7,229 clicks to the Substack and YouTube.
Tom Sykes earns from two places: his Substack and his YouTube channel. Since 7 July 2026 AE has cut and posted clips of The Royalist to Instagram and Facebook, and every clip points back to one of the two.
Instagram + Facebook · from 7 Jul 2026 · Views from Meta Business Suite, clicks from AE’s link hub
- 1.45M views from the clips posted in the first 30 days. The Facebook page didn’t exist before 7 July.
- 2.67M views in the 30 days to 12 October, the best month so far.
- The Facebook page went from zero to 8,127 followers in 97 days.
Views were never the goal.
A royals commentary show gets plenty of views on short clips. That alone pays Tom nothing. The money is in readers who open the Substack and viewers who sit through a full episode on YouTube, so we built the account around getting people from a clip to one of those two places.
Each clip carries a call to action for one destination. On Facebook it’s a link in the caption, which people can tap. Instagram captions can’t hold a live link, so viewers comment a keyword and get the link by DM. Every link goes through AE’s hub first, which is how we can count the clicks. AE picks the moments, cuts and captions them, writes the copy and posts. Tom spends no time on it.
The clicks grew faster than the views.
About a hundred readers a day.
4,944 clicks have gone to the Substack. In the 30 days to 12 October it was 3,068, roughly a hundred a day, up from 519 the month before.
A fast October.
2,285 clicks have gone to Tom’s YouTube channel. 1,171 of them came in the fifteen days from 13 October, more than in any full month before.
The clickable caption does the work.
5,920 of the 7,229 clicks came from Facebook. A link people can tap beats “link in bio” by a wide margin, so clips with a Substack or YouTube goal mostly go to Facebook.
Followers, and the DM route.
Instagram sent 1,299 clicks, mostly through the comment-to-DM keyword. Its bigger job is growing the audience that the next clip reaches.
A new page, a million views in its first month.
The Facebook page started with no followers on 7 July. The clips posted in its first 30 days have 1.12M views on Facebook and 328K on Instagram. Over the first 90 days the two platforms reached 5.1M views, 3.74M of them on Facebook. The 30 days to 12 October were the biggest yet at 2.67M, from 67 clips. The launch month took 86 clips to reach 1.64M.
No paid promotion, no ads, no audience borrowed from another account. Tom didn’t record anything new for it either. Every clip comes from episodes he had already made.
Stated plainly, so the numbers can be checked:
- Views are Meta’s own per-clip counts from Meta Business Suite (Instagram account @tomsykestheroyalist and The Royalist Facebook page), read on 12 October 2026. A period’s views are the views of the clips posted in that period. Meta’s views count replays.
- “First 90 days” is clips posted 7 July – 4 October 2026. “First 30 days” is 7 July – 5 August.
- Clicks are taps on AE’s link hub that went on to the Substack or YouTube, read on 27 October 2026, with known bots removed. The hub started counting on 20 July, so the launch weeks are undercounted. About 5,500 distinct visitors made the 7,229 clicks; that figure is approximate.
- We count clicks, not subscribers. Substack and YouTube don’t report which subscribers came from a given link, so this page makes no claim about subscriptions or revenue.
- TikTok and YouTube Shorts are not included.
Clips that send people back to the show.
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