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Today’s News

⚽ The Sidemen raise millions
💪 BabyBillion stays at #1
📈 This week on the branded charts…
🍄 Movie characters dominate Shorts
🇸🇽 iShowSpeed goes on tour (again)

MONEY MOVES

The Sidemen gathered creators for another record-breaking game.

The Sidemen’s charity soccer match drew £6.2M and 2.2M concurrent viewers

The program: This year’s charity Sidemen match did not disappoint. The U.K. creator supergroup—who count 23 million subscribers on their primary YouTube channel—sold enough tickets to fill the 90,000-seat Wembley Stadium to capacity.

Those in-person attendees were joined on April 18 by a massive audience of live online viewers. According to Streams Charts, the 2026 Sidemen match reached a peak of 2.2 million concurrent viewers, while a VOD version of the stream has picked up more than 11 million views on YouTube.

That fan frenzy translated into a wildly successful fundraiser. For the second year in a row, the Sidemen’s star-studded footballing spectacle raised more money than any previous edition of the event. A sum of £6.2 million (~$8.4 million) will be split between two nonprofit organizations, with 86% going to the Sidemen’s Bright Side charity and the remaining 14% going to M7 Education.

“This year we raised a record breaking £6,218,875 with all profits going to charity. This wouldn’t be possible without you guys, the best community in the world! THANK YOU”

- The Sidemen (via a YouTube comment)

The creator perks: There’s a reason fans were so engaged—and so willing to open their wallets—throughout and after the game.

The creator-fueled match proved to be an exciting, fast-paced event, with highlights including Tobi‘s trivela goal from a free kick, Max Fosh‘s yellow card magic trick, and a rare save from xQc, who stopped JasonTheWeen‘s penalty shot. Members of the Sidemen switched between the two teams, keeping them evenly matched throughout a back-and-forth game.

A final score of 10-10 led to a penalty shootout, where the YouTube All-Stars earned a rare victory when tech critic Mrwhosetheboss delivered the winning kick.

🌟 SPONSORED 🌟

Cannes Lions announces the 2026 LIONS Creators programme

This summer, your favorite creators, social platforms, and brands will be at Cannes Lions for LIONS Creators—discussing the key trends and partnerships shaping the creator economy.

Here’s a taster:

“Inside the Microdrama Boom: How Creators Are Building the Next Entertainment Economy”
Learn how to capitalize on the fastest growing digital entertainment format—microdramas—with creator Hannah Stocking and Second Rodeo’s Scott Brown.
“The New Creative Directors: Building a Creators-led Campaign in Real Time.”
Watch creators Cian Abion and Shena Vici team up with Bagel CMO Jessica Serrano and We Get It’s Austin Null to build a creative campaign in real time—showcasing the power of bringing creators into the creative process from the start.
“Greenlight your Brand: Step Inside a Billion-View Studio”
Help Dhar Mann Studios founder Dhar Mann and CEO Sean Atkins build a narrative live—deciding whether Shopify’s Jessica Williams or Gap’s Fabiola Tores will walk away with a $200,000 brand integration on Dhar Mann Studios main channel.
“Digital Third Places: How Live Connections Shape Tomorrow’s Trends”
Learn how niche communities drive participation over reach, and how to use them to identify cultural trends before they’re mainstream with Twitch’s Dan Clancy and Mary Kish.

Cannes Lions will take place from June 22-26 in Cannes, France.

Be part of it →

HEADLINES IN BRIEF 📰

BabyBillion isn’t the only Indian hub climbing the YouTube charts.

BabyBillion is one week away from a two-month run at #1 in our Global Top 50 YouTube chart. The family-friendly hub added to its streak by picking up 1.1 billion views during the week preceding April 19. (Tubefilter)
Fortnite is introducing a new tool that will allow creators to turn “an NPC into an AI-powered character capable of unscripted dialogue and interactions with players.” (The Verge)
Legacy cable shopping giant QVC has filed for bankruptcy despite a pivot to ecommerce and daily live shopping events on TikTok. (Bloomberg)
Meta has poached two founding members from Thinking Machines Lab, the $12 billion AI startup established by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. (Business Insider)

GOSPEL STATS 📈

MrBeast keeps putting celebs to the test.

Top Branded Videos: Two-hit wonders with wildly different budgets

Gospel Stats’ latest Weekly Brand Report features a pair of two-hit wonders. MrBeast and Lucie Fink each claimed two videos in this week’s top five ranking, bringing in big views for their respective sponsors.

Both creators snagged tens of millions of views per video—even though they didn’t exactly operate on the same budget. While MrBeast continued his streak of huge cash-fueled streamer challenges, Fink snagged her top spots with affordable shopping content.

🥇 #1. MrBeast Gaming x Shopify: 50 Streamers Fight For $1,000,000 (94M views)
MrBeast kickstarted 2026 by getting 30 celebrities to fight for $1 million. This time around, he gathered 50 top streamers—including Ludwig, Pokimane, Ibai, Fanum, Quackity, Inoxtag, Tfue, and Agent00—to duke it out for the same amount.

That challenge racked up almost 100 million views, directing plenty of eyeballs to MrBeast’s longtime sponsor, Shopify. The ecommerce giant continues to be one of the most prolific sponsors on YouTube, backing nearly 40 videos over the last week.

🥈 #2. MrBeast x Shopify: Last Streamer Standing Wins $1,000,000 (35.8M views)
This three-hour stream ties into video #1 by following four finalists (Rubius, YourRage, Rakai, and Ski Mask the Slump God) through the end of MrBeast’s $1 million streamer competition. Once again, Shopify was on board to present its offerings to any ecommerce-curious viewers.

🎰 #3. Lucie Fink x Sam’s Club: YES, My husband narrated my trip to Sam’s Club (18M views)
Lucie Fink’s production process was just a bit lower-budget than MrBeast’s. For both this video and the #4 clip in this week’s Gospel ranking, Fink partnered with Sam’s Club to show viewers how easy it is to find everything you need (and more) at the chain’s warehouse stores.

Check out the full branded ranking here and head over to Gospel Stats for more YouTube sponsorship insights.

TOP 50 🌍 MOST-SUBSCRIBED

Arista Viva is cashing in on the Super Mario Galaxy buzz.

If you believe film is dead, you haven’t been paying attention to YouTube Shorts

The Shorts trend: These days, the biggest films of the moment don’t just make millions at the box office—they also end up fueling some of the world’s most viral short-form videos.

We saw this phenomenon on full display last year, when KPop Demon Hunters proved to be the most common topic among channels in our global ranking of top-subscribed YouTube hubs. A few months later, a new Sonic the Hedgehog movie made the gaming world’s favorite speedster a popular cosplay choice for Shorts creators.

Flash forward to April 2026, and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie has taken over the cultural zeitgeist. The game adaptation sequel has already made over $700 million at the box office, and Shorts creators are racing to capitalize on the hype—including creators whose content has nothing to do with gaming, movies, or plumbing.

Channels like Peru-based hub Arista Viva have attracted hundreds of thousands of new subscribers by adding Mario costumes into Shorts about everything from drawing to family drama. That random placement might seem like an odd way to appeal to Super Mario fans, but the strategy is working like a charm. Over the last week, Arista Viva jumped up to 11th place in the Global Sub Top 50 after snagging roughly 500,000 new subs in just seven days.

The context: Some creators are already getting ahead of the next movie-inspired trends. The official trailer for the upcoming Street Fighter reboot only dropped five days ago, but sketch comedians on YouTube have wasted no time dusting off the costumes they need to buy into the film’s promotional cycle.

Major studios and streamers are playing along, too, with giants like Netflix bringing their characters to digital platforms in a way that encourages short-form mashups from independent creators.

WATCH THIS 👀

iShowSpeed is going back on tour.

iShowSpeed is headed to the Caribbean

The tour: Last year, iShowSpeed embarked on a world tour so influential that governments began paying him to visit their countries. Regions like Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia each offered up €30,000 (around ~$35K USD) to make sure the creator stopped by during his tour (per local press LRT). According to StreamsCharts, Speed “picked up nearly 10 million news followers over the course of his global tours.”

Now, he’s taking flight once again. In a trailer for “The Caribbean Tour,” the creator revealed plans to visit Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Sint Maarten, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, and the United States Virgin Islands.

Fans won’t have to wait long to tune into that big trip either; according to the trailer, Speed’s Caribbean Tour kicks off on April 25.

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