Best of YouTube 2025: Plugged In’s Year-End Picks, Best TV Shows to Binge Watch

As of 2025, there are reportedly 60 million active YouTube channels (those who upload at least once a month). If YouTube were a country, it’d be just ahead of Italy as the 25^th most populous on the planet.

Obviously, that means we can’t review every YouTube channel. But we can sure give it a good try. Each year, we pick five channels that stick out—channels we believe are more worthy of recognition than others. Now, just so we’re not being biased, we don’t include channels that focus specifically on Christianity—though we’d still encourage looking into those channels too!

Without further ado (and in no particular order), here’s a list of enjoyable YouTube channels we reviewed this past year:

Zack King – 42.8 Million Subscribers

This channel dazzles viewers with optical illusions and magic tricks, both in short- and long-form content. Zack King finds plenty of creative ways to show off his sleight of hand offering a wide variety of clips that viewers can enjoy. What’s more, King says he hopes to keep his channel family friendly—a feat that certainly helps him make this list. To that end, while parents should note that a couple of crude words have appeared on the channel, viewers shouldn’t need to worry about other concerns.

King’s channel is all about making your day a little better with his illusions; The Johnson Brothers do the same through comedy. The channel—led primarily by Amos, Isaiah and Sam Johnson—hopes to make you laugh through an abundance of short- and long-form skits, many of which contain impressive special effects or fun editing. The brothers fight each other with lightsabers, battle zombies and sing songs on the beach. But regardless of how strange the premise of a video can get, it’ll likely get a laugh or two out of you.

How Ridiculous – 23.9 Million Subscribers

If reading that last entry made you think, “How ridiculous,” well, that just so happens to be the name of our next channel. How Ridiculous—featuring Australian friends Scott Gaunson, Derek Herron and Brett Stanford—centers on sports and games. In some videos, they drop items off a tower to perform an assortment of extreme tests—like whether a thousand exercise balls can cause a falling car to bounce. In others, they compete against each other in wacky games, such as playing frisbee disc golf down a mountain. The channel has additionally offered long-time support to Compassion, a Christian organization that sponsors children living in poverty.

If we had a nickel for every channel name on this list that referenced brothers, we’d have 10 cents—which isn’t much, but it’s interesting that it happened twice. Shiloh and Bros caters to a younger audience, offering fictional stories that follows Shiloh Nelson and her brothers as they travel across imaginary worlds in pursuit of clues that could explain the disappearance of their mother. The set pieces and costume designs are impressive, and the general story which links their videos is engaging. While some of the worlds the family travels to are based on kid’s horror games, the content here is quite tame.

If watching Shiloh hop between all those worlds has you thinking about travel, you might enjoy watching Tonio Guajardo do it on his eponymous YouTube channel. Sometimes, he’s zipping across the United States, finding ways to enjoy his time on remote islands in Alaska or on the worst-rated cruise in America. Other times, well, he’s just enduring the lowest-rated buffets around. Guajardo hopes to “find joy in unexpected places”—and, in many of his videos, he experiences the fun with his family.