Jason Coffee

“Family having fun, making silly videos!” So reads Jason Coffee’s social media tagline. And it’s about as succinct a description of who he is, what he does, and why he is so popular as you can get. This is, after all, a man with 21.6 million TikTok fans, 847,000 Instagram followers, and 416,000 YouTube subscribers. His content has generated literally billions of views and likes in less than a decade. And before them, there were the millions of followers and reacts he got on the now-defunct video-sharing platform Vine.

One of the things that makes Coffee stand out is his age — and not in a bad way. Now in his forties, he has built a massive family-orientated following on platforms largely (and falsely) seen as Gen X territory. But then Coffee is something of a social media OG. He joined Vine as soon as it launched at the start of 2013, and by the time it closed four years later, he had amassed over 900,000 followers. He has enjoyed similar success on Insta and YouTube, but it’s TikTok where his unique but relatable brand of family blogging has really taken off, with a mind-blowing 26.1 million people clicking the ‘Follow’ icon on his account.

It should be noted that Coffee isn’t his real name, he keeps that well under wraps. His caffeinated pseudonym comes from a) his love of the stuff, and b) his previous job working for Starbucks (which he was doing when he set up his first successful account).