouTube Channels where you can browse the rankings, see who’s rising, see who’s falling, who’s on top, discover new channels, et cetera, et cetera. Only problem? It costs money! While I’m not sure exactly how much SocialBlade costs, I know you really only get access to the Top 250 YouTube Channels, and well, that’s all you get!

But if you happen to be looking for a free alternative to SocialBlade’s database of top YouTube channels you are in luck, as I just finished launching the very first version of my new site CyberSurf.io about 5 minutes ago. If you are interested in taking a look at what I’ve got so far, please see my first post on the new site: The World’s Top 10,000 YouTube Channels

For a little back story regarding my project, this new website actually started out as an app for the Amazon Fire TV Stick that I built so I could channel surf YouTube; that’s how the whole thing got started. To build my Fire Stick app I incidentally needed to build a web crawler to discover new YouTube channels and crawl those channels for content which I featured in the app using YouTube’s shareable embeds. However, that project was quickly shut down by Amazon’s App Store which rejected the app over copyright issues. While I don’t believe I was actually in violation of copyright infringement as I simply used sharable YouTube embeds which you see all over the internet such as Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, nevertheless, I didn’t have the resources to weather battling with Amazon’s App Store reviewers, so I simply decided to pivot to something else.

This new project I decided to call, CyberSurf. Several months ago I launched CyberSurf the mobile app but ran into some problems. Problem A: The Apple App Review Board rejected my app. Problem B: I couldn’t get anyone to download my Android app! In my opinion, the CyberSurf Android app is much better than my new website, cybersurf.io. However, I found trying to reach people and drive installs for the app was incredibly expensive and wasn’t getting any traction. Which is what brings me here now writing this blog post… I am fairly confident that a market and demand for YouTube channel rankings exists, and maybe, just maybe, a website featuring such a database will inevitably find its way to end users via Google searches. So if you happened to have read this far down my blog post, it looks like my hypothesis may be right.

Any comments, questions, feature requests for CyberSurf.io and my new YouTube Channel Rankings? Feel free to contact me (Topher Pedersen) at chris@topherpedersen.com, or shoot me a text message @ +1 (469) 261-0727.