… set to hit 1.0billion views in 2023
Channels TV is Nigeria’s most watched television station by online viewers in Nigeria, with an average that is twice those of its competitors combined.
The station averages 90 million monthly views since it joined YouTube in 2011.
The closest to it is Television Continental (TVC) owned by Lagos strongman and APC Presidential Candidate, Bola Tinubu, TVC averaged 29 million views per month since it joined YouTube in 2014
| Station | Total Views | Per Year | Joined |
| 1. Channels | 989.04M | 90M | 1 Feb 2011 |
| 2. TVC | 234.25M | 29M | 27 Nov 2014 |
| 3. Arise TV | 135.25M | 23M | 28 Nov 2016 |
| 4. Silverbird | 69.08M | 11.5M | 28 Sep 2016 |
| 5. NTA | 35.18M | 4M | 23 Apr 2014 |
| 6. AIT | 1.59M | 530K | 24 Jul 2019 |
Arise News, owned by multimedia entrepreneur, Prince Nduka Obaigbena joined YouTube two years after TVC and today averages 23million yearly views.
The three top stations also have the greatest number of subscribers – people who register for free to see the programmes they upload
Surprisingly, the legacy media have not upgraded their social media game and are lagging.
For instance, the first independent television station sits uncomfortably at the bottom of the six stations we sampled for this story.
This station, the African Independent Television (AIT) has the least number of subscribers (18,000) followed by NTA with 202,000 subscribers.
Legacy TV excel in follower numbers
However, the two stations make up for this through very strong showing in other social media – Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
Here are their social media rankings by number of followers:
| STATION |  |  |  |  | TOTAL |
| 1. Channels | 1.2M | 6M | 3.6M | 2.41M | 13.2M |
| 5. NTA | 149K | 1.3M | 567K | 202K | 2.21M |
| 6. AIT | 55K | 789K | 1.04M | 18k | 1.9M |
| 2. TVC | 237K | 231K | 626K | 695K | 1.8M |
| 3. Arise TV | 245K | 392K | 336K | 415k | 1.08M |
| 4. Silverbird | 105K | 159K | 12K | 326K | 602k |
NTA made a strong showing on the most popular social messaging applications, coming in second place behind leaders Channels TV. followers for Channel Television are three times all others combined.
As happened with YouTube views, total views of 10.8M for channels is almost twice the combined total of the other five stations.
At its current average monthly views of 90 million, Channels TV is projected to hit one billion views between this December and January 2023. It currently has 989,450,148 views on YouTube alone.
Channels is most watched TV online
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