Objective

Hello Kitty and her friends are on a mission to spread friendship, kindness, and inclusivity across the world… and on YouTube with the Hello Kitty and Friends YouTube channel!

The channel had grown steadily with an audience in North America since 2019 and in 2024 we saw the opportunity to grow, bringing fans across the world into the channel more than ever before. 

Our goals on YouTube were ambitious: increase subscriber growth on the channel by 1.2 Million in nine months reaching 3 Million subscribers across our target regions (North America, UK, Spain, Italy, France and Germany). 

Strategy

We took an audience-first approach to growing the Hello Kitty and Friends channel, knowing that our best advocates are the fans we already have. We began by reviewing past performance and metrics across our channel to understand what our fans were the most interested in, what content earned the most subscribers, what Sanrio characters were the most popular, and what changes we could make that would quickly grow the channel.  

We discovered the following opportunities to increase growth: 

• We saw a correlation between subscriber growth and increased content around fan favorite characters like Kuromi and Cinnamoroll, so we increased our posting cadence by adding Kuromi Shorts, an engaging series of moments in Kuromi’s life, as well as a new animation series, I.CINNAMOROLL, which imagines Cinnamoroll’s life in the human world. 
• We capitalized on the fandom behind our most popular animated series, Hello Kitty and Friends Supercute Adventures, by releasing 2 brand new seasons. 
• We tapped into relevant trends across culture and social media to inspire our content, making culturally-relevant live action craft videos, ASMR videos, and shorts featuring our character mascots that increased views and engagement. 
• We found compilations of past episodes of Hello Kitty and Friends Supercute Adventures featuring top characters helped to increase watch time, views, and subscribers, so we published one character-focused compilation each month.  
• We saw that we could bring in new audiences through Shorts as well as long-form videos, so we made sure to keep a consistent cadence on both feeds to reach audiences no matter where they were scrolling. 
• We knew that international fans were already visiting our page and watching videos, so we made it even easier for them to discover content in their language by updating the homepage to feature playlists in multiple languages – visually tagged with flags to make it easy for non-English speakers to navigate. 
• We learned that top viewed content and top engaged content also drove subscriber growth, so we used those videos in a targeted paid campaign across North America, the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany Italy and France taking into consideration the regional differences between each audience. 

All of these changes helped us spread smiles and joy to new and existing audiences in the US and abroad because as Hello Kitty says “You can never have too many friends.” 

Results

We have not only met but exceeded our objectives. With our multifaceted approach, we met the 3 Million subscriber goal in December 2024 - THREE months early! And it didn’t stop there. We are continuing to build our fan base with 3.24 million subscribers currently.  

We were also able to grow subscribers in our target European markets (UK, Germany, Italy, France, and Spain) by 105k subscribers through a mix of engaging organic content and a paid subscriber campaign targeting Hello Kitty using both in-language and non-verbal content.  

In addition to our subscriber goal, we also grew views by 68% from 2023 to 245 million views in 2024, had 6.2M engagements and a 113% increase in watch time compared to 2023.  

The Hello Kitty and Friends channel continues to grow, making friends around the globe by spreading smiles, friendship, and kindness to new and old friends alike.  

Media