South Korea’s fastest growing Youtuber KIMPRO has amassed over 22 million subscribers in just over a year of being active on Youtube.

The cousin duo has cemented their place this year as a top global Youtuber, consistently bringing in over 500 million views per week since June, posting almost exclusively Youtube Shorts.

Today, we’ll dive into who KIMPRO is, what they’ve achieved so far, and my thoughts on what Youtube creators can take away from their success.

Korea’s top non-music Youtube channel

KIMPRO is a cousin duo from South Korea consisting of male DongJun Kim and younger female cousin BaekHab Yu.

Having started on Tiktok in February 2021, they started uploading humorous and entertaining content with little to no speaking, appealing broadly to non-Korean-speaking audiences. Within 10 months, they’d reached 1 million followers. In August 2022, they started actively posting on Youtube Shorts, and within one month had reached a million subscribers on Youtube.

Now, sitting at over 22 million subscribers, KIMPRO has topped global weekly video view charts multiple times throughout the year, and is on track to be the second Youtube channel ever to reach 1 billion views in a single week (the first was Cocomelon - Nursery Rhymes in May 2020).

KIMPRO is currently the top ranked Youtube channel in South Korea by SocialBlade ranking, and is the most subscribed non-music channel in Korea (7th overall).

While their videos may seem fun and humorous, every video is carefully planned, filmed, and edited. In an interview with Chosun Daily (Korean), DongJun mentions that each Short/Tiktok video is considered and prepared for like a performance. Having both majored in acting, the two cousins seem to grasp the importance of preparation, delivery, and production quite well. They still do everything from ideation, filming, and editing themselves, and their dedication is reminiscent of how MrBeast talks about creating the best videos possible.

KIMPRO by the numbers

• 22.4 million subscribers on Youtube as of August 2023, up from 825,000 in September 2022 → 26x increase in 11 months!

• More than 23 billion video views in total

• Over 500 million views per week on average since June 2023

• 46 videos with more than 100 million views - most popular video (Sept 2022) has 412 million views

• 1833 videos uploaded

What this means for Youtube creators

In my opinion, KIMPRO’s growth highlights a couple things more broadly:

• Short-form video is king

• The next biggest Youtube star can come from anywhere on the globe

Short-form video as King

KIMPRO’s explosive growth highlights how huge short-form video is now. It’s hard to imagine any serious Youtuber ignoring this format going forward when (with a lot of work and many things going right) you can gain over 20 million subscribers in less than a year.

As MrBeast has pointed out in past podcast interviews, short-form video creators have such a huge advantage in not being limited to a particular platform. With Tiktok, Instagram, and Youtube all pushing hard on short-form content and audiences responding, it makes sense that more than 70% of the top 100 Youtubers in August (by views) post Youtube Shorts almost exclusively. Growth on one platform can easily translate into exponential growth on another platform, as the same videos can be uploaded to multiple places.

The next global Youtube stars

MrBeast has also mentioned in the past how Youtube is increasingly global, and that the next top stars can really come from anywhere, not just in the States. Where previous and current top Youtubers (PewDiePie, MrBeast today) may seem US-centric, increasingly we are seeing growing creators with the most views globally coming from everywhere around the world.

One of the keys to KIMPRO’s growth so far is the ability to appeal to mass audiences that don’t speak Korean. With little to no speaking in the short videos, the viral content can make anyone around the globe laugh or smile. In a country where English is not a native language, many Korean Youtubers are just now turning their focus to English and other language titles, subtitles, and descriptions in their videos to appeal to broader audiences - KIMPRO seems to have understood this from day one.

The pair have even bigger dreams though and are self-described as just getting started. They have set up their own crew, called OK Team, with the goal of creating more entertaining content to make people laugh and smile. If they can continue building on top of the global audiences they reach already, they’ll be sure to continue breaking Youtube records while teaching others how to film the trendiest Tiktok videos.