Don’t let Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch fool you. There’s still no such thing as bad press. Case in point: YouTube’s most-subscribed-to star Ray William Johnson’s recent public spat with YouTube multi-channel network Maker Studios has led to a substantial increase in the viral video connoisseur’s subscriber count.
News broke late Monday night / early Tuesday morning of Johnson’s allegations against Maker. The most-watched personality on the internet’s largest video sharing site – Johnson has accumulated over 2 billion views on his channel over the past three years – accused Maker of holding a few of his assets hostage over contractual and intellectual property disputes. The story’s gotten a lot of press.
Since then, Johnson’s YouTube channel has seen a 130% uptick in its daily subscriber increase. That’s a lot.
Subscribe to get the latest creator news
According to data from VidSatsX, Johnson’s channel has averaged a daily subscriber increase of 6,036 subs over the past 90 days. But in the past three days, Johnson’s channel tacked on a daily average of 13,907 subs. And on Thursday, December 13th, 14,855 YouTube accounts subscribed to Johnson’s channel. That’s his best single-day subscriber increase in the past three months.
Here’s a chart from VidStatsX that illustrates the recent subscriber rise:

Stats wise, it hasn’t been a bad week for RayWJ. We’ll let you know how it went for Maker when we get our hands on some data. Stay tuned.