On the road

Nurse John and other funny Filipinos entertaining social media

I turned my cellphone on the other day to the awesome news that Nurse John, a social media influencer I follow on Instagram, was named one of Forbes Magazine’s Top 50 Creators for 2026. 

Nurse John, whose real name is John Dela Cruz, ranks Number 28. He is just a few notches below the children’s show host Ms. Rachel at Number 24. He outranked two other creators I follow, the Japanese-American lawyer-finance expert Erika Kullberg at Number 40, and Chinese-American Vivian Tu, another finance expert known as Your Rich BFF, at Number 45.

Many of the names on the Top 50 Creators list I have never heard of, but some I follow. One of them is the British host Steven Bartlett of Youtube’s “Diary of a CEO” fame, ranked Number 3. Another is American comedian Adam Waheed, posting as AdamW, known for his extremely wacky stunts, at Number 13.

As far as I could tell, Nurse John, who is now based in Los Angeles, is the only social media star of Filipino ethnicity on that list, and the only one, after Bretman Rock in 2022, to ever be recognized as a top creator. 

“The creator economy is no longer trying to break into show business—it is show business,” Forbes said in its report. 

Nurse John creates hilariously raunchy skits about life as a nurse burnt out from long shifts and mistreatment by doctors and patients. He likes comparing nurses by generation. On one end, he portrays Gen-Z nurses as shy and reticent, and on the other end, veteran Boomer Filipino nurses as small-but-terrible types who refuse to be cowed by the most stubborn patients or by boastful doctors. 

Nurse John appears on my feed a lot. The algorithm loops him back to me for reacting to his content, mostly by liking his posts. Forbes data shows Nurse John having one of the highest average engagement scores on the Top Creators’ list, a score arrived at by a formula of counting likes, comments and shares against total number of followers.

According to Forbes, Nurse John has a following of close to 20 million across social media platforms. People could easily relate to his content: anyone who is or has been a nurse, or knows or works with one, or has been treated by one in a hospital or a clinic. That demographic is huge. He has a following among health professionals, with other creators liking and commenting on his posts, and even collaborating with him, among them the neurosurgeon @ladyspinedoc and the pediatric ER doctor @drbeachgem both of whom I follow too.

Forbes places Nurse John’s earnings at $7.2 million. That’s a feat for someone who, at 17, migrated to Canada from the Philippines with his single mother, studied to be a nurse, and worked, hoping to be just another Filipino nurse abroad. But Covid happened and John, like many health care workers, got burned out. He turned to TikTok where he filmed himself in funny situations, as a way of coping with nursing life. The rest is social media history. 

Before Nurse John, I was already watching Nurse Even, John Steven Soriano in real life, who was posting about nursing life on Instagram from the UK. Both Johns have levelled up to doing stand-up comedy shows to packed audiences and getting huge bucks for it. 

They aren’t the only Filipinos now making a living out of social media. Excluding movie and TV stars and other personalities who have a built-in following, there are hundreds, if not thousands of others who are also part of the creator economy, on a smaller but nonetheless sustainable scale. 

I know of people who follow YouTube videos of residents in Batangas in Southern Luzon, for instance, as they build their houses, or repair their boats, or go about daily lives in various stages. There are families who dance, people who cook, men and women who invite their audience to GRWM (get ready with me), mothers who care for kids, and professional content creators who produce quality entertainment on social media.

The content possibilities are endless in social media, as long as would-be stars as willing to shed their inhibitions, and show themselves on camera doing all sorts of things, in the name of authenticity. 

There’s a downside, though, in being willing to bare all in exchange for money, but that’s another story. 

What I find revealing and worthy of further inquiry is how far the Philippines’ own creator economy has come and how much it is worth these days. That, too, is a story for another day. 

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Read related stories:

Anywhere, Everywhere (On Filipinos I’ve encountered all over the world)

On The Road, One More Time (Why I write about migration, the new home and the old)

My Blog’s Origin Story (How it all started)