The data shows that former physical therapist and strength coach Athlean-X is the most successful fitness YouTuber. He has the most subscribers and the most views with 11,600,000 and 1,847,112,280 respectively, scoring a perfect 10 out of 10 for both categories.

Coming in second place is German influencer Pamela Reif. According to Social Blade data Reif is also predicted to earn the highest yearly salary through YouTube at £1,900,000, (9.29 points out of 10).  

Then there’s Yoga with Adriene in third place who has the second highest number of subscribers (9,870,000) after Athlean-X. Likewise, Adriene’s high subscriber count can be attributed to her zen personality and videos that cater to all abilities.

Trailing behind in 18th place, but still considered one of the top 20 most successful fitness YouTubers is Stephanie Buttermore who uses her background in science to educate her subscribers. Buttermore’s estimated yearly salary through YouTube is £51,200.

Similarly, former Olympian Tom Daley is in the penultimate spot with 126,406,562 total views, as well as an estimated yearly YouTube salary at £43,500. Whilst in last place is fitness and figure competitor Dana Linn Bailey who despite having 479,000 subscribers and 99,977,573 total video views, scored no points overall.

Other notable results:

Despite being in the news consistently over the course of 2020 through to 2021 encouraging the nation to keep active, surprisingly Joe Wicks aka The Body Coach only comes in at number 12. Wicks has 2,760,000 subscribers and 275,709,950 total video views.

Methodology:

          1.   To collect this data, Flawless.org used reputable journalistic articles featuring top-rated fitness YouTubers. Flawless.org curated seeding list from 2019- 2021. Sources included:

1. Thereafter, Flawless.org was able to extract a list of recurring YouTubers that were mentioned more than once, finalising a seeding list of 20 YouTubers to analyse.

2. POPSUGAR Fitness was omitted as there isn’t one specific notable influencer as it’s a company run channel.

3. From this, Flawless assessed each YouTube channel profile to source every influencer’s subscriber count and total video views.

4. Social Blade was used to find their estimated yearly salary. The range fluctuates as there are many factors that come into play when calculating CPM. These include quality of traffic, source country, niche type of video, price of specific ads, ad block, and the actual rate. Flawless took the maximum yearly salary noted.

5. After collecting this data, Flawless.org amalgamated the raw data and input into an index-scoring system, ranking all 20 fitness YouTubers according to the factors investigated. Flawless.org also converted figures into Dollars and Euros using live exchange rate data https://www.xe.com/.

6. For each factor, each YouTuber was scored out of 10. They were also given an overall score out of 10, ranking them in terms of ‘success’.

7. Data was collected on May 24th, 2021 and is subject to change.