- [Rob Wilson] As you may or may not know,
PewDiePie smashed 100 million subscribers this week
and we were fortunate enough to capture the moment live.
(crowd cheers)
However, had this happened in September,
it would have most likely looked something like this.
(clicks)
Oh, that was a bit boring.
(exciting music)
- [Male Voice] vidIQ
- [Female Voice] vidIQ
- [Male Voice] vidIQ.com
(upbeat techno music)
- [Rob Wilson] Hello, I'm Rob and as always,
welcome back to vidIQ,
educating you on your YouTube journey.
And I know you all love this little sub counter thing
called a LaMetric Time.
And I'm delighted to announce
that we are currently on 390,478 subscribers.
But in a short few weeks,
YouTube is gonna break this thing, kind of.
Let me put it this way, I want you to search
for your favorite channel on YouTube and tell me
exactly how many subscribers they have right now.
Depending on when you watch this video,
you're gonna get this answer
or you're gonna get this answer
and that's called an abbreviated subcount.
To the shock of the whole YouTube community,
YouTube announced these changes three months ago
and now they have updated us all
on how exactly they are going to work.
To summarize, with the exception of channels
under 1,000 subscribers whose subscriber count
will always be displayed to the single digits,
all channel subscriber counts will be rounded down,
depending on how many subscribers the channel has.
For example, 1,234 subscribers becomes 1.23K subs.
123,456 subscribers becomes 123K subscribers.
And yes, in the case of PewDiePie,
even if he had 99,999,999 subscribers,
it would show his counts as 99.9 million subscribers
until he surpassed 100 million subscribers.
Or at least something similar.
This is an artist impression
because YouTube have not yet made those changes.
They intend to make them over the month of September.
Now, those are the basics, but there are some
really important questions that need to be answered.
The first question is what about my channel?
Am I never going to be able to see
exactly how many subscribers I have?
Well, that's actually a tricky one to answer,
because yes, you will be able to see
a subscriber count to the last digit
in your Creator Studio dashboard.
But this count is usually delayed by at least 24 hours
because, as you can see, it doesn't match up
to the subcount we get for vidIQ on YouTube search pages.
Those are, however, changes are going to impact
YouTube users and video creators.
For those changes also impact us.
As part of these changes,
third parties use YouTube's API Service,
and that includes vidIQ,
will also access these same public facing counts
you see on YouTube.
As of the time of recording, none of this has happened yet.
So we can only make an educated guess,
but it may be some of our tools begin showing
some abbreviations, like this.
But right now this a chicken and the egg situation
until YouTube make the changes,
our developers can't start their work
on giving you the best data that's available to us.
And of course, subscriber counts represent a tiny part
of the vidIQ Chrome extension,
that will help you research YouTube,
analyze any video on the platform,
audit your own channel,
and take actionable steps that will help grow
your YouTube channel to even higher abbreviated subcounts.
It is free to download
and there is a link in the video description.
But on the other hand, some third party vendors
live on real time subscriber counts.
And they're going to be impacted massively.
Abbreviated subcounts will kill
the real time subscriber count cottage industry
that FlareTV began almost a year to the day when they
started following PewDiePie and T-Series' subcounts.
It's still running today and has helped the channel grow
by over two and half million subscribers.
But soon this livestream is going to look
something like this.
And no one will ever know quite how close
these channels are to their next subscriber milestones.
So, why have YouTube done this?
Well, they say that beyond creating more consistency,
this addresses creator concerns about stress and wellbeing,
specifically around tracking
public subscriber counts in real time.
Now my guess is that the majority of you
are going to disagree with what YouTube is saying here.
Subscriber counts have been around forever.
It wasn't broken.
Why are you fixing it?
I love the gamification of hitting those targets.
And these are all valid points
and when we did polls on this earlier in the year,
around about 85% to 90% of you disagreed
with what YouTube was planning to do with
abbreviated subcounts.
And YouTube know this is not a popular decision.
In the same update, YouTube said, "While we know
not everyone will agree with this update,
we hope it's a positive step for the community,
both those viewing and creating content."
As always, we'd love to hear
your thoughts and opinions on these subjects,
especially those in favor of abbreviated subcounts.
We've not heard many voices in support of it,
so anybody who does think it's a great idea,
we'd love to start a constructive debate in the comments.
As for my own personal opinion, I've got to be honest.
I don't really like the change.
I think the consistency argument doesn't really fly,
because view counts can still be inconsistent
throughout YouTube.
And we're not seeing YouTube try to change them.
And as an analytics geek myself,
I think it's a shame that we're gonna lose
some purity in the data.
These numbers have been accurately tracked
to the single digit for years now.
And we're gonna lose those pages of history
to these abbreviated counts.
And nobody's really gonna know when the channels are hitting
these huge landmarks until they've happened.
Except for the video creator themselves
and I think they're gonna find it hard to share that data.
Because they only get it from the channel analytics,
which is delayed anyway.
However, I do understand the wellness argument
of this change.
This is the trend that social media platforms
are going towards these days, with Instagram hiding likes.
And I have to be honest,
I personally haven't been negatively affected
by real time subscriber counts.
And there are those video creators
who potentially have been.
You think about the Tati Westbrook versus James Charles
real time subscriber count and what happened there.
There are real serious considerations
of how this affects the mental wellbeing of video creators.
Now one of the reasons I made this video is because
in a recent poll I posted to the vidIQ community,
apparently a quarter of you
still have no idea this is happening.
So consider yourself informed.
And now for a little bit of fun.
Let's find out how many subscribers we got
during the making of this video.
Oh, wonderful.
(smacks repeatedly)