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Zoella Tubular Labs Youtube

Only a third of UK's top 10 most influential YouTuber's traffic originates in UK

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By John McCarthy, Opinion Editor

October 23, 2015 | 3 min read

The reach of the top ten most influential UK YouTube creators has been documented by Tubular Labs for the BBC, showing that two thirds of the list's viewers come from outside of Blighty.

The research found that UK creators in particular have an international advantage over non-English speakers with the 'One Direction' effect, whereupon international audiences even prefer vloggers from this region.

In first place is KSI (real name Olajide Olatunji) – a Watford based vlogger who plays and comments on video games, one of YouTube’s top content avenues. Recently he featured on the Forbes YouTube rich list alongside fellow gamer (and YouTube’s highest earner) PewDiePie.

Tubular research claims he has a reach of 17.4m people across all his social channels, boasting 362k new YouTube subscribers in September. At the time of publication, KSI has 10.875m subscribers.

Making inroads into rap and comedy, KSI’s intro video on his channel documents his reaction to a tutorial documenting how to use a grapefruit for self-pleasure…

In second place is ComedyShortsGamer. Deji Olatunji, KSI’s brother, has a social media reach of 7.5m and saw 183k new subscribers in September, contributing to his 5.3m pool of followers.

Coming in joint third is three vloggers; fashion vlogger Zoella (Zoe Sugg), with her brother Joe Sugg and his flatmate Caspar Lee, hold the third, fourth and fifth spots on the influence list in no particular order. Notably, Zoellla’s boyfriend, Alfie Deyes holds the tenth spot.

Denis Crushell, vice president of Europe for Tubular Labs, said: “What is amazing specifically about the UK creators is that their content travels so well internationally.

"They are probably exporting this content to hundreds of countries around the world, which if you think about a TV show and more traditional media brands, it would be quite hard to distribute to hundreds of countries pretty easily."

On UK YouTuber’s international appeal, Crushell concluded that only 34 per cent of the entire list’s audience comes from the UK, with over a quarter originating in the US.

Check out the full top ten below or check out the comprehensive BBC report here.

Zoella Tubular Labs Youtube

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