Is The YouTube Subscriber Issue Just A PewDiePie Phil DeFranco Maker Studios Problem?

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Is The YouTube Subscriber Issue Just A PewDiePie Phil DeFranco Maker Studios Problem?

Is The YouTube Subscriber Issue Just A PewDiePie, Phil DeFranco Maker Studios Problem?

Recently, this year, a number of prominent YouTubers have complained about subscriber channels being dropped from their rolls, most notably PewDiePie and Phil DeFranco. In his vlog, PewDiePie threatened to quit and shut down his PewDiePie YouTube Channel once it reached over 50 million subscribers because of this subscriber problem. And Phil De Franco chimed in to echo that there was a problem as well.

The problem in this entire discussion is that a lot of truths are being avoided. The first truth of all is that buying YouTube subscribers and views is so frequent to this day that it’s become something of a cottage industry. It’s also something I have been very afraid to do because when some YouTubers started the practice back in 2008, one person I know who was a blogger on one of my city blogs, Oakland Focus, rapidly added 80,000 subscribers and a pretty cool self-made opening for his YouTube vlogs.

We lost touch for a while, and then he contacted me in 2009 to give me an update, which included the news that his channel had been deleted for adding what are referred to as “fake” YouTube subscribers. That was all the reason I needed not to take up the practice myself, even as I didn’t know what a “fake subscriber” was if some person actually made the YouTube channel – that leads me to the second truth here.

These large YouTube channels can’t possibly reach something like 50 million subscribers and all of them are real. Think about it. There are something like over 300 million people in America alone, and the demographic most likely to watch YouTube probably numbers around 100 million, or about one out of every three people, today. So half of all of those people, or some giant number, are all subscribed to PewDiePie? Really?

Even if you say, that doesn’t include the entire World, I’m still questioning this. Yes, the gaming community is enormous, but I can’t remember seeing any session or event at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco where PewDiePie was featured. Even with that, I’m not trying to take away from PewDiePie’s unquestioned and documented influence over the gaming industry. But I am openly daring to ask how much of his following consists of real people or real views – and what is a real person?

This is a question that’s hard to ask, but it must be. In 2012, Google / YouTube stripped the World’s largest music companies of something like two billion views – yes, billion with a B. Universal was said to have lost 1 billion views to YouTube’s take away, with Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, and Justin Bieber named as artists who were impacted by the action. Sony was hit as well. To be fair, the music industry show back with the claim that they migrated to Vevo, and so that was the reason for the view take away – but that doens’t pass the logic test, because migrating to a new channel or platform in the present does not alter past statistics.

But my point is, did this practice of view or subscription purchases come to impact the growth of PewDiePie’s channel? Or what about other giant YouTubers? Is there any really “authentically big” YouTuber of 30 million or more subscribers? Why is it that websites like VidStatSx.com show “top losses” of subscribers where some channels drop over 100,000 subscribers over a 60 day period? Were those real people who didn’t like something or closed accounts? Why were those accounts closed? You see?

Given that PewDiePie and Phil DeFranco are both complaining about this problem, and are both with Maker Studios, then I have to ask if this is a Maker Studios concern? Truth be told, I’m not putting down Maker Studios (although I am not happy that they took down my Blip.tv Zennie62 channel after changing their terms of service to not favor standard video-blog formats, then said my channel wasn’t in line with the company’s new direction for Blip.tv. They didn’t even give me a chance to recover my classic Blip.tv vlogs – they could have sent them to me.)

So we as a community and with YouTube need to have a real talk about subscribers, views, community and favorites. In the past, YouTube staffers had favorite vloggers they promoted over others. I begged to be on the front page for my political vlogs in the early days, and once I was promoted – just once.

The truth is YouTube and it’s CEO the great Susan Diane Wojcicki need to really take the bull by the horns and create a system that better promotes all YouTube Partners, and bring the focus back to the YT Partner via that system. The issue is money. YouTube Partners who have watch time numbers good enough to be able to email staff directly should also have a largers percentage take of revenue sharing. That would help a lot.
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