Julius Dein is a good magician, that’s undeniable, but is he as good as Penn & Teller, David Blaine, David Copperfield or any other magic superstar you care to name? I imagine you’d argue no, but the 23-year-old Brit’s online presence is orders of magnitude larger than the world’s most famous and well paid magicians. On Instagram, David Blaine has 463,000 followers. Dein has 13 million. Does Instagram really matter that much? Enough that Blaine maintains (or pays someone to maintain) an online presence on the app. So what is Dein doing differently?

SEO. Search Engine Optimization. The art of tricking a search engine into putting your content higher up the search results for a given term. Those sites at the top? They get traffic boosts in the millions of hits. Like most social media stars, Dein spends a lot of time carefully considering his content and, more importantly, how it appears to search engines.

“I’m utterly obsessed,” he told Business Insider UK. “It consumes my entire life. I think about it from the moment I wake up and grab my phone to the moment I go to sleep at night.”      

Not to belittle Dein’s sleight-of-hand chops (you don’t get as big as he is without top-tier patter and good hands) but it’s his skill with Youtube’s search algorithm’s that set him apart from rank and file magicians. And considering the absolute state of some professional magicians’ websites, it’s not hard to see why Dein is so far ahead of the pack.