“All those videos got over a million views,” Johnson says, “and I was like, oh, what’s going on here?
“Like, this is crazy.”
It would only get crazier—and more creative. In a video from July 2024, Ben shows off a bespoke closet made to efficiently store and access his trove of tennis equipment, from clunky racquets to his hat collection to accessories in various colorways. He built it himself, for about £250, after a trip to Ikea.
That same month, with Wimbledon taking place, he put together a two-second clip about viewing habits that became his most popular video on Instagram: over 391,000 likes.
“You have to sort of go down the funny viral route first,” Johnson says of his timeline, “and then you can start introducing the sort of super niche, kind of luxury lifestyle tennis content that I do now—which is what I love to do, bigger productions with the music, the grading, the cinematic-esque filming.”
There’s no better feeling I get than finishing editing a video, with the cool music, and just sitting down and watching it 100 times in a row. Ben Johnson
Johnson uses the word cinema often in our conversation. It’s the antithesis of most content that fills social-media algorithms: brain rot, lo-fi if not lowbrow, captured in often careless ways for the purpose to capture a view.
Rather than a cheap score, tennis’ Instagram auteur aspires for something much more.
“I film, edit and come up with all the creative ideas for my page,” Johnson says proudly. “It’s me with a tripod, I fly the drone, I grade everything myself, edit everything myself.
“It’s now my full-time job.”
