24 hours, 10 million subscribers and more: Cristiano Ronaldo’s YouTube debut breaks records

Football superstar Cristiano Ronaldo enjoys immense global influence across social media, as he has more than 112.5 million followers on X, 170 million on Facebook, and 636 million on Instagram. But, after ruling the game of football for nearly two decades, Ronaldo has started his journey as a content creator, taking the first step by launching his YouTube channel 'UR Cristiano'.

The channel debuted on August 21 with several videos, including a teaser trailer, a fun quiz game with his partner Georgina Rodriguez, and a clip of Ronaldo meeting his wax figure at Madame Tussauds. It also broke several records as the ‘UR Cristiano’ channel became the first YouTube channel to hit the 1 million subscribers mark within the first two hours.

Within just six hours, the channel's subscriber count surged past 6 million, and by the end of the day, the ‘UR Cristiano’ channel broke the previous record held by Hamster Kombat of reaching more than 10 million subscribers. Interestingly, Kombat's channel took more than seven days to reach this milestone.

At the time of writing, Ronaldo’s channel has more than 18 million subscribers. Interestingly, Ronaldo’s contemporary Lionel Messi, who has won the prestigious Ballon d’Or award eight times, has a YouTube channel too and currently has 2.27 million subscribers despite it being launched way back in 2006.