Subscribers don’t matter!!!

[TheClayWay]

I’ve been running my channel full-time for about two years and for the first year and a half I thought subscribers really mattered, to how much money I made later finding out that it had nothing to do with it.

it’s about views and view duration.

When I started my YouTube channell to share the gift that I’ve been given by God. Showing people how to work on their automobiles from home and showing them some of the nice tricks that I’ve learned in my 30 years of working on automobiles.

I only started full-time after I was cheated out of $80,000 (my life savings). With nothing to do but work on a bunch of cars I started shooting YouTube video and I’d like to think over the years I’ve gotten better at it if you ever need any advice please ask. I will be happy to tell you what little bit I know but I do get over 500,000 views (very consistently) a month with a small subscriber count of only 19,000.

I don’t personally think that 19,000 is all that many people as followers. but I have started gearing my channel towards advertising and just helping people by answering every thing that people say to me even if I don’t want to I’m always polite even when they’re not very polite to me.

 

[mirrorlessNY(youtuber)]

cars are a very popular topic, whats the channel name?

 

[GiggaVega]

Very insightful post. It is true it is not all about Subscribers. Subscribers are the start point. Youtube is a business with many opportunities for partnership & stuff. I've seen accounts with thousands of subscribers & each view gets a few hundred views. That shows youtube & potential sponsors that the channel does not have return value, why would they invest in the channel.
That is why sub for sub never works because the numbers will never balance.
The best types of channels to create, just like you did are channels that have a service to offer. I just started making videos a little over a year ago & am currently at 228 subscribers & I love reading people's threads with the words "Small subscriber count of 20k" lol jk.

 

[Min/Max Munchking]

Indeed, I can't agree more. It's only a vanity/ego boost metric nowadays.

My channel is making the same amount of money now with 3.3k+ subscribers that it was making 7-8 months ago with ~2k subscribers and I even recently monetized the channel with ads. The subscribers have grown over 50%, but monthly views have only increased by ~25% compared to mid-2019 and the Patreon has never reached the 2019 summer/fall peak earnings. Most of the growth is still relying on the select few 1.5+ years old videos pulling in consistent daily views from YT search, but I doubt that trend will continue for much longer as the niche evolves and moves on. This is why this year I'll be trying to make changes in video topics, format and structure to elevate the channel beyond the scope of what it was about so far.

With YT, everything can crumble in an instant - you can get copyright strikes, YT can just randomly decide to delete your channel, the algorithm changes and you no longer rank high and/or get suggested and people generally just stop watching over time as they lose interest/move on to other things in life.

You really have to treat this as any other business, you can get all the views and subscribers in the world, but if you aren't getting any sales, you are just spinning your wheels in a spot. And to get a sale, you really have to think of a product/service that your potential customers would be interested in. Most importantly, for better or worse, by focusing on YT only, you're putting your eggs in one basket and that's the mistake I've been doing for far too long already. Sometimes you can't do much about it, but it's important that all of us are aware of it.

 

[TheClayWay]

cars are a very popular topic, whats the channel name?

Thank you very much! The name of my channel is The Clay Way .

 

[TheClayWay]

Very insightful post. It is true it is not all about Subscribers. Subscribers are the start point. Youtube is a business with many opportunities for partnership & stuff. I've seen accounts with thousands of subscribers & each view gets a few hundred views. That shows youtube & potential sponsors that the channel does not have return value, why would they invest in the channel.
That is why sub for sub never works because the numbers will never balance.
The best types of channels to create, just like you did are channels that have a service to offer. I just started making videos a little over a year ago & am currently at 228 subscribers & I love reading people's threads with the words "Small subscriber count of 20k" lol jk.

Well in the grand scheme of large channels 20k is not that much I found that getting a large sponsor is very difficult to do with only 20,000 subscribers and the transition to explain to them that you consistently get half 1 million views monthly and it grows on anywhere from 7 to 15% every single month is difficult for them to retain because the media pushes the word “subscribers” so much.

Most comparable Auto Repair channels Generally only retain about 1/10 of 1% even if they have 1 million subscribers compared to views so my channel is extremely average because that is approximately the amount of subscribers I get to views.

So I think as YouTubers we need to focus more on a channel’s views in order to be able to successfully sell subscribers in the future and try to deviate from using the word “subscribers” I think as YouTubers we need to focus more on a channel’s views in order to be able to successfully sell Sponsorships in the future and try to deviate from using the Subscribers as the The value of our YouTube channels.

The only way to be successful on YouTube and continue success is to be at the least consistent and just keep pushing our where’s learning a trade and earning our keep

consistently getting the same amount of views every month or at least growing them a few small percentages every month is what we all need to focus on.

 

[GiggaVega]

I try using different words, like instead of calling them subscribers, I call them 'My Supporters' and I refer to my channel as my 'Community' people like that.

 

[PansGaming]

I think subscriber number would be a good metric to gauge how popular you channel is in general but only if all the subs you've gained have come naturally. There are so many sub botters/sub4sub people/etc. that make subscriber number irrelevant. If you've never done any of that and your channel has a consistently growing sub count then it shows that the number of people interested in your content is growing.
Really what I'm trying to say is as your views and watch time increase over time, it's likely your sub number will increase too. At least they should grow in tandem with each other unless there are other factors affecting sub count outside of natural growth. That's why it's so easy to tell the accounts that have used the sub4sub services etc. because their view numbers are way below what you'd expect for their sub count.

 

[GiggaVega]

@PansGaming yeah, I agree.
Sub for sub does not work for many reasons. Here is one of the major things that people don't consider, if somebody hasn't visited your channel for X amount of time, that subscriber will drop from your sub count.
I came across a channel the other day with 3.5K subs. I went into his videos section and for the last 9 months he hasn't broken 100 views per video.
My issue is that i have a lot of viewers but not many people hit the subscribe button. Like my Doom Eternal video got at one point 1.7k views but only 3 new subscribers. Part of the grind lol

 

[Min/Max Munchking]

@PansGaming yeah, I agree.
Sub for sub does not work for many reasons. Here is one of the major things that people don't consider, if somebody hasn't visited your channel for X amount of time, that subscriber will drop from your sub count.
I came across a channel the other day with 3.5K subs. I went into his videos section and for the last 9 months he hasn't broken 100 views per video.
My issue is that i have a lot of viewers but not many people hit the subscribe button. Like my Doom Eternal video got at one point 1.7k views but only 3 new subscribers. Part of the grind lol

I'm at 3.3k+ and it's still quite a challenge to go over 1k views per video. Subs generally don't get notified of new videos, I certainly don't get recommendations from my subscriptions, and only 350ish people have clicked the bell icon so far, so I can't count on subs to swarm the channel when the video goes up. Instead, I really have to think about the thumbnail and title to maximize my chances of getting pushed on Homepage for the first 2-3 days.

Well in the grand scheme of large channels 20k is not that much I found that getting a large sponsor is very difficult to do with only 20,000 subscribers and the transition to explain to them that you consistently get half 1 million views monthly and it grows on anywhere from 7 to 15% every single month is difficult for them to retain because the media pushes the word “subscribers” so much.

Most comparable Auto Repair channels Generally only retain about 1/10 of 1% even if they have 1 million subscribers compared to views so my channel is extremely average because that is approximately the amount of subscribers I get to views.

So I think as YouTubers we need to focus more on a channel’s views in order to be able to successfully sell subscribers in the future and try to deviate from using the word “subscribers” I think as YouTubers we need to focus more on a channel’s views in order to be able to successfully sell Sponsorships in the future and try to deviate from using the Subscribers as the The value of our YouTube channels.

The only way to be successful on YouTube and continue success is to be at the least consistent and just keep pushing our where’s learning a trade and earning our keep

consistently getting the same amount of views every month or at least growing them a few small percentages every month is what we all need to focus on.

I get less than that, I'm breaking 30k views/month for the last few months and I'm getting 200-220 subs/month. It's nice seeing that number grow, it means you've managed to convince someone to at least consider coming back at some point, but the more I'm into this Yt game, the more I realize it's more about other metrics - likes, comments, like vs. dislike ratio, view velocity, watch time, average view duration, audience retention etc etc. I still get almost 80% of my views from non-subscribers anyway, so whenever I come up with a topic, I'm spending progressively more and more time on thinking about thumbnails and titles to get them to click and watch.

I'm on a verge of completely dropping the "subscribe to my channel" call to action during the video and instead focusing only on inviting them to like and comment as that has shown way more correlation with mini/semi-viral effects for new videos.