Blackpink Becomes the First Artist to Hit 100M YouTube Subs

Photo Credit: @aanglerrr

Thanks, Blinks: A decade after debuting, Blackpink has become the first act to crack 100 million YouTube subscribers.

Both Blackpink and YouTube itself acknowledged the record, including in a blog post as well as a video from the four-piece girl group. All told, said group is now ranked 16th in overall subs across the platform, which sent along its “Red Diamond Creator Award” to commemorate the 100-million milestone.

That award is front and center in Blackpink’s 90-second clip, complete with a few clear-cut indications about how the YG-signed act entered the YouTube history books. At the top level, all four members recorded the upload (in Korean as well as English) and made a point of thanking the aforementioned Blink fandom for its support.

And they rather shrewdly took the opportunity to plug their forthcoming Deadline EP, which is slated to drop this coming Friday, February 27th.

(No longer contributing data to Billboard’s US charts – and facing renewed criticism over its per-stream royalty rate – YouTube capitalized with some self-promotion of its own. “We are proud to support artists in connecting with audiences around the world with our global reach and building successful careers with our twin engine of ads and subscriptions,” the platform wrote.)

For reference, fellow K-pop powerhouse BTS boasts roughly 82 million YouTube subscribers against just shy of 63 million for Taylor Swift and 59 million for Ed Sheeran.

But it’s a different story on Spotify, where Swift is riding high with 105.8 million monthly listeners compared to nearly 83 million for Sheeran, 26.4 million for BTS, and then 22.4 million for Blackpink.

Pulling back the upload-volume curtain makes Blackpink’s achievement even more significant: The group’s official channel currently has 651 YouTube videos versus almost 3,000 videos for BTS’ channel.

As for other evidence of Blackpink’s YouTube reach, nine of the group’s uploads have topped one billion views apiece.

Members (meaning the group and Lisa as a solo artist) have also claimed four of the platform’s top-10 music-debut records, with a staggering 3.3 billion views to Blackpink’s credit across the past 12 months (of 41.2 billion cumulative views) to boot.

(The 12-month total’s top-five countries by view contribution: 277 million from South Korea; 223 million from India; 218 million from Indonesia; 182 million from Mexico; 180 million from the States; and 168 million from Brazil.)

An interesting concluding takeaway brought out by a Blink on X: All these consumption feats have arrived despite Blackpink’s relatively small catalog, which includes approximately 30 original tracks.

“Blackpink with fewer than 40 songs have those numbers, wow, imagine if they had 100 songs,” the superfan pointed out.