Cristiano Ronaldo might have a future in streaming, as we have learned from Front Office Sports. The 39-year-old star, in the twilight of his football career, set up a YouTube channel on July 8 and, as of this writing, has picked up 47 million subscribers and 255 million views. He has done this with a library of about a dozen videos, none of them reaching four minutes in length. The most viewed so far bears the title “The golden button… for my golden kids” and shows him opening a YouTube plaque.
To put this into context, Ronaldo’s channel has, in less than two months, broken into the top hundred channels by subscriber count as ranked by SocialBlade. The top five are MrBeast (312m), T-Series (272m), YouTube Movies (183m), Cocomelon - Nursery Rhymes (181m) and SET India (176m). For now, Ronaldo would rank about even with number 74, Ricis Official, an Indonesian channel generating, by SocialBlade’s estimate, anything from $242,700 to $3.9 million.
SocialBlade has also ranked YouTube’s sports channels. The top five here are, or were until recently, WWE (104m), Sports (74.8m), Dude Perfect (60.4m), Yolo Aventuras (52.2m) and Celine Dept (35.3m). Ronaldo’s channel would seem to have displaced number five – if, in fact, it qualifies as a sports channel.
