- [Rob] So how come my YouTube channel page
tells me I have this many subscribers,
but my YouTube Analytics page
tells me I have this many subscribers?
What's all that about?
- [Man] vidIQ.
- [Woman] vidIQ.
- [Man] vidIQ.com.
(upbeat music)
- You may or may not know that popular YouTuber MrBeast
smashed 40 million subscribers recently
which he happily tweeted about,
as you probably would do
if you just hit 40 million subscribers.
But this gave me somewhat of a subscriber headache
because I was recording the moment for another video,
and it wasn't until several hours later that Mr Beast
according to the YouTube public subscriber counts
actually hit that landmark.
So what is going on?
One YouTube page tells me this,
another YouTube count tells me this.
It's time for some theories, a little bit of testing
and hopefully some answers.
(upbeat music)
There used to be a time where
unless a creator hid their subscriber count on purpose,
every single person in the world
knew exactly how many subscribers the channel had
at any given time.
There was also a time when I had a naked chin too,
but we all make mistakes in our youth.
Having precise subscriber counts that updated in real time
allowed you to do cool time lapses
like when PewDiePie hit 100 million subscribers.
Sadly however, thanks to YouTube's ultimate wisdom
and huge public pressure from absolutely no one
YouTube decided to abbreviate public subscriber counts,
so now those time lapse videos look like this.
(crickets chirping)
Yeah, you just record for hours on end and nothing happens.
I recorded this screen for 18 hours
until it tipped over to 40 million subscribers, true story.
Tragic story, since I've got nothing better to do
but true story.
So is this the theory?
We the public see the abbreviated sub count like this
and when the actual sub count of a channel
reaches a figure like this, YouTube automatically rounds up
to the next abbreviated sub count for the channel.
Well, since we don't have access
to MrBeast's private actual sub counts
we can neither confirm nor deny this,
but we do have the next best thing, our channel.
All right then, the vidIQ channel
according to our own YouTube Studio tells us
that we currently have 656,747 subscribers.
So that should be enough to round up
to 657,000 subscribers, right?
Apparently not, it looks as if YouTube doesn't round up
public abbreviated sub counts
to match private YouTube Studio Analytic sub counts.
Time for another theory.
(upbeat music)
Now you may have a little confusion
swirling around your head at this moment
and I don't blame you.
At the very start of this video I showed you two numbers,
which looked like the numbers were being rounded up
and another where they clearly weren't being rounded up.
So we need to do a test.
I'm currently logged into YouTube with the vidIQ account
and I've set up this test channel with no content,
three subscribers and a quite beautiful channel banner.
So let's subscribe to the channel with vidIQ
and then update this page.
In this instance, the subscriber count updated instantly.
This is because when a channel has under 1,000 subscribers,
YouTube doesn't abbreviate the count.
So with this in mind, let's switch to this YouTube account
and check the channel analytics.
Alright, so the channel analytics
still say three subscribers.
However, the vidIQ realtime stats bar
at the top of the screen says four subscribers
and if we try and switch accounts again,
the figure there also says four subscribers.
So on the one hand we have
multiple sources of the same number,
all be abbreviated that everybody can see
and on the other hand
we have one source for a specific number
that only you the creator can see.
So I decided to ask YouTube specifically
about this channel analytics subscriber count
and this is what they said.
"The number of subscribers that you see in YouTube analytics
is delayed by approximately 48 hours.
Before we post the stats in analytics,
we want to make sure they're 100% accurate,
so we perform additional verification and spam reviews
that's why it takes a little longer."
So the bottom line is,
if you have less than 1,000 subscribers,
your count is never abbreviated.
So via channel page subscriber counts
and everything you look up publicly
is always going to be ahead of your channel analytics
because they are delayed.
I know that's really annoying
but it's nothing to worry about, it's how YouTube works.
For channels that have abbreviated sub counts,
yes, those numbers won't quite align
but it's not gonna happen as often.
The funny thing is,
this subscriber count setup has always been the case.
The difference is, nobody used to pay attention
to the channel analytics accounts
because everyone looked at the public sub counts,
but once they got abbreviated
creators start to pay more attention
to the channel analytics without realizing
that they've always been delayed by 48 hours.
So in summary,
if the subscriber counts on your channel
don't match up in different places,
don't worry about it, it'll all catch up in the end.
And if you're getting really annoyed
about the subscribers that never end up in your counts,
then I'm afraid you're worrying
about the wrong things on YouTube.
Spam account, fake subscribers, bots,
do you really want any of those numbers
interfering with your analytics?
No.
Now then, we do have one loose end that we need to tie up.
These two numbers, the channel page sub count
and the YouTube API real time sub count,
come from the same source.
So how did MrBeast tweet this out
before it actually happened?
Pretty simple theory this one,
he cheated so we could tweet it out early.
I mean, it's not hard, is it?
(upbeat music)