I last looked at the YouTube subs at the start of this month, but have had a quick browse of the numbers (in honour of Jimmy’s main channel surpassing 2m subs, late on the 27th).
What can I say – I like a good spreadsheet; I love comedy and I’m trying to puzzle out what impact all of the ID verification is having on the channels of our biggest comedians. There certainly seems to be some generalised slowdown in subs.
Still having a ton of issues with online counters – especially the ones for Facebook / Threads, constantly freezing for days on end. Which means I can’t do my “5 platform” analysis right now.
If you’re not familiar with my methodology – the Reporting page (here) explains the background / colour key etc.
Date comparisons (variance) this time are from May 10th 2026 to June 27th 2026. A period of about 47-48 days (depending on what time of day I looked).
Videos posted
No doubt as to who is posting the most content. Across the 5 accounts we have videos for stand up, TV clips, podcasts. shorts etc.
Subscribers
The ranking order hasn’t changed, during June (since the last post) so Jimmy’s accounts are still in 8th overall.
Sorting by the first variance column (growth) from May to June 27 moves him up to 2nd.
Mr Gervais has been more active on YouTube recently and the numbers on both his account and Michael McIntyre’s are creeping up.
The negative numbers for Jack Whitehall and Andrew Schulz reflect a downward trend that has been apparent for some months now.
Views
When you consider the views that some AI slop channels get…then these view numbers look tiny, by comparison.
What we need to bear in mind is that, for a comedian, using YouTube is getting them a FAR bigger audience than linear TV could ever dream of. Even Netflix can’t deliver numbers like this.
The sensible comics (who want to sell tickets and grow their career) are using YouTube as advertisements for their comedic chops.
In the June 1st numbers (here) Jimmy’s accounts were in 4th place with 1.359 billion views.
Looking at the top accounts (with over 1b views each) we first of all have 3 Americans that are pretty much uncatchable. They’ve been around a long time, started out from a bigger population demographic and are increasing their numbers by the hour.
- Joe Rogan Experience is a long-standing juggernaut of a podcast, unlikely to ever be caught up. That account is 3.6b ahead of Max Amini’s.
- Max Amini is doing great (ashamed to say that I’ve never watched him, will rectify that later) and is 359m ahead of Fluffy. Fluffy catching him up would still be a tough challenge – but not as insurmountable as 3.6b
- Gabriel Iglesias (Fluffy Guy) is 1.17b ahead of Jimmy and that’s a BIG number.
It’s insane that Jimmy’s accounts are in 4th place and yet are 5.16b views behind the Rogan account.
In 5th place Matt Rife is 115m views (behind Jimmy) and Theo Von is 303m behind.
June 27th and Jimmy’s accounts were still in 4th but have added over 59 million since the 1st (not shown in this image, above).
In the period May 10th to June 27th, the 5 accounts grew by 127,490,476. The image below is sorted by that variance column and moves the JC accounts back to 2nd.
What the variance column kind of tells us is who was popular in May /June 2026.
As mentioned in the previous post – looks like Ricky’s account had some old content deleted.
What does Google think?
Just while I’ve got my head in numbers mode…
Yesterday I was writing up this post on a “50 greatest stand ups” show and I have to use a couple of different search engines as results are SOOOO variable and various stuff gets hidden.
I don’t use AI but you can’t help but see the panel, when using Google as a Search Engine. I COULD suppress it, but I like to see what it’s up to (just for giggles).
Firstly, it gave me an (unwanted) opinion that the top 3 UK stand ups were Jimmy, Ricky and…drum roll, please…James Acaster. Not even REMOTELY close on the 3rd name.
The justification for naming James was that he “gets talked about a lot on Reddit”, by people that like him. I mean, that gives us an idea of where his fanbase demographic hangs out, but is not exactly hard evidence. I dropped him off my reports a long time ago as one of the comedians whose numbers were too low.
I hadn’t taken a Google screenshot so tried to replicate the query (on the 28th) and, as ever, it changed its mind.
With the below – I’d agree with those 3 names. I’ve been looking at this data for a year or three and those are ALWAYS the top 3 names, whichever way I slice things (see also the Netflix figures, here). Just don’t tell Michael McIntyre or he’ll call the lawyers in (see here).
I’m just always curious as to why it zeros in on certain things, trying to understand how it comes to the conclusions that it does:
- Jimmy does have over 4m subs on Instagram so, yes, he is “one of” the most followed. Not sure why that counts for more than Facebook (5m+) or X (5.7m+).
- Ricky’s YouTube subs of 730k are surely not significant enough to mention?
- Jack – the citation used is from the Q1 YouGov poll (see on here). That’s basically just people voting for which comedians they KNOW, meaning it’s just a fame ranking, polled from people that like filling out YouGov surveys (with no indication of how many responses there have been). Q2 poll results should be out shortly, watch for that one.
As I’ve said before – these “AIs” are actually just LLMs that are using maths to predict what information you are looking for. There is no intelligence there to ponder whether having millions of subs equates, in important, to a polling agency listing.
As a quick justification for my agreeing with those 3 names: if I go back to the February 2026 data (the most recent look at the 5 platforms) you can see that total follower / subscriber numbers were:
- Ricky – 25.4m
- Jimmy – 18.7m
- Jack – 15.6m
Without being able to see ticket sales the only measures available are viewing / follower numbers from Netflix, Amazon, TV and social platforms.
There ARE other Brit comics that can fill stadiums (Peter Kay, Michael McIntyre, Russell Howard, Kevin Bridges, Micky Flanagan – to name a few) – but they are not really registering, on any of the available metrics.
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