Why subscribers on YouTube don’t matter
By: Shane Pepperell
Tags: Subscribers, Money, YouTube, Views

Yes, you read this right. You can almost forget about subscribers. Unless you’re aiming for the illusive YouTube play buttons. Let me tell you why.

If you think about subscribers as a success metric, your going in the wrong direction. While yes they can be important later on. At an early stage it isn’t what you should focus on. subscribers shouldn’t be your focus to grow on YouTube. you should focus on other metrics instead in order to grow on YouTube, the right way.

One of the big metrics you should focus on (and the most obvious one) is views. The more views get the more likely your video is to be recommended. YouTube drives more traffic to great videos. This is controlled by the algorithm. Many try to reverse engineer and find hacks to rank better and get more views, some succeed, while others fail. Views are what drives the platform. YouTube’s main objective isn’t that different than yours. They want more viewers, engaging more and watching longer because that’s how they make their money as a platform. More time spent on YouTube = more attractiveness for advertisers = more advertising budget allocated to YouTube = more revenue for YouTube (i.e. Google, its parent company). In short. The YouTube algorithm is basically Pandora’s box. You just need to create the right content that engages audiences and unlock the secret of said box.

This is easier said than done. There are a lot of things you have no control over. But it’s not all bad news. There are things you can to do to take control somewhat. For example you can’t force people to sit down and watch hours upon hours of dull and boring content. But you can create genuinely engaging content for your viewers so that they will want to come back to watch more of you.

If the algorithm has the power to push more views to channels on the platform, it also has the power to not recommend other channels that create low effort and full videos that people click off instantly. For example imagine a channel with 1,000 subscribers but just a handful of videos that barely get any views. it shows that their subscribers aren’t engaging with what that person is uploading. Those subscribers don’t matter and can be compared to ghosts in a graveyard. This is why sub4sub is a terrible growth strategy What if it’s the other way round. Well that’s also bad. Because if people are not watching for long enough because they got mislead by a title or thumbnail. YouTube will be less inclined to push that out into the algorithm

Now let’s look at the other side of the story Imagine a small channel, with just a few subscribers, that uploads regularly and constantly gets around 1k views. As well as that people are watching to the end and enjoying the videos. This shows YouTube that the content is good and videos like that are much more likely to get ranked in the algorithm

Now Imagine if those viewers took a call to action and subscribed to your channel and decides to check out your other content. You’ve just turned a viewer into a fan that will keep coming back to watch more of your content. You need to let people subscribe to your channel when they have genuinely enjoyed the content youve created. So thats where your focus should be. High quality and enjoyable, that will entertain your audience.From here a lot more people will be more inclined to Subscribe to you if you leave enough of them entertained after they watched your content, Therefore driving more important metrics like viewership and watchtime higher

And just to be clear, There’s nothing wrong about reminding people to subscribe at the end of your videos. This is called a call to action and most people do it. However most people do it wrong. If they’ve watch the video to the end, they must have enjoyed it. That’s your chance to ask them into consider subscribing. But don’t beg them after 15 seconds, it just feels needy. and people will be less inclined to do so. You can even do this midway thought the video but you should only do that on longer videos

But haven’t you contradicted myself?

No and there is a really easy way to prove this. Youtube has a tool that lets you see the percentage of your views coming from your subscribers vs. non-subscribers. A lot of people also use this metric to encourage people to subscribe. The average is 90 to 95% of their views come from non-subscribers. That means most people watch videos from creators they haven’t (yet) subscribed to. And that’s YouTube’s algorithm recommending your videos and sending traffic to your channel, And another thing. Lets say you are trying to reach the monetization requiurements, which are 1k subs and 4k public watch hours. Imagine you beg people to subscribe and use methods like sub4sub to reach the monetization requirements. You have 1,000 ghosts following your channel. You showed YouTube that your first 1,000 subscribers don’t watch your content for more than a few seconds, so you ruined your potential for being promoted in the algorithm. How will you get to 4,000 hours of watch time now? You can spend hours and hours spamming all corners of the internet to get views, but chances are you’ll lose patience or motivation before reaching monetization. And even if you do end up reaching monetization with spam, your audience won’t be targeted, they won’t be relevant for ads on your channel and you won’t end up making a lot of money from AdSense.