Many YouTube Content Creators awoke yesterday to find that they had lost many subscribers seemingly overnight. While some larger YouTube channels lost thousands, smaller channels lost maybe 10 – I personally went from 191 to 184, and I was somewhat surprised until I looked on Twitter and saw many others posting about similar losses, which seem proportional to the channel, and always seemed to be about half a percent of their subscriber base. This means larger channels were losing up to 100,000 subscribers, which is pretty crazy.
Now, many people are thinking this was a bug in their system, and some have seen subscribers come back, or so i would seem anyway, over the past day or so. I haven’t seen anything special though, but it doesn’t bug me, as I think I know what may have gone on.
Some YouTubers noticed they were gaining subscribers quicker than normal, even during times they weren’t making videos. This includes me, I was getting a sub a day for the past week or so, even though I hadn’t made any videos. Once the purge hit, I was back to about where I was a few weeks ago, and that’s when it hit me. Maybe YouTube had a subscriber gain rate bug, and they fixed it, reverting the counts back down to what they were?
Who knows. It seems really odd. Some people think YouTube really did, due to a bug, unsubscribe real subscribers – YouTube half the time won’t show you videos from your subscribers anyway, so this would fit their usual pattern of errors, but I don’t see myself having been “unsubscribed” from anyone forcefully, and I don’t see anyone else reporting such beyond what seems like normal error in YouTube, so who knows.
I think the purge was to fix another bug, and only when losing subscribers did people really notice, and make a fuss. This probably won’t be a big deal in the long run, but it is quite the odd thing, and apparently a purge of old accounts happens every few months – only just now with it being the large numbers it was have we noticed enough to make a fuss.
Below, I share 2 videos with 2 different takes on this, one from AlphaOmegaSin, and another from my friend Wardo. Enjoy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f08SLHXm4d4
I guess I’m lucky since I still have 101 subscribers and it hasn’t changed at all. I do see some people claiming they had to resubscribe to some YouTuber’s and that its supposedly a frequent thing but its apparently never been this bad. I don’t really care about my channel though until I find a way to make it active.