With millions of young followers, Olajide Olatunji is one of Britain’s biggest internet stars – now the man behind the acronym explains why he is revealing his personal side
During the past couple of months, the internet star KSI has been prolific on YouTube, because what else has there been to do? He has asked subscribers to tell him their jokes and recorded himself reacting to them. He has filmed himself playing scary video games (“I’m shaken”), invited his haters to insult him (“Why am I doing this?”) and responded to pressing personal questions from superfans, including this corker: “Who is your barber?” Captivity, it turns out, will spark a boom time for content. “If anything, it’s moving faster now,” says KSI, during a video chat on a Thursday afternoon in April. “People have time on their hands!”
KSI stands for “Knowledge, Strength, Integrity”. It is the alias of Olajide Olatunji, a 26-year-old from Watford, who happens to be one of the most successful YouTubers in the history of YouTube – a product and exemplar of our very online culture. (Friends call him JJ.) More than 20m people subscribe to his main YouTube channel, which he registered in 2008, when he was 15 and still at school and uploading videos of himself playing Fifa. This was before most of us, least of all grown-ups, came to realise that recording yourself playing video games in your bedroom might actually turn out to be lucrative. “I have African parents,” Olatunji says. “They wanted me to be the kind of person who becomes a doctor.” When he was asked to leave school, at 16, acrimoniously (grades troubles), family relationships became strained, though his parents needn’t have worried. At the time of writing, Olatunji’s videos have been viewed more than 5 billion times. He has 5.7m followers on Twitter and an Instagram audience of 8m. Even his secondary YouTube channel has 10m subscribers. At a moment when numbers like these really seem to matter – culturally, financially, anthropologically – Olatunji is overloaded with them.
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