Sidemen – New Age Superstars & Marketing Geniuses
Depending on your age and familiarity with YouTube, the word ‘Sidemen’ will have different meanings. To those who are accustomed to YouTube, they would know I am talking about the group called the Sidemen, which has 14.7 million subscribers on YouTube.
The group consists of seven members all from England, most notably KSI for his activities in the realms of music and boxing, also featuring on many mainstream TV programmes like The Jonathan Ross Show. The other six members are Simon (Miniminter), Harry (Wroeteshaw), Ethan (Behzinga), Josh (Zerkaa), Vikk (Vikkstar123) and Tobi (TBJZL). They formed this group in October 2013, originally just playing online games such as FIFA and Grand Theft Auto and have evolved over the last nine years to real-life content, rivalling the production quality of major TV shows.
The staple content of the group is their ‘Sidemen Sundays’, where the first edition was uploaded onto the Sidemen Channel on the 7th of January 2018, ‘SIDEMEN READ MEAN TWEETS’, and they continued to post a video every single Sunday to their account for the next four years, even continuing as of now. They have used similar content to TV programmes such as The Chase, Family Feud and The Wheel, and combined this with popular YouTube content such as Mukbangs (basically having a chat whilst eating) and their innovative ideas, which seem to be the most popular – such as Tinder in Real Life and holidays abroad with completely different budgets.
Since this, the group have branched out into creating three other channels on YouTube, the first being MoreSidemen (6.39 million subscribers) which goes back to its roots with mainly gaming and challenge videos, SidemenReacts (4.13 million subscribers) which hones in on the YouTube algorithm as reaction videos are nearly always successful, and SidemenShorts (1.61 million subscribers) which takes advantage of YouTube’s new feature ‘YouTube Shorts’ which is their take on concepts such as TikTok and Instagram Reels, which seem to be the way to go viral in this specific digital age.
They have successfully brought in other audiences from around the globe with their impressive collaborations and guest stars in certain videos. They have had other YouTubers and influencers such as Logan Paul and LazarBeam to help bring in American and Australian audiences respectively, famous comedians such as Jack Whitehall for a more mainstream audience, and professional footballers like Ben Foster and even lots of players from Arsenals women's team to attract a sporting fanbase.
In terms of money-making, the Sidemen are extremely familiar and well-versed in this. Their main revenue stream is their line of clothing ‘SidemenClothing’ which has been around for years, and they promote this well with advertising videos at the beginning and end of videos, and in every Sidemen Sunday video, they give a 10% discount code at a random point, to remind subscribers of its existence and add an extra incentive to watch the entire duration of each video. They have released their alcoholic drink, XIX Vodka, which they released with different drops that all sold out very quickly, and they have said how they aim to release this to the public soon, even wanting it to be put in bars and nightclubs across the country. Most recently they have created their own takeaway business ‘Sides’ selling items such as burgers, chips, and wings. They only had locations in London and Dubai originally, plus releasing new spots across the country to expand this service. Along with collaborations with YouTooz collectables and much more, they certainly know how to monetise their content.
The biggest innovation of their content has been ‘Side+’, which is a subscription service similar to Netflix and Disney+, costing members £6.99 a month for exclusive access to their podcast ‘SideCast’, behind-the-scenes content, chances for prizes and much more. They are slowly making the move away from free platforms such as YouTube, even though they are still uploading the main chunk of content to it, they are hiding certain elements for Side+ members to offer an extra incentive to join, and it seems that they are slowly transitioning to having increasing amounts of their content behind a paywall in the future.
This could be because they want to expand their team, from starting as just seven friends, they have grown to have a whole production team for all their weekly content, including videographers, photographers, and editors. They also have employees working for XIX Vodka, Sides and their other projects which the core seven members have never met, according to Tobi Brown (TBJZL). Their Side+ website claims that they want to give all of this money back to the fans, which could be speculated that they do not believe that the revenue that they earn from YouTube is a sufficient return on investment compared to what they put into the platform in terms of their content, overall brand and popularity.
What are your thoughts on the Sidemen? Is it reasonable to begin the transformation to content behind a paywall or should they stick to their roots?
