- Hey folks, I'm Rob.
Welcome back to vidIQ.
Very recently, I told all of you that subscribers are dead.
(bell rings) (finger snaps)
And then YouTube released a new live subscriber count page.
I'm clearly being trolled.
(soft music)
Let's have a little fun with this one.
Here's our real-time subscriber count
with a clock underneath.
However long it takes to edit this video,
is how many subscribers we got
in a time it took to make this video.
Pause this video,
have a guess how many you think we're gonna get
and I'll show you how to get this page for yourself.
In the YouTube studio on the dashboard,
you will already see your exact subscriber count,
but it's not live.
So go to analytics,
and on the real time panel on the right hand side,
you will see your subscriber count.
This is in real time, but it's not very fancy.
So, YouTube have decided to create a dedicated page.
So I hope YouTube have rolled this out
to everybody all at once,
so nobody complains that they can't see it yet.
It's pretty basic as you can see,
but this number will tick forward or indeed backwards,
depending on who is doing what with that subscribe button.
Below that you have a subscriber graph
which you can minimize if you wish,
but it does have a time period selector on it
which is pretty cool
especially if you set it to your lifetime.
Have a guess when I started making videos for vidIQ.
It's cool that this does basically allow you
to see exactly how many subscribers you had
at any point in your channel's history,
but on what I'm most disappointed in right now
is the fact that nobody's actually subscribed to this
while I've been demoing the screen.
There you go.
Now to be clear,
this does not mean a return
to accurate public subscriber counts.
They will remain abbreviated
and can sometimes be a little behind
the studio subscriber count.
What this does allow creators to do
is potentially live stream their own live subscriber counts,
once again, through something like OBS or Streamlabs,
which is what we'll probably do
when we get close to a million subscribers.
Oh, come on, who just unsubscribed?
Okay, I've got a bit of a sit rep here.
I need to take Jasper for a walk
because he's desperate to do his business.
So it's gonna extend the editing time a little bit,
and it gives me a chance to get some more subscribers.
You ready?
Let's do this.
(bright upbeat music)
All right, you've got three seconds to screenshot this
and turn it into a meme.
I'm trying to get Jasper's attention,
but he's distracted by a dog.
(bright upbeat music)
Yep, he loves artificial grass.
And we are done.
How do we do?
Huh, thanks for the subscribers.
Yeah, Jasper says thanks.
Back to work.
Now, I've had a couple of ideas
about how vidIQ could improve this page.
One thing is that we could add a milestone predictive,
it calculates your next big subscriber number.
And another was to add the previous
subscriber milestone achievement certificate from vidIQ,
on the right hand side where you could share it on social.
Of course, all of this and more is already available
from the achievements vidIQ tool.
But yeah, if you want us to add it
to the real time subscriber page,
I need as many as you as possible
to tell us so in the comments,
so I can convince our developers.
Okay, so we're having some fun here
with the new YouTube realtime subscriber page.
But why did I say at the beginning of this video
that I think subscribers are dead?
Well, what I mean by that
is that YouTube subscribers have never been
a reliable piece of data,
in terms of assessing a channel's health
or its potential to grow in the future.
YouTube have recently released a new data set
called Return Viewers,
which is much more reliable
in tracking the progress of your channel
and how it may grow in the future.
It all boils down to building an audience,
as opposed to beating an algorithm
and getting more YouTube subscribers.
I have now made a trilogy of videos on this topic,
all in a separate playlist.
Do make sure to check it out if you have time.
Now then, yes it looks like we've passed 826,000 subscribers
on the channel.
Thank you very much.
I'm gonna now see when it happens on this clock.
Any second now.
(knocks)
It's not gonna happen, is it?