It’s the end of the year…spreadsheet time!

If you’ve not looked at these statistics before there are notes in the posts below as to my methodology. To keep it short – I’ll just repeat that I have been tracking data for 29 US/UK comedians. My starting list had been 90+ and I’ve gradually whittled it down to the ones that are the “bigger” names (from a stats perspective).

If you don’t see your favourite mentioned in any of my reports – they don’t have enough followers and / or YouTube / TikTok views to be in the mix.

Twitter / X

Twitter (X is impossible to search for, so it HAS to be Twitter) caught my eye back in October. With such as the UK Online Safety Bill (and all kinds of other legislation) Elon’s team started purging bots and dead accounts. There were reports that, in October alone, 1.5m accounts had been removed.

Just looking at my 29 names the collective changes (to give you an idea) were:

• Oct 20^th – saw a gain of 605,035 on a collective total of 116,601,558
• Dec 31^st – was a collective loss of -7,946,104

That massive almost 8 m loss of subs took the group down to -108,874,321

There are some individual loss figures below – but nothing should be read into those numbers (in relation to how popular the person is etc.).

From my analysis and regular pokes around in the numbers I think what we are seeing is that the people that have legacy accounts have suffered the most.

To generalise – if you have had an account 10-20 years and have more than 5m followers then you are statistically like to have accumulated more dead accounts and/or bots. So, the loss %age is bigger.

Which is what we are seeing in the below – which is sorted by biggest losses between October 20^th (my baseline number) and December 31^st.

Bill Burr only has just over 2m subs and so his loss of -36,211 is dwarfed by Kevin Hart losing -4,076,930. But his starting number was over 31 m.

And the colour key is that the top 3 Brits are coloured Gold and top 3 Americans are Blue. Just to help you pick them out.

Note – Performance Location is used, rather than country of birth. Makes it simpler.

This 2^nd image shows the data sorted in order of most subs. In the last couple of weeks a few people (with the older accounts) have seen a reversal, in that their numbers have grown slightly:

• Joe Rogan – 12,126
• Ricky Gervais – 13,401
• Jimmy Carr – 546

I’m not sure whether to view this as green shoots of growth or not as it’s quite possible that the X destroyer crew were just having a rest over the Christmas / NY period.

It remains to be seen as to whether more accounts are removed in January so I’m not going to spend any more time analysing this data.

2025 12 31 reports links

• Facebook – here
• TikTok – here
• Instagram – here
• YouTube – here
• All 5 social platforms – here
• YT & TikTok views – here

Previous report links for 2025:

• Apr 25 – YouTube figures – here
• May 19 – YouTube figures – here
• May 28 – TikTok figures – here
• May 25 – Facebook figures – here
• May 24 – Instagram figures – here
• Jun 1 – social account totals – here
• July 31 – Social account totals for US/UK comics (5 platforms) – here
• July 31 – Follow on report totalling “most followers” overall – here
• September 13 – most subbed on YouTube mini report – here
• October 22 – impact of Riyadh festival on follower counts? – here
• November 11 – Twitter/X being affected by Online Safety Bill? – here
• November 19 – Twitter/X subscriber losses to date – here