He registered his YouTube account in 2009 and started posting gaming commentary videos on Call Of Duty and FIFA, then it grew from there. To be fair, there’s a reasonable excuse for finding KSI’s success hard to comprehend: it has no precedent. As his affable manager Mams Taylor tells me, ‘The numbers don’t lie.’ Then, in June, they released Prime in the UK, and the drink soon replaced Gatorade as Arsenal’s official hydration partner. It made $10m in its first 12 weeks on sale in the US alone. In January, he launched a sports drink, Prime Hydration, in the US, with Logan Paul, an even more successful YouTuber. He’s the CEO of the company MisFits Boxing and co-owns a restaurant chain and a vodka brand. There’s his YouTube career, of course, but he also owns at least 10 homes across the UK. KSI’s ventures have earned him in excess of £15m. His videos have been viewed more than 10 billion times. KSI is huge on YouTube – he has more than 40 million subscribers across his three channels. If you grew up on traditional media – hearing about celebrities on TV, the radio or in magazines like this one – then KSI’s success can be hard to square. He’s Britain’s biggest internet celebrity, someone who became famous making YouTube videos (skits, pranks, gaming commentary), then became a pop star, then a boxer. If you’re over 25, KSI may well be the most famous person you’ve never heard of. Today, he sits in the sunshine outside a photo studio waiting to have his picture taken for Men’s Health, cradling a gallon hydration bottle filled with colourful BCAAs. Hundreds of thousands more will watch via pay- per-view (PPV), putting the match in DAZN’s (the streaming service with links to controversial boxing promoter Eddie Hearn) top five most-watched boxing events of all time.
In 18 days, KSI – whose real name is Olajide ‘JJ’ Olatunji – will fight Brandon ‘Swarmz’ Scott, a London rapper, in front of 20,000 fans at the O2 arena in Greenwich, London.
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