YouTube Subscribers Don’t Matter. This Is What Does

all right so absolutely everyone wants more subscribers on YouTube the only issue is subscribers mean literally nothing anymore in fact here's Alex hosi saying exactly that subscribers mean nothing followers on Instagram mean nothing they're literally just aity metric now and look I can personally relate to this as someone who's got over 1 million subscribers on their main Channel 300,000 followers on Tik Tok and 200,000 followers on Facebook I can tell you that subscribers don't matter at all so in this video what I'm going to do is explain exactly why subscribers won't make you more money

why they won't get you more views and then I'm going to tell you what you should be focusing on instead if you want to grow your channel and monetize it to make a full-time income part one subscribers and money so lots of people want to do YouTube for monetary reasons maybe you want to get more leads for your business maybe you want to build a stronger personal brand and start selling things to your audience or maybe you just want to talk about your passion and make money from doing that whatever it is you know there's

no shame in wanting to make money from YouTube in fact I really respect it but there seems to be this intense focus on people wanting to get more subscribers to get all of this stuff yet subscribers won't get you there subscribers won't actually make you any more money for example if you want to do a brand deal then it's worth knowing that Brands don't care about your subscribe account for example look at this motorbike channel here it's got 579,000 subscribers which sounds really impressive but brands are not going to look at the Subscribe count instead

what they're going to do is look at the Channel's Niche to see if it aligns with theirs and then how many views are average that channel gets per video and then how engaged the audience is so that's things like likes and comments and that kind of stuff these are the metrics that matter now despite this channel I just showed you having over 500,000 subscribers its average views are about 1,000 per video and it basically gets no comments on each video either which means Brands simply won't want to work with it in other words Brands look

for quality over quantity and they're not interested in a channel that's got lots of subscribers if those subscribers barely watch your videos and don't engage with your content Brands want to reach an audience that's you genuinely invested in what you've got to say so a smaller highly engaged audience is far more valuable than a large passive one secondly let's talk about making money with Google AdSense and this is essentially when adverts appear in your videos and then every time someone watches an advert you just make a small amount of money because someone might click on

that advert or they just watch it and to do this you do need to join the YouTube Partner program and yeah sure you do need 1,000 subscribers to qualify for that so subscribers do matter to actually join the program in the first place but once you've actually joined the program very soon you'll realize that more subscribers does not equal more money for example on my main channel in March 2022 I made $8,500 in a month with $800,000 subscribers a year later with over 1.3 million subscribers I only made $4,300 in a month despite having way

more subscribers like 500 600,000 more subscribers so what's that actually going on here well there's two very important factors at play retention and Views let's talk about video retention first if you've got three adverts in a video and someone watches the whole thing they're likely to see all three ads but if they click off the video after let's say the first ad you'll obviously make less money because they don't see the other two adverts so the higher their attention in your videos and the more people who watch all the way to the end the more

money you will make so you could have you know a video with 10,000 views and make less money on that video than a video with 5,000 views if the retention is higher on the shorter video so why subscribers can help you get started is often the quality of your content and how engaging it is that really determines your earning potential secondly views play a massive Factor as well obviously if a video has more views then it will be showing more adverts to more people meaning you make more money but here's the mistake people think that

with more subscribers you will get more views but that's not actually the case which brings us on to part two subscribers and Views so the YouTube algorithm has changed it's no longer focused on subscribers and it's now focused on suggestions let me explain what this means when you watch a new video on YouTube most of the time you don't click on the subscriptions button to find that content rather you'll just be on the YouTube homepage and it will suggest content to you that it thinks you will like and critically many of the videos that you

are being suggested are from channels that you're not even subscribed to and you can actually check this out right now if you want go on to your homepage and then have a look at all the videos that YouTube is recommending to you how many of those channels popping up are you actually subscribed to or look at the suggested videos next to this video here how many of those channels are you actually subscribed to as well my guess is probably not that many of course there will be some channels that you're subscribed to but YouTube is

far more interested in serving you content it thinks you'll enjoy regardless of whether or not you're subscribed to that channel in fact if you go to your YouTube analytics Tab and then click on audience you'll probably see that the majority of your viewers viers are not subscribed in my case 91% of the people who watch these videos are not subscribed to my channel in fact the chances are you watching this video right now and not subscribed to me and you clicked on this video because it was recommended to you not because you're a subscriber and

that just feeds into the bigger point that I'm trying to make which is most people who find your content do not find it because they're subscribed to you they find it because YouTube is recommending it to them that isn't to say that subscribers don't play a role at all they certainly do help the algorithm figure out what kind of people like your content and who your core audience actually is but it's not nearly as important as it used to be so the key to getting more views is not about growing your subscriber count it's about

creating content that is so good YouTube wants to recommend it and show it to as many people as possible The Logical question to ask is how do you do this and that brings us on to part three what matters now so there are three key pillars click watch retain pillar one is click and this is pretty simple if if no one clicks on your video it doesn't matter how good that video is no one will just no one will ever know about it you could have the best video in the world but if no one

clicks on it that video is going to get no views so to get that click you need to come up with an amazing video idea and then come up with a killer title and thumbnail just remember that your video idea sets the video's potential and then your title and thumbnail determine how much of that potential you unlock a click through rate of between 5.5 8% is pretty solid anything below 5% and you probably need to change your thumbnail and I've got a whole system for creating hyperli thumbnails in my full course YouTube credit Pro so

if you want to take your thumbnails to that next level then check out the course by clicking the first link in the description pillar two is watch once they click on your video you want to keep them for watching for as long as possible if people watch a lot of your video it tells YouTube that it's really good content and the algorithm rewards You by pushing your videos out to more people you want to aim for a watch time of between 40 and 60% in all my videos that have hundreds of thousands and even millions

of views they tend to get a watch time of over 60% and that just increases the chances that it's going to be seen by a lot of people so if you are able to get a video that's got a watch time of over 60% then there's a good chance that your video will do exceptionally well now as you do the subscribers will come as a natural byproduct and I'm not for a second saying that subscribers are a bad thing in fact they're a pretty good Benchmark just to know roughly where your channel is in its

Journey but the point of this video is to show you that they're not a good marker of success in terms of views and money pillar three is then retained once people have seen your content you want them to come back for more so every time you make a video it pops up in their home feed and then they click on it and the best way to do this is just by creating really valuable content that people absolutely love I know that sounds simple but it's true each video you make needs to offer so much value

that people go wow this guy or girl is absolutely amazing I can't wait for the next video and a great way to see how many people are coming back to your channel and coming back to watch your videos is to go to analytics audience and then new versus returning viewers now if these two lines are really close together like I have on my main Channel then you're doing really well and it means people are coming back to watch your videos if there's a big gap between your returning viewers and you know your returning viewers is

really low and your new viewers is really high it means people are not coming back regularly to your videos and you just need to make better videos and look if you want help creating better videos and building a top .1% YouTube channel then please check out my full course YouTube credit Pro that will teach you everything you need to know about how to build grow scale and monetize a YouTube channel you can check it out by clicking the first link in the description and I'll see you there