Why YouTubers are always nagging you to subscribe to their channel

If you know someone who creates content, chances are they are always trying to hawk their content on you. “Listen to my new song”, “watch my video” or “subscribe to my YouTube channel”, one of many phrases you’ve probably heard before. It’s pretty easy to understand, how listening to a new song or watching a recently released video might help, but with subscribers, it’s a bit blurry.

How does it help your friend or whoever is asking for subscribers when you click on the big red button on their channel?

It helps in more than one way actually…

“Money, money, money”

Most content creators have the goal to make money from their YouTube content and for that they NEED subscriptions. There are 2 targets you have to meet if you want to join the YouTube Partner Program and make money from content:

1. 1000 Subscribers &;
2. 4,000 public watch hours in the last 12 months.

9/10 times your friends or people you know are asking you to subscribe because they want to meet that threshold. And since you don’t have to pay anything to be a subscriber, the YouTuber feels there’s no harm in asking the people they know to subscribe.

Beyond money…

Subscribers are still pretty important beyond just qualifying a channel for revenue. A YouTuber’s content is surfaced more often and reliably to their subscribers which increases the chances of getting more views whenever they release new content. First, the content is shown to subscribers via their homepage on YouTube and if for whatever reason it doesn’t appear on the homepage, it will definitely be in their subscription feed.

Additionally, if a subscriber turns on notifications by clicking the bell icon, that’s essentially a guaranteed view since every time the content creator uploads a video that subscriber will get a notification.

Signalling

This is a bit technical but I’m going to explain it as best I can, so bear with me. YouTube has an algorithm that recommends content to other users. So when you view content or subscribe to a channel, YouTube suggests the same content to other YouTuber’s who have similar content preferences.

What this loosely means, is that if a channel gets 1000 subscriptions and all of them are from people in Zimbabwe, what that tells the YouTube algorithm is that Zimbabweans are likely to be interested in the content and therefore the content will pop up in more feeds in Zimbabwe. This is how YouTube comes up with charts such as Trending in Zimbabwe and a bunch of other categories. tl;dr — subscribing to a channel or watching a certain piece of content, creates a snowball effect as it’s recommended to more people.

Should I subscribe even when the quality is poor?

The truth is that question is up to you. If you believe in the content creator and you believe they will get better then maybe you should subscribe despite the fact that you are rewarding short term mediocrity.

If, however, the quality of the content is actually good and you want to increase the chances of that content creator making more content — then yes subscribe. This will increase their incentive to create more content as there’s potential financial reward and a higher chance of impacting more people.

That’s all folks!

About Author

Farai Mudzingwa is a 23-year-old Zimbabwean directing video content for The Story Untold ZW — a Zimbabwean media startup exploring the journey of local entrepreneurs/creatives.

Cover Image Credit: Pranavsinh Suratia from Pexels