ahem *puts on scientific voice*
In the newly published YouTube video "DAN AND PHIL MASSIVE PIZZA MUKBANG 3", Lester (2026) discussed a shared kiss between Lester's "partner in everything" (Howell & Lester, 2025) Howell and himself during the filming of "phil is not on fire" (Howell & Lester, 2009). This added a new layer of context to the video, which Howell (2023) refers to as "one of the most important pieces of culture in the 21st century". As a consequence of that, a spike in the engagement with "phil is not on fire" can be observed as members of the Phandom re-examine the 16 year old video.
In this post we will attempt to quantify the response to this recent development. This will be done through the analysis of multiple factors indicative of the engagement with the original "phil is not on fire".
Over the course of the past 43 hours (8pm BST 2026-07-04 to 3pm BST 2026-07-06), at least 270 new comments were added to the 16 year old video. This number was determined by counting the new comments added after the mukbang was posted. It is important to note that this is likely an underestimation, as this method does not include new comments left under older comments. Therefore, the actual number of new comments is likely higher.
To put this in perspective, over the past 16 years this video has amassed 33,660 comments. That means the 270 comments of the past 43 hours constitute about 0.8% of the total comments (S. Endipnpipity (@serendipnpipity), personal communication, July 5, 2026). For comparison, "phil is not on fire" has been up for 6098 days, which means that these approximately 2 days make up 0.03% of the total time this video has been posted.
Furthermore, one new comment (Figure 1) gained 954 likes in the examined time frame.
Figure 1 - YouTube Comment under "phil is not on fire"
oookay let's drop this. so basically it's kind of hard to say just how many views pinof got since the mukbang because afaik, there aren't any websites that track the view counts of singular videos. if there are please PLEASE lmk. so we have to work around that a little bit.
one metric we can use is the socialblade channel views for AP. socialblade isn't thaaaat reliable at tracking things correctly but it's somewhat right. as you can see here, AP usually get's something between 17k and 22k views daily, peaking at 28k (although that is probably just a mistake in the count because you can see the day before that is only 7k views. so yeah, the actual view count of those two days is probably closer to 17.5k each)
on sunday, so the day after the mukbang (and considering my time zone (CET) that's the day where you'd expect to see the biggest impact in views as an immediate reaction to the mukbang) the views shot up to 36k, which is 14k-19k views more than you'd expect to see. I suspect those views can mostly be attributed to pinof.
if we want to go even deeper, we can turn to our bff the wayback machine.
the last two captures of pinof 1 through the wayback machine were on march 4th and may 8th, so there are approximately 2 months (or more precisely 65 days) between that. In that time pinof gained about 19,500 views, so about 300 per day.
in the 59 days since the may capture it gained about 23,200 views, which is about 390 views per day. or put differently, with the view rate of the preceding two months of 300 views per day we would expect an increase in the view count of 17,700. there are 5,500 more views than that.
with the first method we can't attribute the increase of the AP views directly to pinof and with the second method we can't attribute the increase in views directly to the last two days. but like. something happened for sure. yay!
yeah so, a lot of people went back and watched pinof. and please dan and phil let me look at your channel metrics, i would actually kill for that.
nopee, not That committed to the bit but ig here are the videos i mentioned:
izzy806
baratheonpilled
discoholicmusic
snowghoul
