In the report on YouTube subs I mentioned that Views are perhaps more important than followers so there will be one final post, after this one, looking at the “views” numbers.
This post is about looking at the overall subscribers / follower totals for the 5 biggest platforms:
- TikTok
- YouTube
- X / Twitter
When I say “biggest platforms” – when I first looked at this data (probably 3 years ago) I’d looked at what 90 comedians were doing online. I eventually whittled my list down to 29 names and these 5 platforms because, between the US and UK, the comedy output was spread across a wide range of outlets.
Yes, a lot of people now also use Threads (for example) – but the follower numbers are tiny when compared to something like Facebook. And while a couple of people use BlueSkySocial – it will skew the figures too much, if I add it in for everyone.
The exceptions to the aim of “everyone must be using it” have to be TikTok and YouTube. They are far too important (to the majority) to be excluded on the basis of the likes of Burr, Gervais, Mulaney and Rogan not utilising both of them.
Once again, the variance column is comparing October 20th to December 31st 2025. With the exception of Nate Bargatze whose total is Dec 18th to 31st. Back in October Nate’s TikTok total was refusing to show for a while, so that made his variance data column a bit iffy. The Dec 31st figures for his accounts are accurate.
The usual key – Blue for top 3 Americans, Gold for top 3 Brits. Those colour indicators have been added for the 5 platforms, the overall total and the variance for the 2.5 months.
The numbers for Kevin Hart are insane and he’s often held up as an example of how to build a huge brand. Joe Rogan’s numbers are probably mostly attributed to his wildly successful podcast. For someone that’s been around for about 15 years, Matt Rife seemed to build a huge following “overnight”. Gabriel Igelsias started in 1997 and Theo Von in 2002.
That (very) briefly sums up the top 5 Americans, with 448,397,706 followers between them!! None too shabby.
When we get to the Brits in the YouTube post (here) I predicted the order that the Brits would land in, below, in my mini rant about a tabloid labelling PK the “UK’s best comedian”.
- Ricky Gervais
- Jimmy Carr
- Jack Whitehall
- Michael McIntyre
- Russell Howard
- Sarah Millican
- Peter Kay
At that point I honestly hadn’t set up my new spreadsheet…so it’s nice to see that is exactly the order. Good to see Mr Carr with a “gold run” across all of the columns. Reference for Brits there to Blockbusters!
Ricky’s a talented guy (3 comedy titans emerged from Rubbernecker!) and you can see that a large %age of his fans are coming from X (still). This is despite him losing -879,153 followers there, in 2.5 months.
The people with -ve numbers are mostly down to the X / Twitter subs purge (here). Across 2025, for example, Jimmy lost -702,008 and Jack -568,052 (from X alone).
Despite that statistical setback Jimmy’s overall total (since August 1st) has increased by 1,368,977. Not a bad comeback.
As the columns are probably too wide for anyone on a mobile to see a screenshot clearly – here is one of just the overall total, variance and %age.
If I filter this data on the variance column we get another perspective.
Just for anyone that may have opened this post (and not seen the others). X / Twitter started purging bots and dead accounts in October 2025 (talked about in here and here and here).
While I think removing bots is a good thing – this is a problem that exists across the whole online world. AI slop (music and video) is a massive issue and no other platform seems to be doing an awful lot to stop it. In fact they are often rewarding it by promoting it in the algorithms. If you’ve not noticed a problem on YouTube – see this video.
The downside of the purge is that it makes it harder for me to spot trends and get anything meaningful out of these numbers.
All I can say is that Jimmy has done well to come out of this with a positive 494,791 growth (for 2.5 months).
2025 12 31 reports links
- X / Twitter – here
- Facebook – here
- Instagram – here
- TikTok – here
- YouTube – 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
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