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SPORTS

Current College Player Nets Larger Audience Than NFL

Martha Bennett

• 1 min read
Current College Player Nets Larger Audience Than NFL
Photo by Gene Gallin / Unsplash

Florida Atlantic isn’t the biggest college football program in the country, but the team does have one of sports’ biggest social video stars in Josh Moore, according to new data from Tubular Labs.

Leaning almost exclusively into YouTube Shorts, the FAU Owls safety is cultivating a large audience against his content. According to Tubular: 

  • Moore was the No. 5 U.S. sports creator across YouTube and Facebook in November 2024.
  • His 25 million unique U.S. viewers were slightly more than what the NFL had in November, with his Shorts about football collecting millions of views (where 27 different videos earned at least one million).
  • Moore has been creating content for some time alongside his college football career, but only recently saw things really blow up. His U.S. audience grew by 6.4x in November, and over 32x since this past July.
  • Volume is part of the growth (a third of his videos in 2024 were uploaded last month). But he’s done an excellent job of using Shorts to quickly react and tie into trending topics, while also aggregating other content effectively.
  • Moore's success showcases how individual creators can compete with large media companies for eyeballs via authenticity, a unique voice and a smart engagement strategy to fuel growth.