The Magician With 200 Million Views

Imagine you’re asked to write a story about a YouTube magician whose subscriber count recently blew up to 1,000,000 subscribers. You sit down to research, and you hit play on one of their videos.

It’s a card magic tutorial that’s amassed 1,300,000 views.

The video’s stock footage intro would better fit a spy thriller.

Its voice-over and music feel like they belong in a conspiracy theory video.

It’s for sure a nice touch.

“This trick fooled David Blaine,” the magician says.

Okay, you’re interested.

“This trick was invented by an ancient magician, Chung Ling Soo”, he says next.

What?!? Now you’re invested.

The magician then performs the trick to the camera.

Hmmm, that’s strange, you think to yourself.

The secret to the trick is then taught to millions of viewers.

The YouTube magician credits Chung Ling Soo again, which is a strange way to pronounce John Bannon — you know Bannon was the magician who first published this triumph trick, Play it Straight, in his book Impossibilia in 1990.

There’s been plenty of published variations since the original - including variations from Joshua Jay, Asi Wind, Franco Pascali, and Harpan Ong.

But the original stands as one of the strongest pieces of card magic.

The same effect is frequently taught elsewhere, but typically Bannon or the name of the effect gets mentioned. This viral tutorial did neither and was shared on YouTube by a magician you have likely never heard about.

This magician has 1,100,000+ million subscribers and over 200 million views.

That’s right – 200 million views, and you’ve never heard about them.

Barely anyone in the magic community knows about him.

We asked around!

And yet, the future of magic is now getting shaped by people like Oscar Owen.

We recommend sharing One Ahead with your magician friends to read together.

Part 1. Oscar Who?

Oscar Owen is a 24-year-old magician from the UK that has had an astronomical rise in the YouTube community in the past three years. New York Weekly named Owen “the number one magic coach in the world”. He describes his online course as “the most popular card magic course in the world”, – which could actually be true with his huge following and his pricey learnmagic.com domain, which instantly landed high in Google searches for “Learn Magic”.

Oscar Owen also offers private coaching for £5k.

Yes, you read that correctly – private magic coaching for £5,000 ($6,000).

If you were to take a look back to Oscar’s earliest video in 2016 - you would see the foundations of the videos that helped him quickly become one of the most subscribed magicians on the platform.

His first video is a tutorial of an ambitious card sequence told with a story of how magician Dai Vernon fooled Houdini. From that point in 2016, his video posting was sporadic, going months in between uploads.

It wasn’t until 2019 that a more consistent uploading schedule was established - going only a few weeks between uploads. Then in October 2020, Oscar gained over 93,000 subscribers, and everything started to blow up. He his 1 million just four months ago and has since grown 10% more popular.

Many of his videos have hit over 10 million views, and he holds the top result when searching “card magic” on youtube. Without a doubt, Owen has established himself as an expert in the field in the eyes of the public.

The magic community should take notice.

200 million views in just a few years, shaping how the public views our art – not performance videos: tutorial videos.

We spend so much time getting upset at magic exposure that the community never looks at how and where new magicians are discovering and learning magic.

How did the magic community totally miss Owen’s rise to online fame?

Part 2. Oscar Owen’s BIGGEST secret | Revealed

Oscar’s video format has hardly changed since the start—a cinematic performance of an effect to the camera followed by an explanation. In recent months, he’s also begun producing magic reaction videos.

Usually, to help build the presentation out - there is a claim that the effect fooled a famous person. Blaine, Obama, and Musk have apparently all been fooled by card tricks you can learn on his channel. And although these tutorial videos reach millions of views, they are tiny view counts compared to his main series: Revealed.

It turns out that adding “Revealed” to your title gets you views.

They’re SEO-friendly (search engine optimization) titles followed by blatant exposure of quick tricks. The top 4 videos have a combined 47 million views.

And no one in the magic community is talking about it.

Owen is a smart entrepreneur. He executes well and subscribes to what many solopreneurs do today. He’s currently in Bali, working minimally and efficiently and building what appears to be a successful financial business, with a book, online course, and private mentorship alongside his YouTube Adsense.

But at what cost to magic?

It would be silly not to acknowledge that his rise coincides with a global pandemic. Millions of people were isolated at home in quarantine with nothing but the internet and time. Some people learned how to make sourdough bread, some made fresh pasta, and some learned an exposed and uncredited version of Stewart James’ Miraskill magic trick that apparently fooled President Obama.

It just so happens that Simon and Schuster published Oscar’s book. That is one of the largest publishing houses in the world. The book is titled Mind-Blowing Magic Tricks for Everyone and was released in 2021. In 156 pages, Oscar teaches 50 effects. Most of which explore basic magic concepts in a beginner-friendly way. QR codes throughout the book show you what these ideas actually look like. He even credits some of the ideas to their original creators.

Although the book is carried at some of the largest magic retailers, like Penguin and Vanishing Inc, there isn’t a single review online for it. There is also no review on The Magic Cafe. Magicians have primarily overlooked his work.

The book has 100+ reviews on Amazon.

The vast majority are glowing testimonials.

Oscar’s course sells at $199. The list of contents on the website shows that he’s teaching some well-known classics - such as Out of this World and Shuffleboard.

An article about Oscar claims the course has over 10,000 members.

Napkin math tells us the course has generated $1,990,000+.

So with all that success - how did he stay under the radar?

Oscar has marketed himself and his material as beginner friendly. Most magicians inside the community are probably, at the very least, average.

So Oscar has positioned himself as the ultimate teacher for the beginner magician. The audience that finds him is almost exclusively people just finding magic for the first time. And let’s be honest — Oscar’s well-shot videos with friendly explanations are a darn sight more welcoming than the overwhelming bullshit you see when you visit the homepage of any magic shop today.

Remember when Dan & Dave had a beginner section on their site with HD video tutorials teaching essential sleights and card tricks ten years ago? Those were the good days. It’s no wonder people will learn their first tricks from YouTube videos rather than trying to work out what on earth these magic shops are selling…

Oscar never needed the support of the magic community.

In many ways, his videos and audience are a product of magic’s relentless obsession with gatekeeping.

Oscar built himself up by appealing to people with no magic background. This allowed him to credit sparsely, if at all, with no backlash from the industry.

The average beginner won’t recognize John Bannon’s trick - nor understand the ethical implications of teaching it without permission or proper crediting.

Hey — maybe Oscar learned the trick from a source that didn’t credit Bannon either. Perhaps Oscar is none-the-wiser. He does seem like a nice enough guy. But what does that mean for the kid who teaches it next and the one after that?

People want easy ways to discover and learn magic.

And by all accounts, the people searching genuinely want to learn.

They’re curious, they’re interested, and they were like we were at one time.

When they search out magic tutorials, who will they find sharing magic?

Part 3. Finding Magic

To see what a non-magician might find on the internet — we enlisted the help of two non-magician friends, Jeff and Emily. They were asked to learn a magic trick by any means necessary — they couldn’t ask a magician for help.

Unsurprisingly, Jeff and Emily instinctively reached for their phones and went straight to YouTube. In less than one minute, Jeff ended up on a card magic tutorial by, you guessed it, Oscar Owen. Jeff’s search for “card magic tricks” took him directly to one of Owen’s keyword-optimized videos.

Emily took a different route. Being a Mom, her instincts lead her to search for the term “magic tricks for kids”. The names that populated her screen were just as unfamiliar to the magic community as Oscar Owen, but their views were massive. It is remarkable how many people teach magic and how many want to learn.

Millions of magicians are learning from people we don’t associate with the magic community. Are we getting left behind by it all? Is our little insular secret-obsessed magic community being outgrown by a group of millions of hobbyist magicians with a new open mindset towards learning and sharing magic?

“Don’t forget to like and subscribe.”

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Update: On Wednesday 22nd, Oscar Owen’s website went down with an alert still visible, which reads: This Account has been suspended.