- Football star has reached staggering figure across all social media platforms
- Ronaldo has millions more followers than great rival Lionel Messi
- Has hit milestone thanks in part to setting up YouTube channel
Cristiano Ronaldo has been breaking records on the football pitch for years, but now he has set a new record on social media – the first person to have 1 billion followers.
Record breaker
The Portuguese star has profiles on a range of social media platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram. He is also big on Chinese social media platforms such as Weibo and Kauishou.
Ronaldo has hit the mark thanks to his decision to set up a YouTube channel recently. He currently has 60.8 million subscribers to his channel, at the time of writing. When his channel, UR Ronaldo, launched in August, he had hit 1 million subscribers within two hours – a record for the platform. The channel also smashed MrBeast’s record of fasting growing channel of all time, gaining 20 million followers in less than 24 hours, whereas it took MrBeast 132 days to reach 10 million followers.
How did Ronaldo announce the news that he’d hit this milestone? With a post shared across his social media channels.
But while Ronaldo has reached 1 billion followers, it doesn’t mean he has 1 billion individual followers – many people follow him across multiple platforms and there will also be some bot accounts mixed in there too. But nevertheless, the achievement is impressive.
Ahead of rivals
Ronaldo is now well ahead of other global superstars in terms of numbers. His great rival Messi has a mere 623 million followers across social media.
Elsewhere, Selena Gomez – who has recently been declared a billionaire – has 690 million followers. Meanwhile MrBeast, who has the most subscribers on YouTube, has 543 million followers in total.
