How the Sidemen Turned Friendship into a YouTube Empire

Side dishes. Side shows. Even side chicks. Things that come on the side are too often dismissed as surplus. Nice to have, but not essential. But that isn’t the case with the Sidemen.

From fast food restaurants, industry leading YouTube videos, products that sell out just as fast as they hit the shelves of supermarkets and their star-studded charity football matches,  the Sidemen are always the main attraction.

Who are the Sidemen?

Sidemen YouTube banner featuring the group with highlights of their challenges, games, and videos.

The Sidemen are the seven-strong group made up of some of the biggest content creators to hail from London.

The group includes:

  1. KSI – Olajide 'JJ' Olatunji
  2. Vikkstar123 – Vikram 'Vik' Singh Barn
  3. Zerkaa – Joshua Bradley
  4. Miniminter – Simon Minter
  5. TBJZL – Tobi 'Tobi' Brown
  6. Wroetoshaw/W2S – Harry Lewis
  7. Behzinga – Ethan Payne.

Between them, the Sidemen have nearly 150 million YouTube subscribers.

Teamwork really did make the dream work

Like the celebrities from We Are the World or the Avengers, the Sidemen might have been powerful on their own, but combining their powers elevated them to stratospheric levels.

Together, the friends started creating YouTube content in the early 2010s.

Like most content, it started out small - reacting to games, pranks, and bantering on camera, letting their fans feel like part of the friendship group. And this was what kept people coming - they weren’t subscribing to celebrities, they were catching up with friends, keeping up with jokes, and being part of a community.

As a collective, interest in the Sidemen proved unstoppable. Eventually, individual content took a backseat to the group’s joint activities, and they started stepping it up.

They started branching out, producing comedy sketches, travel vlogs, challenges that brought the action from people’s screens and into the real world. Podcasts and even a dating show.

Their cook-offs, pranks, and other videos kept racking up millions of views, but could they take their joint venture further? Of course, they could.

One of Sidemen’s biggest projects to date is their Inside challenge.

The ambitious plan saw 10 influencers locked in a house for a week as they battled for a prize worth over one million dollars.

The scale and success of this reeled in the big fish - Netflix. The Sidemen - a group of friends who lived for content creation - were now commanding deals from the world’s biggest streaming platform.

The second season of Inside - plus a US version - will stream on Netflix, making them one of the only rivals to the likes of MrBeast, who pivoted from YouTube success to launching his own Amazon Prime series.

Keeping friendship at the center of the Sidemen

This might make their YouTube days look small - and the fact the group now reportedly employ a production team of more than 100 people makes them closer to being a Hollywood studio system of the 21st century - but the Sidemen know that their success is rooted in keeping things authentic.

For every Netflix series, cereal launch, or major brand deal, the Sidemen’s success lies in remembering what people want to see - real friends making real content.

Sure, they can produce videos with better camera work and effects than most Hollywood movies these days, but some of their most loved videos remain the ones where they’re filming themselves.

Lessons from the Sidemen

The Sidemen’s success comes from staying true to themselves and never settling for less. They’ve built on what made them great as individuals, lifted each other to new heights, and brought their fans along for the journey as real-life friends living real-life dreams.

The Sidemen’s appeal is that they haven’t deviated too far from what made them all individually successful. They’ve just combined their skills, charisma, and visions to push one another to bigger heights.

Despite leapfrogging from subscribers to studios, supermarket shelves, and sponsorship deals, they’re still real-life friends living out some real-life dreams, and they make sure to bring their fans along for the journey.

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