Ray William Johnson
American YouTuber · United States · On the map · YouTubers · Born 1981 · age 45
Ray William Johnson turned viral-video commentary into a crown. His YouTube channel, Equals Three, held the throne as the most-subscribed on the platform for 564 days straight and was the first to crack 5 million subscribers - back when that meant something close to total dominance.
Ray William Johnson is read about 593 times a day, in 37 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 9 November 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 400 days, one point a day.
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About this person
Born August 14, 1981, Johnson launched Equals Three and rode it to the top of YouTube by June 2011, a perch he kept until January 2013. The channel passed 10 million subscribers and 2 billion views in 2013, numbers that made it one of the era's juggernauts. He co-founded Your Favorite Martian with Jesse Cale, voicing Puff Puff in an internet cartoon band that released 60 songs starting in 2011 and went quiet for over a decade before returning in 2024. Johnson stepped away from hosting Equals Three in March 2014 but kept producing it alongside series like Booze Lightyear and Comedians On, both later axed. He tried scripted work with Riley Rewind on Facebook in 2013, sold a TV concept to FX that same year, and appeared in the indie film Who's Driving Doug. By the 2020s he'd pivoted to true crime stories on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram - a long way from reaction videos, but still chasing the algorithm.
