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Regarding the abbreviated sub counts. We wanted to take a second & thank you all so much for the overwhelming support. We've reached out to YouTube a couple of days ago to talk to them about this but still haven't heard back. We found out about this just like you from a tweet.
YouTube claims this change is to "create more consistency" and (via Creator Insider) that this is in line with instagram, facebook, and twitter. Though we prefer seeing the full numbers on YouTube we're 100% fine if they want to change their site to have abbreviated numbers.
The compassion to the other sites though is wrong in two regards. Yes, they might show abbreviated numbers, but if you mouse over the values you see the full numbers. Also, unlike YouTube's proposed change, 3rd party's get the full data.
Now that those items are out of the way, what we're hearing unofficially is this is in response to negative attention to people watching live counts. We get that. This is why we stay away from talking or promoting any youtube fights but only promote people reaching milestones.
If YouTube's goal was to stop live counters alone this would be sad because there are so many good reasons to watch a live counter as you reach a milestone. We love seeing people celebrate hitting their first 1k, or 100k, or 1m etc but even this we'd understand.
But there is a better way to even do that. All they'd need to do is simply cache the data on their side like they used to many years ago and give api users the updated number once a day.
The biggest issue we see from all of this is in the longer time frame. Our site will still work if they go through with this change, but the granularity will be lost. For example, PewDiePie hit 95M subs on April 28th and 96M on May 22nd. Right now we see updates each day
but with YouTube's new system it would look like he didn't gain any subscribers for almost a month and then all of a sudden he gains a million. So on the "zoomed out" view things would still be there, but at a huge loss of precision.
The same would go for all channels. We'd still be able to track data and show graphs, top lists, etc, but the number of data points would be so much less.
So far almost all responses to YouTube's tweet, support article, and creator insider video are saying this is a bad idea. We're hoping that YouTube looks at this feedback and takes it into consideration. This doesn't just effect us, this effects the entire YouTube landscape
from creators, to brands, to the media, and to the viewers. There are way more positive use cases then we can talk about in a tweet storm that would be impacted negatively by this change.
We're happy to work with YouTube on better ways to accomplish their goals. YouTube if you don't have our contact info and want to chat just DM us and we'll provide it to you to talk about this in private.
