The Sidemen co-founder Ethan Payne has shared the surprisingly simple answer to the UK YouTube group’s decade-long success
Sidemen star Ethan Payne has unveiled the surprisingly straightforward secret behind the YouTube collective’s remarkable decade-long success.
Best known as Behzinga, the 30-year-old helped establish the content creation phenomenon, which features KSI, Simon Minter, Vikram Singh Barn, Joshua Bradley, Harry Lewis, and Tobi Brown.
Since launching in 2013, the YouTubers have amassed a staggering combined following of over 100 million subscribers.
The group has become synonymous with engaging challenges, particularly their charity football matches that have captured viewers’ hearts.
Most recently, Ethan embarked on a fresh challenge by participating in the Formula E EVO Sessions this past Sunday (16 February), at Saudi Arabia’s Jeddah Corniche Circuit, reports the Daily Star.
He went head-to-head with the planet’s most prominent content creators, taking control of the state-of-the-art GEN3 Evo racing machine. The full experience is available to watch on Formula E’s YouTube platform.
Speaking with the Mirror prior to the competition, the father-of-one explained how the Sidemen have sustained their popularity, even as fresh waves of content creators flood the market.
“The key thing is friendship,” he explained. “I know it’s cliché to say, but the root of it all is we are just seven friends. I feel like if we didn’t have that bond at the core of it, it would be very easy to get comfortable and sit around.
“Whereas, we’re always in the group chat saying, ‘We need to do better this year. We need to revamp this or revamp that’ because the core value is to help improve everyone.”
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Earlier this month, KSI (real name Olajide ‘JJ’ Olatunji) revealed that every member of the group receives equal pay. Speaking on Jason Nguyen’s Twitch stream, he stated: “[There’s] equal pay all around, no one has a higher percentage.”
This disclosure left fans gobsmacked as KSI is generally seen as the group’s wealthiest member, thanks to his careers in music, boxing, and appearances on mainstream programmes like Britain’s Got Talent.
The other members have varying degrees of success, but that doesn’t alter anything for the band of brothers. As KSI further disclosed, everything is kept entirely fair.
When questioned about KSI’s comment, Ethan responded: “Thank you to him [KSI]. Realistically, in any other business world, it would be a silly model, but it works here. It helps us hold each other accountable as well.”
Formula E’s 2026 EVO Sessions is available to stream now on YouTube.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: mirror.co.uk
