Good morning, John. I almost made this video over on Hank's channel where I've been goofing off a lot in the last couple weeks.
But why not? Yeah, you gave me permission on Twitter. So I'm gonna goof off here. Goof goof goof.
Subscriptions!
It's the brand new thing, a craze that's sweeping the nation. "Please subscribe," everybody's asking for it. But over the last 10 years of YouTube,
subscriptions have gotten less important, okay? It's a thing that has happened. Why has it happened? I don't know.
I'm not gonna go and see that it's YouTube's fault. Subscriptions seem to be fairly front and center both on desktop and mobile experiences.
Even on a channel like vlogbrothers, which is very much sort of a repeat-viewer kind of channel,
with a lot of viewers that are very YouTube savvy, views on first-day
uploads are only about 30% from subscriptions, and that goes down to like 15% in the life of the video.
So it's--it's a big piece, but it's not the biggest piece.
So since it's a smaller--and shrinking, honestly--piece of the pie,
you'd think that people would freak out a little bit less when
somebody, this person, said on Twitter that their subscription feed was suddenly not in chronological order.
I understand why youtubers are so protective of this one place that is not controlled by computers, it is controlled by humans.
It is the one place left where we know what's going on.
I am NOT gonna go into how this information was released in a manner that allowed YouTubers to be wildly speculative and
miscommunicate and misconstrue and send really nice notes to Twitch being like "hey, what's up?"
I guess actually I'm gonna do that 'cause I just did it. But look, the sub feed has problems. If you look at your analytics,
you can see this. It works best for channels that are able to upload like a video every single day.
It works much less well for people
who have to spend a long time making one video.
And also if you've been using YouTube for any length of time,
you know that it's a lot easier psychologically to subscribe to something than to unsubscribe to something, which leads to people's sub boxes being
often, or even usually a dang mess.
So many videos hit that box that it's overwhelming and it's not a good--what they call user experience.
I think Iiked that,
ultimately.
I mean,
I tried to scroll to the end of the month in my subscription feed and I just didn't make it. I didn't get there.
I couldn't. I did not have the patience. Also I can see you on the channels that I have access to analytics for that fewer
impressions and views are coming from the subscription feed.
It seems like people are using it less.
Maybe that's because home is getting better, or because the subscription feed is getting worse.
And if subscriptions becomes a product that fewer and fewer people use,
this is a bad thing for everyone, and YouTube knows this because it's the only place left where people are
guaranteed to see the thing that they signed up to see.
But you can't, can't, CANNOT fix that by breaking it.
Whether YouTube like deeply, viscerally understands this the way the creators do,
you created a contract with us. This is how this product works and it has to work this way.
There is one place--one place where users are in charge and they need to be in charge.
We have to have that relationship with our communities, that there is one place that we know they can find our videos.
One place
where I don't have to worry about what a computer thinks. That needs to not change. And I'm not saying that there aren't problems,
but maybe there are other ways to solve problems, like maybe creating a space above the feed for an algorithmically generated
"what you missed" section. But because this problem is so hard to solve,
maybe it's not a problem that needs to be solved with computer code. Maybe it's a behavioral problem.
So to the people listening out there:
Please, unsubscribe.
Find the things that you don't watch, the things that are cluttering up your sub feed, the things that make it a less good
experience for you, and get them out of there. It's okay.
You're not gonna hurt my feelings. And YouTube, maybe give people more options for how to customize that experience,
because if you want people to have a personalized experience,
maybe the person personalizing it should be...
a person.
Because even if fewer people use it, the ones who do are your power users.
They're kind of the ones that matter the most. And people having some amount of direct control over their experience of this platform and
over the relationship between creator and audience, that is always gonna be more important than
creating the most clickable feed. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.
I made a video diving fairly deep into the analytics of the sub feed over on Hank's channel if you want to go watch that.
