Kim Pro

KIMPRO is a South Korean YouTube channel that became the most-viewed channel in the world without anyone in it needing to say a word. Run by Kim Dong-jun with his cousin, it makes very short comedy videos built on faces, gestures and small surprises that anyone, anywhere, can understand.

Origins

The channel was created in 2017, but for several years it was not the main focus of the people behind it. Kim Dong-jun worked as a planner of events and concerts, a job that taught him how audiences react in real time: what makes a crowd laugh, gasp or lean forward.

In August 2022 he decided to commit to the channel seriously. He began working on it with his cousin, who is also known online as kkubi99, and the two appear together in many of its videos.

The Wordless Idea

Their key decision was to make videos that did not depend on language. Most successful Korean channels speak to Korean audiences. KIMPRO’s videos are built around expressions, physical comedy and situations: a surprising taste, a trick played on a family member, an exaggerated reaction, a small everyday problem solved in an unexpected way. There is little or no dialogue.

They also made the videos short. KIMPRO concentrated on YouTube Shorts, the platform’s vertical format of videos under a minute or so, which YouTube was pushing hard to compete with TikTok. Shorts are recommended to viewers all over the world, regardless of the language they speak. A wordless comedy clip could be enjoyed as easily in Brazil, India or Indonesia as in Korea.

The content mixes comedy sketches with popular online genres: mukbang (videos of eating), challenges and memes, adapted quickly to whatever is trending globally.

Explosive Growth

The combination worked on an extraordinary scale. The channel grew from a modest following to tens of millions of subscribers in a couple of years. In January 2025 it became the most-viewed YouTube channel in the world for a single month.

On 18 April 2025 KIMPRO became the first South Korean channel to reach 100 million subscribers, overtaking the K-pop group Blackpink to become the most-subscribed channel in the country — a remarkable result for a channel run by two people rather than a global entertainment company.

By the end of 2025 it had recorded about 77.5 billion views during the year, more than any other channel in the world, according to figures reported in the Korean press in January 2026. It has posted thousands of videos, most of them Shorts, and by 2026 had more than 130 million subscribers.

The Business

Korean financial media have estimated that the channel earns well over a hundred billion won a year from advertising — roughly $100 million or more. These are outside estimates based on view counts; the channel has not published its accounts. Shorts earn less per view than longer videos, but KIMPRO’s volume of views is so large that the totals are still very high.

Its success has made it a case study in Korea of how a small creative team can build a global audience by designing for the whole world from the start, rather than first for its home market.

A Low Profile

Despite its size, KIMPRO has kept a low public profile. In 2024, when it passed 50 million subscribers, Korean media noted that many Koreans had never heard of it, because most of its audience was abroad. Kim Dong-jun has given few interviews, and little is published about the cousins’ private lives, which this profile respects.

What It Shows

KIMPRO shows how YouTube changed in the 2020s. Shorts made it possible for a video to find an audience in any country within hours, and the barrier that mattered most became language. By removing words, KIMPRO removed that barrier.

Why Shorts Mattered

KIMPRO’s timing was important. YouTube launched Shorts globally in 2021 as its answer to TikTok, and in February 2023 began sharing advertising revenue from Shorts with creators. Until then, short videos had been hard to earn money from. The change made a Shorts-first channel a real business just as KIMPRO was growing.

Shorts also rewarded a particular kind of video: one that hooks the viewer in the first second and can be understood without context. KIMPRO’s wordless comedy fitted that almost perfectly.

The measure of it is the idea. Many creators chase trends; KIMPRO’s founders designed their format for the way the platform actually works, and for a global audience from the first day. That single decision made a small Korean channel the most-watched on earth.

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