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Celebrity YouTube Channels

Celebrity YouTube Channels

April 03, 2025

Celebs Starting YouTube Channels: The Good And The Bad

For the last decade on YouTube, we’ve seen celebrities come and go. Individuals like Zac Efron, Kevin Hart, and The Rock have all launched a YouTube channel—some have stayed and continue to post videos, but a majority of celebrities have left the platform or the channel they started.

I loved Gold Minds on YouTube.

YouTube is a hard game—It’s not as simple as posting photos on Instagram or creating a one-minute video for TikTok. It requires a lot of thought, editing, and you have to lean into the process of being a creator on the platform. Most celebrities probably don’t have the time or the passion, or they rely on a team to run the channel, which causes it to lose traction because the celebrity never fully buys into the process. In this edition I want to go through a little bit of the wins and losses of celebrity YouTube channels over the past decade

The Good

If I remember correctly this individual has the record for most subscribers gained in 1 day. Cristiano Ronaldo is one of the best examples of a celebrity fully leaning in to their channel. Not only did he make headlines with the fastest new channel to 1M subscribers (now 75M), but he’s still actively making new content for the platform every month.

You can tell he knows what he’s doing on YouTube.

I think Ronaldo did a great job in his first month making content for his YouTube audience. He had everything from reaction videos to podcast episodes that gave you a look at his personal life off of the field, and his most popular video is a collab with Jimmy—you can tell he’s doing a little bit of everything, and is actually passionate about making content. Going back to my point about being 100% leaned in, the last 3 videos the channel has put out have been fashion videos from Georgina—I’m interested to see how this develops.

The Misses

For those of you who didn’t see, Leonardo DiCaprio launched a YouTube channel last week. There’s a big miss in the launch of this channel with him posting a movie trailer (already available on WB’s channel) as his first video. It’s really hard to build a YouTube audience this way, it’s even harder when your first video feels like an inauthentic post just to push a project that you’re a part of. When Leo launched his YouTube channel we should have gotten a 30 minute piece of individualized content directly from him. We’ll see what he posts second, but complete whiff for the first upload.

This channel is interesting right now…

The Opportunity

I think one of the most interesting channels that I’ve been keeping up with over the last 6-7 years now has been The Rock’s channel. It’s interesting that when you look at his channel, he also launched with a movie trailer. The next big video was The YouTube Factory with Lilly Singh and Markiplier and a bunch of other YouTubers (obviously made with YouTube’s audience back then in mind). He’s also been going strong for 8 years, you can tell that he and the team he built are fully leaned in to the YouTube meta.

I forgot all about Pokerock.

I think another channel I’ve been watching over the last year has been Tom Brady’s channel. I think some of the initial hype for the channel has died down since he first began posting, but I think where his channel has really done well is in collabs with other YouTubers. So far he’s made videos with Bryson DeChambeau, Nick DiGiovanni, and Dude Perfect (and many others). Even if this is the only content he puts out once a month, I think he’s going to have a successful YouTube career.

The Big Takeaway…

Celebrity YouTube channels will come and go, especially when they figure out how much time you have to put into building a community of people who watch your content. At the end of the day, celebrities who are actually passionate about making YouTube videos are going to find success on the platform.