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The 2025 Social Media Ranking Of Free-Market Think Tanks
May 9, 2025

According to a May 2025 Forbes social media ranking of free-market think tanks, the “Institute for Justice is the top among legal defense groups.” IJ also placed No. 1 in views of YouTube videos (two minutes or longer) among “judicial defense and rule of law” groups.

This reflects a period of substantial growth in IJ’s video program. Since 2020, our subscribers on YouTube have grown from 59,400 to more than 480,000, with 91,400 new subscribers in the past year alone. We now average nearly 2 million views per month, and in the past year, those views totaled 1.3 million hours of watch time. 

Since July 2024, we have released 20 mini-documentary case videos; 22 episodes of our video podcast Beyond the Brief, which accounted for 500,000 total watch hours; and 34 “shorts,” a vertical video format that exposes new audiences to brief but compelling updates about IJ cases. In that same period, 11 videos broke 500,000 views—and three broke 1 million! 

Our most popular videos over the past year are listed at left. Many of these are recent, but several older videos gained a second wind and went “viral” this year, amassing hundreds of thousands of additional views. One such video was our feature on James King, whose case IJ argued at the Supreme Court in 2020.

To see all our latest videos, visit our YouTube Playlist.