Binging with Babish: Andrew Rea's Channel, by the Numbers

Binging with Babish recreates food from films, TV shows and games, and its host, Andrew Rea, has been unusually open about what running it cost him. This profile follows the channel from its 2016 start through a 2022 interview about burnout, and then checks what its public numbers look like in October 2026, including how many of its videos are sponsored.

How it started

Rea told The Observer in 2022 that he had graduated from film school in New York and planned to direct documentaries. In 2016, after “a marriage break-up, a professional falling-out and a bout of depression”, he was living with a friend in Queens. He put $4,000 of camera equipment on a credit card. An episode of Parks and Recreation with a burger cook-off gave him the idea: recreate a dish from the screen as faithfully as possible, mistakes included (The Guardian/Observer, May 1, 2022).

The account itself is older than the show. Its About panel says it was created on August 21, 2006 (YouTube, @bingingwithbabish). The name comes from Rea’s favourite character in The West Wing.

Growth, and what it cost

The Observer interview gives a set of dated markers:

• For the first eight months, while still in a full-time job, Rea said he worked at least 100 hours a week.
• He went full-time “once sponsorship money started rolling in after the first year”, and brought in his best friend, Sawyer Carter Jacobs, as business partner when sponsorship offers arrived at around a million subscribers.
• During the pandemic the channel went “from 5m to soaring past 8m in a matter of months”.
• By late 2021 it was past 9 million subscribers, there was a small crew, cookbooks and a cookware line, and Rea had spent 18 months working 70-hour weeks.

Then growth slowed. He told the paper he was “stuck on 9.5m”, obsessed with reaching 10 million, checking analytics first thing every morning, and that he had “a massive internal breakdown” before his fiancé, Jess Opon, and his business partner staged what he called a “friendship intervention”. “It was killing me slowly,” he said.

Four and a half years later, the channel shows 10.5 million subscribers. The milestone he was fixated on did arrive, slowly.

By the numbers

On October 28, 2026 the channel’s About panel showed 1,030 videos and 2,965,676,456 total views. We measured its recent uploads as part of our study of 312 big YouTube channels.

Measure (October 28, 2026)	Binging with Babish	Typical food channel in our study
Subscribers (as YouTube displays them)	10.5M	—
Median views per long-form upload	816K	—
Views per subscriber	7.8%	7.8%
Like rate (likes ÷ views)	2.35%	2.40%
Long-form uploads, last 30 days	2	3.5
Long-form uploads disclosing a sponsor in the description	9 of 15	8.7% of food uploads
Median views per Short	98.5K	—

On reach and likes, Babish is almost exactly the typical food channel: 7.8% of subscribers per video and a like rate a hair under the food median. The pace is gentler than at the 70-hour-week peak, about two long-form videos a month.

The sponsorship row is where it differs. Nine of its 15 latest long-form descriptions disclose a sponsor in explicit terms such as “sponsored by” or “thanks to … for sponsoring”. Across the 60 food channels we measured, 8.7% of long-form uploads did. That is consistent with what Rea described in 2022, a channel funded by sponsorship, and it is the kind of transparency brands and viewers should want: the deal is stated where anyone can read it.

What our checker would add

Binging with Babish is on YouTube, one of the two platforms our free authenticity checker can score. We did not run it for this article, so nothing here is or implies a score for the channel. Run it yourself at /check/youtube/bingingwithbabish; the methodology explains what it measures.

The bottom line

The channel’s history is unusually well documented by its own host, including the parts most creators leave out. Its numbers today are ordinary in the best sense for a big food channel, and it discloses its sponsors more consistently than most. For brands weighing a food creator, Rea’s interview is also a reminder that a channel’s output depends on a person, and that a slower upload pace can be a healthy one. See our guide to checking a YouTuber’s current activity before you sign.

Sources: The Guardian/Observer, “Andrew Rea: the YouTube chef cooking up a storm”, May 1, 2022; YouTube channel About panel; YouTube’s public upload feeds for the channel, read October 28, 2026 (study dataset).