I’m Obsessed With The Numbers

Obsessed With The Numbers
I am a YouTuber, and I am obsessed with the numbers.
When I started my first official channel in 2010, a makeup channel, it took me three years to reach 1,000 subscribers. Around 2013, I was forced to make a new channel because AdSense was disabled on my first channel. No AdSense equals no money, and I needed all the money I could get. YouTube was the only way for me to receive income at the time. Having to have a new channel devastated me as that meant having to start completely over and losing the 1,000 or so subscribers that took me so long to earn.
But, again, I need the money. I have things to pay for too.
The good news was that it didn’t take me another three years to earn 1,000 subscribers again. I was actually at around 3–5,000 in two years (thanks to old subscribers moving over to the new channel and the help of my friends sharing my videos about closed captioning and the like when I made my content change) and then in January 2015, I was at around 15,000 all thanks to a shoutout from Tyler Oakley.
At the time I’m writing this in August 2018, I’m at a little over 80,000 subscribers and, for some reason, I can’t seem to be happy with that number.
Or rather, it’s not really that I’m not happy with that number. 80,000 is a huge number to a lot of people and it took eight years total to get to that point. And, to be honest, a lot of that in 2018 alone is because a YouTube acquaintance of mine hit it big in terms of numbers, started collaborating with others with big numbers, and their audiences have become a part of my audience.
As my number grows, my obsession with checking my numbers grows. Every single day, ever since finding out about SocialBlade, I started checking not only my real time subscriber count, but my stats to see how many subscribers were arriving and leaving. I would especially check this every time I uploaded a new video. If people left when a video was freshly uploaded, I started becoming convinced that there was something wrong with me and my videos. Were people getting bored of me and my content? Was I talking about the same thing for too long?
I decided to try to make my channel grow, be better, and I thought to do that, I needed to branch out. I needed to talk about something other than being deaf for every other video. Not only was it keeping me from branching out, but I was running out of things to talk about and that was putting a lot of stress on me.
Eventually, I started talking more about mental health and child abuse. Doing mental health videos actually helped me be on a panel at Playlist Live about mental health when the year before, I was doing a workshop on accessibility and disability (which ended up not really happening on the day of, but that’s a whole different thing). I did have a few potential sponsorship opportunities, but the paperwork was never started. As far as child abuse awareness goes, I haven’t had any chance of any speaking gig or sponsorship opportunities, but I have been able to raise awareness in some ways and, who knows, maybe some opportunity will come along in the future.
Of course, I had to check my numbers to see how well I was doing at mental health and child abuse awareness. My mental health videos were doing pretty alright, but child abuse awareness would send up to 100 people, sometimes more, flying. And that hurt. I hated that people were disappearing when I talked about something that was such a huge part of my life. I hated that people were leaving when I was being extremely vulnerable.
As of late, I started talking more about being bisexual. I was afraid to do so because of 1) the possibility of being accused of attention seeking (as if people don’t already think that re: talking about my deafness and other things) and 2) demonetization from YouTube as they have been going after LGBT creators for quite some time now. Fortunately, YouTube seems to take it easy on me and leaves my videos alone (and I realize how privileged this makes me as they literally demonetize a video of my friends, Jessica Kellgren-Fozard and Stevie Boebi, just for the phrase “dress like a lesbian” in the title). The real enemy here turned out to be the subscriber count. In one day, a video answering the question, “Is Bisexuality Transphobic?” lost me 100–150 subscribers. More left the next day. In fact, at one point, 58 people had left in just an hour after publishing. I almost cried. When you’re a smaller YouTuber, numbers like that are huge and it hurts. (I realize to some that 80,000 subscribers is huge while to others, 80,000 is quite small. It’s all a matter of opinion. In a world where most of the people I know are well over 300,000 at this point, 80,000 to me is small. You’re more than welcome to disagree.)
And I still kept refreshing my SocialBlade every hour to see if I had gained anybody’s attention, anybody that wanted to stay with me. And as I write this on a plane, I’m desperately itching to see my numbers after publishing a video about dealing with bierasure this morning.
The number on the page was becoming my entire world, and yes, I realize just how unhealthy that really is. I have tried not looking at the numbers. In fact, there was a period of time that I didn’t look and it was so refreshing. But somehow, I got sucked back in. Probably because of the large growth in numbers during the late spring and early summer.
The thing is, most of our subscribers don’t watch our videos anyway. If you look at any YouTuber’s analytics, you’ll see that most of our views come from random people that may or may not end up subscribing by the end of the video. When I looked at my analytics, I learned that about maybe 25% (the exact percentage itself is escaping my brain right now) of my subscribers actually watched my videos. For someone like Roberto Blake, it’s the same result (numbers themselves may vary, but most of his views also come from people who aren’t subscribers).
I also realize that people grow, change, and their tastes change. If someone they watched changed as a person or in topics, they may no longer be interested. I was mostly talking about deafness, disability, and accessibility. If I talk less about that, people who came to me for that will likely leave, but let’s be honest, these are topics that aren’t the most popular on YouTube. They may be some of my most popular videos due to algorithm luck and my channels or big channels sharing them, but on average, they don’t do very well in views. They’re just not topics the majority of YouTube is interested in seeing. Yes, it’s important to do what you love and what is important to you, but when YouTube is a part of your career and your income, you have to think of ways to expand. Viewers might not see it that way, and they’ll leave if they’re no longer interested. As someone who tries to keep people interested, it hurts. But I also understand the viewer perspective because I’m still a viewer myself. I’ve subscribed and unsubscribed from plenty of YouTubers because I was no longer invested in them as a person or their content.
While we may understand these things, our brains as a business person are still different than our brains as a consumer. Or at least mine is.
August is almost over and I’ve come up with a goal for myself. Like before, I want to try to go the entire month of September without going to SocialBlade or seeing the subscriber count on my channel page (which I try not to see when I have to go to my page to get something, but accidents happen and I sometimes see the numbers because I wasn’t expecting to be on a particular area of my screen). This is something that I did before and it actually worked well for me. If I can get myself to focus on that again, I think it’s something that will really help me out in the long run.
I would love to be able to be in a world where I am not obsessed the numbers, and I hope to start on that journey today.
