CREATOR ECONOMY

Exploding Kittens Blows Up, Reaching 20 Million Viewers On YouTube

John Cassillo

May 19, 2025 • 2 min read

Exploding Kittens learned some key lessons from the creator economy in April, using Shorts to generate viral interest in its various party card games (including newly-released Coyote). Data from Tubular Labs shows Exploding Kittens was the No. 5 domestic brand by U.S. YouTube reach in April, at 19.8 million unique viewers.

While brands can fuel YouTube reach growth solely via ad buys if they so choose, Exploding Kittens utilized Shorts to create organic content that felt endemic to the creator economy – and it paid off. The brand’s top video of the month generated nearly 1 million engagements, when brand ads typically see engagement figures that are far lower.
Exploding Kittens isn’t typically this sort of creator, either. In the past, the brand hasn’t created much YouTube content at all (fewer than 5 million views and 76K engagements total from Jan. 1, 2023 through Nov. 30, 2024), yet was able to quickly capture eyeballs with the new approach in April 2025.

The lesson for brands, in part, is to tell by showing when you have a more visual product. And of course, to do your homework about how your intended audience engages with content. Here, the viral clips not only grabbed attention for Exploding Kittens and the new game Coyote, but also showed how to play quickly in a way that felt natural for consumers.

The brand itself told The Measure about the conscious shift in strategy:

“As we’ve evaluated our content strategy for social channels like YouTube, we’ve moved away from sharing traditional branded content to instead focus on capturing moments that feel spontaneous, social, and shareable, because that’s how people actually play our games,” said Daisy Ritz, VP of Marketing at Exploding Kittens. “Our goal is to make content that feels like a friend recommending a game to you, not a brand. With Coyote, for example, we designed our videos to reflect the fast-paced and chaotic energy of the game so people could get a sense of what playing would be like.”