Earlier this week, YouTube published a blog post outlining some updates they were intending to publish on­to their website.

http://youtubecreator.blogspot.com/2012/01/upcoming-improvements-to-accuracy-of.html

If you don’t want to read the entire blog post, the main idea of the update is to update subscriber counts so inactive and invalid accounts are no longer included in the tally of subscribers. For example, if someone has 100 subscribers, but 10 of those people deleted their accounts and another 10 of those people no longer use YouTube and have not signed in to YouTube for a long time, this individual’s sub­scriber count would fall from 100 to 80.

Seeing as I have a moderately strong and relatively historical presence on YouTube, some of my friends, readers, and subscribers have suggested that I write a blog post about this new update expressing my opinions.

First, I think it is important to look past what YouTube wrote in their blog post and take a look at their in­ten­tions, then consider the people who are opposing this change and look at their intentions as well.

I think YouTube’s intention for this update is pretty obvious – they want to make sure the subscriber count is a reliable measurement of a channel’s success, and want to avoid people abusing the sub­scription system and inflating it using methods that breach the terms of service. For the naïve who do not know already, yes, there are people who pay professional companies to increase their subscriber counts so it appears like they have more subscribers than they really do. As of today, searching for “buy YouTube subscribers” on Google yields about 63,600,000 (63.6 million) results; some of the results show com­panies that sell subscribers for as little as 10¢ each.

Just from this information, it seems like the only people who would oppose this update would be people who have used malicious methods to increase their subscriber count; if the updates rolled out, all their fake subscribers would be removed and they would be back on square one. However, people who have le­git­imately earned all of their subscribers are opposing this as well. The main justification they have is that removing inactive or deleted accounts essentially means they are removing old success. The sub­scribers that they earned a long time ago would not transfer over, and video makers want their success to be a cumulative measure of the things they did in the past as well as current success in the present.

It seemed as if YouTube actually listened to the opinions of the video makers and decided to reconsider their decision. A day after they initially released the blog post, they posted an update saying that they would postpone rolling out the changes of removing inactive and deleted accounts from subscription counts, but they said they would still roll out a system that would prevent people from continuing to abuse the subscription system.

Oddly, even though they said they would not cut subscription counts, it happened anyway. Someone I know who recently reached the 100,000 subscriber milestone fell back down to 99,000. The second most subscribed channel on YouTube supposedly lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers (but they were past the 5 million mark, so it wasn’t too drastic). I lost about 80 subscribers – I was at about 3200 on the 11th, but fell down to the low 3100s on the 12th.

My opinion about this whole issue is of support. It has always pained me when people who make terrible videos become moderately well-known (and sometimes even make money off of their videos) because they use methods that break the terms of service. For example, someone can buy thousands of views for their videos from a professional company. If they enable pre-roll advertisements on their videos, the amount of money they make off of those advertisements from the thousands of views far exceeds the a­mount of money they need to spend purchasing the thousands of views in the first place. Once adver­tisers figure out that there are fake people watching their advertisements, they are not going to want to advertise on YouTube anymore, which then negatively affects those who are using YouTube properly to make money, as they will not have enough well-paying advertisements to show on their videos.

One thing that I do think is a down side to this update is the shock value it will give to people who lose subscribers. For me, it was not much of a deal, because most of my subscribers were real and I only lost about 80. However, sometimes, people with more fragile emotions might be discouraged if they notice that they dropped below a milestone (such as the example above of a YouTuber dropping below 100,000) and lose the motivation and drive for continuing production.

Thus, I think a way to mitigate this is to have a subscriber count freeze rather than updating the public subscriber count. For example, if someone had 110,000 subscribers but dropped down to 99,000 real sub­scribers, their public subscriber count would show 110,000 subscribers and freeze at that number un­til their real subscriber count made it back up to 110,000. Only then would it start to increase again. This would be primarily beneficial for people who have been targets of subscriber count inflation by their fans – they had no intention to break the terms of service, but were victimized anyway because of others outside their control.

I think that popularity on YouTube has always been a hot and volatile topic, and I’m interested to see how this ends up within the next few days and weeks.