Last month Middlesex Cricket were delighted to receive an award from YouTube for passing 100,000 subscribers on the Club’s YouTube channel – the prestigious YouTube Silver Plaque.
In earning the silver plaque, Middlesex became one of only six first-class counties to surpass 100,000 subscribers on its YouTube channel, which was first launched by the Club in 2010 and now boasts 105,000 subscribers.
The channel saw steady growth since its launch, however the introduction of the Club’s live match streaming service in 2020, in the height of the Covid pandemic, has seen the number of subscribers grow exponentially in recent years.
With regular content uploaded onto the channel, including live streams of all the Club’s matches, highlights from all Middlesex games in all domestic formats, interviews with the players, coaching staff and members of the Club’s Board of Directors, feature content showcasing the Club’s work delivered through our charitable foundation, Middlesex in the Community, to archive content and interviews celebrating the achievements of some of the Club’s greatest ever players, Middlesex’s YouTube channel has become the go to place for all the Club’s latest video content.
Since 2020, when the channel noticed its steepest growth curve, the Club’s live match streams have been watched over 9.3m million times in less than five years, with 2024 already showing viewing figures of over 1.56m.
The Club’s most watched live stream remains the Middlesex v Surrey Vitality Blast clash, played behind closed doors in the Covid year of 2020, with that one live stream alone watched an incredible 458,000 times.
In addition to the huge viewing figures generated by the Club’s live match streams, plenty of other Middlesex content uploaded on the channel gets huge engagement too, with the most watched video the Club has ever uploaded being the highlights video from our Vitality Blast match against Somerset in Taunton in 2019, when Eoin Morgan smashed an unbeaten 83 off just 29 balls to see us to an incredible victory. This video has been watched a staggering 2.1 million times online.
On receiving the YouTube Silver Plaque, the Club’s Communications Director, Steven Fletcher, commented:
“We are rightly proud to have received the silver plaque from YouTube in recognition for passing 100,000 subscribers on our channel.
“The game-changer for us was jumping straight into live streaming in the Covid year, as this gave us a real launch pad to grow the channel significantly, which it has done since.
“With the volume of viewers the live streams are receiving, we have been able to commercialise the live stream, by securing a multi-year partnership with Dafabet, which now sees the Club’s live stream as one of our most important commercial assets.
“We look forward to continuing to deliver content of high quality to our subscribers and watchers, and to seeing the channel continue to grow in the coming months and years, although we might have a bit of a wait on our hands before we receive the Gold Plaque – awarded to channels who surpass 1 million subscribers.
“Our thanks go to all our subscribers and to the millions of people who watch our videos every year and my personal thanks go to the team I work with, who continue to engage our audiences with engaging content.”
For those interested in subscribing to Middlesex YouTube channel, simply click here and hit the subscribe button and be the first to hear when we upload new content.
