Up And Coming YouTube Stars Who Will Blow You Away In 2018
Making a name for yourself on YouTube isn't quite as simple as it used to be. When the video sharing website first launched back in 2005, anyone with a camera and a niche could generate views and pull in subscribers with relative ease, just through a sheer lack of competition. As the platform grew in the years that followed so did the number of competitors, however. If you have an idea for a YouTube channel today, the chances are someone has already beaten you to it — YouTube has a staggering 1,300,000,000 users as of 2017, with 300 hours worth of video uploaded to the site every single minute.
Those figures may seem intimidating to someone setting up to record their very first vlog, but it isn't impossible to make a mark in the current climate if you want it bad enough. Every year there's a handful of YouTubers who blow up after seemingly appearing from nowhere, and 2018 will be no different. Fortunately for you, you don't have to wait until next year to check them out, as we've compiled a list of the ones to watch out for over the coming months. These are the up-and-coming YouTube stars who will blow you away in 2018.
Dobre Brothers
The Dobre Brothers are the sons of gold medal-winning Romanian gymnast Aurelia Dobre, who would have likely been remembered as one of the all-time greats of the sport had her career not been derailed by a serious knee injury. Aurelia went on to marry a gym owner named Boz Mofid and the pair settled down in the United States, where they had four sons together: Cyrus, Darius, Lucas and Marcus. Twins Lucas and Marcus are already huge YouTubers in their own right. They are both members of Jake Paul's squad Team 10 and their own channel has over 5 million subscribers, but brothers Cyrus and Darius are relative unknowns in comparison. For now, anyway.
All four recently teamed up to start a brand new channel in which they put the gymnastics their mother taught them to good use. "We dance, we do backflips, and we also live life like there is no tomorrow," their channel description reads, and at the time of writing more than 900,000 people have subscribed to watch them do just that. That's some feat considering the channel only got up and running in June 2017.
The siblings also make their own music, releasing two tracks ("On the Real Tho" and "You Know You Lit") as a taster of what's to come from them going forward. Expect Cyrus and Darius Dobre to become as YouTube famous as their brothers already are in 2018.
Sommer Ray
Fitness model turned social media starlet Sommer Ray already has a following of over 16 million people on Instagram, where she is best known for her perfectly sculpted behind. Dubbed the "belfie queen" by Maxim, Ray is already making a comfortable living from turning her back to the camera and glancing over her shoulder, though she'll have to do more than that if she wants to become an influencer on YouTube as well. Does she have what it takes to become a successful vlogger in the long run? If the first nine months of her channel are anything to go by, then the answer is yes.
Ray only joined YouTube in January 2017 but by September of that year she had attracted over 800,000 subscribers to her channel, though she didn't do it alone. Ray happens to be good friends with Rice Gum, a hugely popular YouTuber who boasts a sub count of 8.3 million at the time of writing. Rice invited Ray to move into his Hollywood home alongside a bunch of other well-known YouTubers in June 2017, and this has certainly accelerated the growth of her channel. With her army of Insta followers guaranteed to check her out on YouTube and the ever-popular Rice by her side (the two are rumored to be dating), 2018 could well be the year of Sommer.
Christian LeBlanc
Christian LeBlanc did what countless others dream about doing every time they sit down at their office desk on a Monday morning — he quit his job and dedicated his time to traveling the world. If this is too much of a stretch for you then why not settle for living vicariously through his channel Lost LeBlanc, which he started in 2015 and which currently has just shy of 380,000 subscribers. The tanned travel vlogger stands out from the crowd because of the cinematic quality of his videos, utilizing a wide array of equipment (including drones, which make for some jaw-dropping landscape shots) as opposed to the bog standard GoPro most travel YouTubers rely on.
LeBlanc has traveled South East Asia extensively and is more often than not found in either Thailand or Bali, major hubs for backpackers and digital nomads (location independent workers who make their money online as they move from country to country). Those two places have been vlogged to death at this stage as anyone with an interest in travel will know, but as the number one up-and-coming traveler on YouTube, LeBlanc knows he has to take his viewers further afield to keep them interested. The Canadian recently released a beautifully filmed series of vlogs in which he sailed around the whole of Ireland in a genuine Russian pirate ship.
Ayla Woodruff
Nicknamed "What's The 411" by friends and fans because of her height (4'11”, obviously), Ayla Woodruff was up until very recently the assistant of Team 10 YouTuber Logan Paul, but the pair parted ways after Paul decided to replace her. Rumors swirled that Woodruff had been fired after a falling out with Paul, but the diminutive beauty decided to come out and rubbish the gossip, revealing that they are still on speaking terms.
"Logan and I still hang out, you guys still see me on the vlogs all the time," she said in a reaction video. "It's no hard feelings. I'm super excited for him to have a new assistant and to get it straight, he will not admit this in the vlog, he did not fire me." The exposure the whole saga has brought has given Woodruff a golden opportunity to restart her own vlogging career, which was put on the back burner while she was working under Paul. She started her own channel back in 2015 but removed her older content when she started over post-Paul. Woodruff now incorporates health and fitness into her vlogs and already has over 700,000 subscribers of her own to brag about.
Jordan Houston
Teenage vlogger Jordan Houston joined YouTube in October 2016 and in the short time since he has established a solid audience. The blond-haired Brit has over 280,000 subscribers at the time of writing and has been killing it in the views department recently, clocking a staggering 17.4 million hits in just 30 days. His videos are partially prank-based and he gained notoriety among store owners in the Brighton area for hiding out overnight in places like Toys "R" Us and Ikea.
Houston's most popular videos are the ones covering his ongoing feud with fellow YouTuber Ruby Rube, who he has called out for faking her videos. With the help of her parents, young Ruby has sucked in millions of subscribers with her 3AM "spooky time" videos, which Houston has parodied on his channel. Exposing a bigger channel is a good way to get yourself noticed by a wider audience, though it sometimes comes at a price — Rube's family have threatened Houston with court proceedings.
"They can't just silence a small YouTuber, just because I don't have as many subs," Houston said. "At least I keep it real, that's what I care about." Something tells us that Houston's subscriber count will actually surpass Ruby Rube's in 2018 as he continues on his march toward YouTube stardom.
Joey Bizinger
Joey Bizinger is a Japanese-Australian vlogger who has a massive following in the YouTube anime community thanks to the success of his main channel The Anime Man, which recently hit a huge milestone with one million subscribers. His relationship with fellow anime YouTuber Aki Dearest (who also has a seven-figure following on her channel) helped to cement his position as one of the most authoritative voices discussing anime right now, though the problem with limiting yourself to a single topic is that you are also limiting the range of your viewership.
Bizinger clearly realized that himself last year, as he made the smart move of starting a separate channel to discuss non-anime related topics with the world. "I'll talk about things that I like, and I'll talk about things that I dislike," he clarifies in his reintroduction video. "I'll talk about things that interest me, and I'll talk about things that don't tickle my interest balls at all." His new channel has just surpassed the 200,000 subscribers mark, and while the subject of anime still manages to creep into his videos from time to time, true to his word he discusses an array of topics and recently branched out into gaming. He sucks at Sonic Mania, but don't let that stop you from checking out his channel, as Joey Bizinger could well become a big name on YouTube in 2018.
The Johnson Fam
Family vlogging is big business on YouTube, and there are countless clans trying to get a share of that lucrative pie. One family that knows all too well how much money a successful family vlog can make are the Butlers, known to YouTube as the Shaytards. Nicknamed "YouTube's First Family," they went from relying on food stamps to earning millions of dollars simply by sharing their everyday lives with their subscribers. Dad Shay Carl Butler told ABC that people watch their vlogs "because inside I think people want a happy family, I think that's a longing for a lot of people. I think people watch to get hope that they can have that."
The huge success of the Shaytard channel has inspired countless others to try and do the same thing, and while many have come and gone since Shaytard-mania first hit YouTube almost a decade ago, one up-and-coming channel that's been gathering steam these past few years is The Johnson Fam. Natalia, Jeff, Peyton and Olivia started making videos in 2015 and since then they've managed to exceed the half a million subscribers mark, with earnings estimated to be as much as $77,000 a month right now. Those figures look set to increase next year, and by the end of 2018 the Johnsons will in all likelihood be a household name.
Piper Blush
Countless YouTubers are guilty of using misleading thumbnails in order to suck viewers in, but one thing Piper Blush doesn't do is clickbait. This BDSM-loving French-Canadian vlogger is blowing up right now, stacking up millions of views (over 16 million in the last 30 days at the time of writing) and gaining new followers at a near-viral rate, which is all down to her using her assets to her advantage. "You are about to enter the extraordinary life of an ordinary submissive girl," her channel descriptions reads. "I am a free woman expressing myself through art as a model, a vlogger, and an author."
If you're not quite sure what that last part means, let us sum it up for you — she likes to squeeze into tiny outfits and do various activities on camera, often in super slow motion. It might seem like an unoriginal idea, but the figures don't lie, and what Blush is doing is most definitely working. Her "Sports Bra vs No Bra" skipping rope video has been watched more than eight million times in the few weeks since she uploaded it, and she recently followed that up with another bouncy video involving a pogo stick. It isn't all about the numbers for Blush, however. She is a genuine supporter of gender equality movement Free The Nipple and exercises her right to do just that in her videos.
Blazendary
This young streetwear vlogger has been posting videos since December 2014, and while he hasn't shot up the Social Blade rankings quite as quickly as some of the YouTubers on this list, he's been making steady progress and looks poised to become a big name among teenage viewers on the platform this coming year. Blazendary's fanbase (or the Blazenfam, as he calls them) recently surpassed the half a million subscribers mark and his stats all point to further growth lately — his sub count was up by more than 600 percent in the 30 day period spanning late August/early September, and his videos were watched more than 10 million times in those four weeks.
This figure will likely spike even further the closer we get to the festive period, as Blazendary (AKA Giancarlo Purch) goes all out at Christmas, giving and receiving all manner of cool gifts. His channel is heaven for fans of the finer material things in life, with Purch not only having an impressive sneaker collection and a horde of designer threads to show off, but some of the latest and greatest tech, too. If you like expensive stuff, this is the place for you.