Beluga is an American YouTuber who is one of very few YouTubers who apparently broke the algorithm with his very quick and massive rise on the channel by the same name. He is mostly known for his Discord-related memes and skits on his main channel and the Beluga Jr. channel. He also has another channel called Explore Lucid Dreaming, on which he was active first with content about lucid dreaming.
Career
Beluga had originally joined YouTube with the channel Survival Mode on January 26, 2017, although it was not his main account and he didn’t even upload anything on it. Rather, he created a second channel called Explore Lucid Dreaming on September 30, 2017, on which he began to upload videos about lucid dreaming and sleep paralysis. Even on that channel, he only started uploading videos in January 2019 with the video How To Lucid Dream In 5 Steps! (WILD Tutorial). He had his other channel linked there, which caused it to gradually gain over 400 subscribers even before he ever posted anything on it. By then, he had amassed over 700k subscribers to his other channel, where he gave a shoutout to his second channel, thus further boosting its subscriber count.
His first video on the Beluga channel (then named exploreld), It's Mathematically Unlikely You Will Watch This, was uploaded on February 26, 2021. In the video, he revealed that he would reward selected people who subscribe and comment to the channel with glowing lucid dreaming wristbands gained from his other channel. While he initially started posting Minecraft-related videos on the channel, in one of his earliest videos, titled Renaming My YouTube Channel (emotional), he mentioned that he had big plans for the channel which will blow it up. He was not wrong, as his next video about a massive Minecraft hack, titled How 126,000,000 Minecraft Accounts Got Hacked, became very successful in late May. However, the real boost to the channel came when he began posting Discord-related meme videos starting with Discord Mods Be Like... on June 12, 2021. It became his most popular video thus far, prompting him to switch to that type of videos and create a cinematic universe with several recurring characters. This channel soon surpassed his other channel, gaining 2 million subscribers in a month and 4 million in three months.
Following the massive success of his Beluga channel, many people started to discuss and dissect his strategy, with claims that he focused on session time to beat the YouTube algorithm, and that his channel being old or he renaming the channel also helped. Interestingly, right before the blow up, his video about Dream’s speedrunning scandal had received a lot of hate due to misinformation, although he decided to keep the video. He subsequently became less active on the Explore Lucid Dreaming channel, although he continued to upload new content. He later created another channel called Beluga Jr., which is supposedly run by Beluga’s son, although he has not uploaded many videos there.
