Digital powerhouse GMA Public Affairs (GMA PA) forges ahead as one of the Philippines’ biggest and most followed content creators, recently reaching 15 million subscribers on YouTube.
The latest feat comes just a year after the said channel hit the 10 million subscriber mark that gave GMA Network its second Diamond Play Button and becoming the first Philippine TV company to receive two YouTube Diamond Creator awards.
With its wide array of videos that range from previously aired documentary, docudrama, news magazine, lifestyle TV shows, to short-form journalism and explainers, GMA Public Affairs continues to attract new viewers and subscribers on its YouTube channel. From April 2020 to date, it tallied a total of 2.8 billion views. The YouTube channel also recorded 264 million hours of watched videos as of this writing.
GMA Public Affairs also remains ahead of ABS-CBN News, which only has 12.1 million subscribers and 1.9 billion views from April 2020 to date.
On top of netizens from the Philippines, the YouTube channel has viewers coming from various parts of the globe including the United States, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Canada, Malaysia, Japan, Vietnam, Kuwait, Australia, United Kingdom, Italy, and Thailand.
It was in 2016 when GMA Public Affairs surpassed 100,000 subscribers on YouTube and received its Silver Play Button. Two years later, it was awarded a Gold Play Button for gaining over 1 million subscribers. And in 2020, the channel earned the Diamond Play Button for its 10 million subscribers milestone.
Across popular platforms, GMA Public Affairs has more than 85 million followers. Data from Tubular Labs and Crowdtangle also showed that in 2020, videos of GMA Public Affairs’ various programs earned over 6.5 billion combined views on social media. With 1.3 billion minutes, GMA Public Affairs emerged as the most-watched News and Politics media creator in the Asia Pacific region (APAC) in terms of total minutes last September 2020. Also in 2020, GMA Public Affairs was listed among the Top 5 Philippine media creators on TikTok.
Last month, GMA Public Affairs launched its online campaign “#JabWellDone” which encourages more Filipinos to get vaccinated against COVID-19 and to help curb the spread of the virus. The campaign organically reached over 8 million users on Facebook alone during the first week of its launch.