YouTube’s Number One Changes Every 2.25 Days in Mali and Every 40.5 Days in Libya, an 18-Fold Gap Across the Only 24 African Markets It Charts

On YouTube’s daily video chart, the number one position changed hands once every 2.25 days in Mali and once every 40.5 days in Libya between 16 August and 7 November 2026, an 18.0-fold gap measured across the only 24 African markets for which YouTube publishes a daily chart at all. The measure is a “reign”: a run of consecutive chart-days on which the same artist-and-title pair held position 1, counted across 1,952 market-days of kworb’s YouTube Insights tables, with every one of the 24 markets’ charts tracked at an average of exactly 20.0 positions per snapshot, minimum 20 and maximum 20, so the gap is not a side-effect of some markets getting a thinner chart than others.

16 August to 7 November 2026. Sorted fastest turnover to slowest.

Show the numbers

Market	Average reign length, days
LY	40.50
CD	20.25
DZ	16.20
CI	11.57
MG	10.12
ZA	8.20
MR	8.10
ET	7.45
SN	7.45
BF	7.36
MZ	7.36
TN	7.36
NA	6.83
CM	6.75
CV	6.23
MU	6.23
AO	4.76
EG	4.76
MA	4.76
NG	4.37
KE	4.10
GH	3.73
TZ	2.79
ML	2.25

Source: kworb.net YouTube Insights daily country charts, collected by this desk, retrieved 7 Nov 2026 · download the data

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Mali churns, Libya barely moves#

At the fast end, five markets turn over a new number one roughly every three to four and a half days: Mali (36 reigns in 81 chart-days, 25 different titles reached the top, average 2.25 days), Tanzania (29 reigns, 20 titles, 2.79 days), Ghana (22 reigns, 17 titles, 3.73 days), Kenya (20 reigns, 14 titles, 4.1 days) and Nigeria (19 reigns, 13 titles, 4.37 days). None of these markets has a single song that dominates: Mali’s longest reign, by “dj vocals” (“Doudou Haidara, Pt. 3”), lasted only 10 days and still accounts for just 12.35 per cent of the whole window. Nigeria’s longest hold came from Davido’s “B4 B4”, 14 days from 29 August.

At the other end, three markets are close to static. Libya recorded only two reigns across all of its 81 chart-days: Colomby’s “فيروز” held position 1 for 64 days, 79.01 per cent of the entire study window, and the only other reign recorded in Libya’s window filled the rest. DR Congo recorded four reigns, and one of them, Innoss’B’s “ZANDO”, has held number one for 67 straight chart-days since 30 August, 82.72 per cent of the window, still unbroken as of this piece’s last snapshot. Algeria recorded five reigns, with LAZARO’s “ZOMBIE” holding for 57 days, 70.37 per cent of the window.

Pooling every market’s chart-days against every market’s reign count gives a weighted average of 5.95 days before a number one changes; treating each of the 24 markets as one equally-weighted observation instead, regardless of how many days it was tracked, gives 8.7283 days. The two numbers disagree because high-turnover markets like Mali contribute far more individual reigns to the pooled total than low-turnover markets like Libya do, so the pooled figure leans toward the churn pattern and the simple cross-market mean leans toward the extremes. Both are reported, because which one is the right “typical” answer depends on whether the question is “how often does a number one change, on a given day, somewhere in Africa” or “how does the typical market behave.”

The counter-reading: three small markets carry the slow end#

Dropping Libya alone from the 24-market average pulls the simple mean down by 15.83 per cent, from 8.7283 to 7.347 days. Dropping the three slowest markets, Libya, DR Congo and Algeria, pulls it down by 27.7 per cent. Dropping the five slowest pulls it down by 33.16 per cent. The slow end of this ranking is doing real work in the overall picture: it is not one market, but it is a small handful. The fast end is not an artefact in the same way: removing Mali, the single fastest-turnover market, moves the mean up by only 3.23 per cent, barely at all, so the churn pattern across Tanzania, Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria would stand even without Mali in the sample.

There is a genuine limit on what a long reign can be read to mean. This dataset carries chart position only, not the underlying view counts, so a 67-day reign in DR Congo or a 64-day reign in Libya says that nothing else outranked that song for that long, not how many people were watching it, and not whether it reflects strong sustained demand for one record or simply a thinner stream of new uploads competing for the slot. The chart depth is identical everywhere (20 positions, every date, every market, confirmed directly against the raw snapshots), which rules out one explanation, a shallower tracked chart in the slow markets, but it does not rule out a smaller pool of new releases entering the chart at all in a given week.

What this means for release planning#

In the five fastest-turnover markets, a YouTube number one is reachable but not a lasting asset: the position changes within a week on average, so a release campaign built around “reached number one in Nigeria” should bank the headline in the first few days, not plan promotion around a multi-week hold that the market’s own history says is unlikely. In Libya, DR Congo and Algeria, the opposite planning problem applies: a release that takes number one in one of these three markets faces very little turnover risk once it is there, long reigns of 57 to 67 days are the recorded norm at the slow end, but getting there in the first place means displacing a song that, going by this record, is unusually hard to dislodge. Labels working these three markets specifically should treat an open number-one slot as rare rather than assume the normal release-cycle churn seen in Mali, Tanzania, Ghana, Kenya or Nigeria will apply.