Houshou Marine has over 960 million channel views at the time of market creation: https://www.youtube.com/@HoushouMarine
Filian has over 963 million channel views at the time of market creation: https://www.youtube.com/@filianIsLost
If Marine's channel hits 1 Billion channel views first, this question will resolve yes.
If Filian's channel hits 1 Billion channel views first, this question will resolve no.
1,000@VtuberNumbers what number do you use to resolve this? Marine's views on the About popup has been at 990 millions for a long time but suddenly decreased to 948 today. I am wondering if it only counts public content and something has been privated. Her SocialBlade page still is at 990 but has been stuck on the exact same number for many days now.
@nollfem I'm using the public YouTube channel stats as linked in the description.
The SocialBlade page and other YouTube views tracker pages also tracks that public YouTube channel number, it just updates up to a day late depending on when they're scheduled to do their API call.
As for what happened, I think YouTube suddenly stopped counting "Topic" video views towards an Artist channel's overall views count. In February 2023, Marine became an YouTube Official Artist Channel, which meant that her "Topic" Music Video viewcounts got rolled into her YouTube channel. This appears to have been reverted for everyone with an Official Artist Channel yesterday, right on the cusp of Marine's next tick which would have taken her over 1 billion views. Crazy timing!
Incidentally, becoming an artist channel is also what caused her more infrequent channel views updates - Artist Channels seem to update their viewcounts around once per week as opposed to non-Artist channels (like Filian's), which update around once per day.
Example of one of Marine's "Topic" videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZL4-f3jRoE
This one has 26 Million views, so it represents more than half of the total lost today by itself.
Topic channels mainly seem to exist for YouTube Music, which is YouTube's Spotify-like music streaming service. They just also happen to accessible on normal YouTube, and their viewcounts on YouTube used to get merged with the person's YouTube channel when that YouTube channel became an artist channel, at least until today.