Carla Marshall has 10+ years of experience in video marketing, social media management, content marketing, DRM, and SEO. She was previously Editor in Chief at ReelSEO.com, and as a journalist and video marketer, she's covered news stories, creator journeys, and digital-first publishing initiatives across all the major online video platforms. She is YouTube Certified and a judge for the Shorty Awards, as well as the UK, US, Canadian, Global, and EU Search Awards.

Carla Marshall

Middle-aged woman with glasses and curly brown hair, smiling in blue blouse indoors

When you tell people you have a YouTube channel, one of the most common questions asked is, "Oh, how many subscribers do you have?" And the answer may be, none of your business!

When you are logged in to YouTube, you should see your channel logo in the top right-hand corner of most YouTube screens. If you click on that, 

you have the option to go to YouTube Studio.

 This is currently in beta, but will become the standard as 2019 progresses. This is your homepage, or dashboard, on the new creator studio, and in order to hide subscriber counts from the public, you click on the settings button in the bottom left-hand corner. Click on Channel >> Advanced where you’ll see a check box that says display the number of people subscribed to my channel.

Why Hide Your YouTube Subscriber Details to the Public?

So, that is how you hide your subscriber count. The burning question now is 

 The common opinion is that having a visible subscriber count can either add or take away value from your channel. A lot of video creators with smaller channels, say, less than a hundred subscribers, are worried that viewers will be immediately switched off from their content because they don't have a perceived audience watching their content already.

That may be a valid point. When you watch a video, and you see a channel with lots of subscribers, does that convince you more to subscribe to their channel than content from another video creator which is just as good, but has a tiny number of subscribers? But as subscriber counts are by default public, what kind of message does that send if a creator makes a conscious decision to hide them?

From a personal point of view, I've never been afraid of hiding my subscriber count, after all, every video creator starts at zero and ends up somewhere. And after a few years of making videos, and when you've built up your channel, you'll realize what a immaterial number that was when you were first starting out your channel. It's all part of a YouTube journey.

If you want to take your YouTube channel to the next level then make sure to download vidIQ. It will help you research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps 

Red subscribe button with a green arrow pointing and bold text asking "WHY?" in black.

Want to hide your YouTube subscriber count? We show you how to (but also question why you would want to do that?).

How to Hide Your YouTube Subscriber Count [New Method!]

Rob started out on YouTube in 2012, building up a tech channel before joining the vidIQ team. He now educates over 450,000 subscribers on the vidIQ channel which has over 25,000,000 video views. Today he is hard at work sharing everything he has learned on the YouTube platform; educating video creators on how to grow their own channels and turn hobbies into careers - just like Rob did in 2017.

Rob Wilson

Smiling bald man with stubble wearing a black t-shirt on a white background

, one of the biggest and most successful YouTubers of all time just hit the 20 million subscriber mark!. Here are the numbers behind the milestone - with a few fun 'facts' thrown in:

Mr Beast was already a big deal on YouTube this time last year, but in the last 365 days he has pretty much quadrupled the size of his channel.

Mr Beast started his channel on February 19th, 2012, and he hit his latest landmark, 20 million subscribers, on June the 8th, 2019.

For those of you who like their numbers that's 7 years, 3 months, 20 days, or 2,666 days, or 63,984 hours.

Now, if we average that over the lifetime of a channel that's 7,501 subscribers per day, but subscriber growth has accelerated considerably in the last year.

So much so that now, on average, Mr Beast averages 41,096 subscribers every single day.

Despite this unprecedented success however, Mr Beast has still stolen 36 million cookies due to visitors not subscribing and not clicking that notification bell.

Next up we have views, 2.7 billion of them to be almost exact.

And that works out at 135 views per subscriber, or just over 1 million views per day since the channel started, or 3.7 million views per video based on the 728 currently published on the channel.

The remarkable thing about Mr Beast channel is it's consistency. His most popular video has 

, which is no mean feat, but using the vidIQ video 

 we can see that from the last 50 videos he has published they average 12 to 15 million views after 28 days. Not a bad number at all when you compare it to say, oh I don't know, PewDiePie, whose videos average 5 to 6 million views, despite the fact he has 75 million more subscribers.

This time last year Mr Beast sat on, around about, 540 million total views. That means the channel has received over 2.1 billion views in a single year. An increase of 300% year on year, just like his subscriber count, and it doesn't look to be slowing down anytime soon.

Mr Beast is, of course, famous for crazy things he does on his videos, and that includes giving away a lot of money. 

 276 hours doing random stuff that range from standing straight in slime, sitting underwater, and trying to survive in the desert.

He's also repeated words, counted numbers, or read from the dictionary for a total of 27,900,000 words, and he has used 132.6 million bits of Orbeez, Lego, magnets, pennies, and more things in his videos.

And so, Mr Beast, on behalf of everybody here at vidIQ, congratulations on 20 million subscribers!!

Blue thunderbolt panther logo above large bold black number 19,999,999 on white background

YouTube superstar just hit 20 million subscribers on his channel. Here are 13 numbers behind that massive achievement.

Mr Beast: 13 Numbers Behind His 20 Million YouTube Subscribers

First off, let’s confirm how you access the ‘Notifications’ feature on YouTube:

When you are logged into YouTube, you should see your channel logo in the top right hand corner of most YouTube screens, if you click on that, you have the option to go to YouTube Studio.

Click on the ‘Videos’ tab, this will show you the video details.

Click on ‘Advanced’. Scroll down to the bottom of this screen, and you'll see the following option: ‘Publish to the Subscription feed and allow notifications to subscribers’. To clarify what that means, your subscribers will see this video in their Subscription feed and will receive notifications if eligible. This is always defaulted on, as you would expect, so if you want to stop this from happening when the video goes public, untick this box, and save the change.

Notifications have already been sent out for public videos, so for a private or unlisted videos.

The Difference Between Unlisted & Public Video YouTube Notifications

I know you've got a burning question you want to ask. What's the difference between a unlisted video and a public video that doesn't send out notifications? Good question.

Unlisted videos are those that are only designed to be found through a shared link, they don't appear in search results, and they don't appear on your channel page either. Public videos, on the other hand, are totally transparent and visible, they can be found through search and appear on your channel.

Some rare reasons why you might need to do this is for your channel trailer. You want it to be discoverable on YouTube, but you don't want to notify your subscribers because it's not required. Or, you might have some sort of Easter egg or secret game you're playing with your audience which they need to find, but obviously you don't want to notify them that the video exists.

And now let's go back to our question, what is the maximum number of notifications a viewer will see from a single channel in 24 hours?

So if you intend to upload multiple videos, maybe five or 10 a day, for whatever reason, and you only want to make sure that the most important videos reach your audience, then you can use that checkbox to untick the ones which you don't think are as valuable.

If you want to take your YouTube channel to the next level and 

 then make sure to download vidIQ. It will help you research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps 

Notification settings banner with YouTube and vidIQ icons on blue tech background

Did you know there is a limit to the number of video uploads and livestream notifications a viewer can receive from a single YouTube channel in a 24-hour period? Find out more.

How to Control YouTube Notifications YOU Send to Subscribers

Trust me, if you've been thinking about buying subscribers to grow your YouTube channel, this is going to save you a lot of pain. Because put simply, you don't want to do it. And this is the main reason why.

. You probably haven't read them, and that wouldn't surprise me because nobody ever reads them. Especially when they are this long. But if you have intentions of buying subscribers, then you may want to read Permissions and Restrictions section 6, which states that you are not allowed to do the following:

Cause or encourage any inaccurate measurements of genuine user engagement with the Service, including by paying people or providing them with incentives to increase a video's views, likes or dislikes, or to increase a channel's subscribers, or otherwise manipulate metrics.

So it doesn't matter where you bought your subscribers from, and it doesn’t matter how much they promise your subscribers are legitimate, and will genuinely watch your content. Ultimately, you have paid somebody to try and artificially grow your channel, and to manipulate YouTube's metrics, and that is against Terms of Service. And the buck stops there. YouTube are the gatekeepers, and if they find out what you've been doing, then your channel will most likely be suspended or terminated.

Why Buying Subscribers is So Bad For Your YouTube Channel

Now let's say for argument's sake that you do buy some subscribers and YouTube doesn't take down your channel. What are you actually going to get from those subscribers you paid for? Well it's kind of similar to sub4sub. And while we are on the subject of sub4sub, I hope that it won't come as a surprise to you to learn that this practice also falls under the fake engagement policy. Buying subscribers, sub4sub, you know it's wrong, don't do it.

Now let's put on my hypothetical hat for a second. Let's say you were on the other side of a fence, and somebody paid you to subscribe to a channel, and maybe watch a video. Once you've done what you were paid to do, you're under no obligation to watch any more of their content or to stay subscribed to their channel. You didn't choose to watch their content in the first place, there was a financial incentive. That's not really the relationship you want with your audience, is it? It's not a recipe for success.

Now, granted, that was hypothetical. But you know what I'm talking about, right? Nobody said YouTube was easy, and buying subscribers and indeed views makes it impossible, because your channel will be terminated. This is all blood, sweat, tears, and hopefully at the end of it, some success. But the important thing is, you need to do it organically. So no, this isn't a video on how to buy YouTube subscribers. This is a video on educating you why you shouldn't buy YouTube subscribers. And we hope you found it valuable. If you did, you may be on the cusp of subscribing to our 

. And if this little graphic down here helps push you over the edge, which is allowed by YouTube, then go ahead. And that's how you get subscribers the right way.

Hopefully. You did subscribe, right? Cheers. Now I know some of you at the back of the room are probably shouting at the top of your lungs, you've just told us not to buy subscribers, and yet you sell a YouTube tool that feels like a hack to me. Well let's address that point.

vidIQ software is certified directly by YouTube

, and that means we have to go through compliancy checks every year or two to make sure that our software isn't doing anything that it shouldn't. We follow Terms of Service on YouTube. And put simply, we are not a hack piece of software. There isn't a magic button in vidIQ that gives you more views and more subscribers.

What we do is signpost your journey. Point you in the right direction. Whether that be through researching YouTube, finding the right keywords to better serve your videos to the right audience, analyzing every single video on the platform to find out what's working for your competitors or what's successful for a particular channel, and how you can potentially follow that success. Auditing your own channel, going through all of those YouTube analytics and bringing the important ones to the surface with single clicks, and suggesting actions that will help fix problems on your channel and help you grow quicker.

Not necessarily help you grow by hacks, but by helping you grow organically. vidIQ is free to download. There is a link below. Make sure to check it out.

Now as we're on the topic of growing subscribers, there is one more gray area to take a look at. Giveaways. Can you encourage people to subscribe to your channel during a giveaway? You are allowed to hold a giveaway contest on YouTube, but there are lots of rules surrounding them and 

You and any third party may not manipulate metrics on the YouTube service, including numbers of views, likes, dislikes, or subscribers, such that those metrics fail to reflect genuine user engagement with the YouTube service.

I also spotted a Tweet from Team YouTube that says, "Giveaways are still allowed! What we don't allow is linking to sites that solely aim to drive up subscriptions or other engagement metrics like views or likes through external contests and other means. Since that's the case with this site, it violates our external links policy."

And what YouTube were talking about here was Gleam. This service helps users manage competitions by giving entrants multiple ways of entering a contest, such as following the user on Twitter, or subscribing to their YouTube channel, watching a video. But unfortunately, YouTube doesn't want you to do any of that anymore, because it manipulates their metrics.

So again, our advice would be to not use giveaways on YouTube that encourage the viewer to subscribe to a channel to enter the contest.

 then make sure to download vidIQ. Join over 1 million other users and use vidIQ to help you research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps 

Red icons with white +1 symbols representing social media likes and engagement.

So, you want to know how to buy subscribers to help grow your YouTube channel? Well, it's pretty simple. You don't!!!

Why You Shouldn't Buy YouTube Subscribers - EVER!

Have you ever noticed this message appear in your creator studio as you've been rummaging around your analytics?

Let's be honest, to the average creator that's a pretty scary message to encounter, as it almost suggests that you are personally responsible for some nefarious YouTube activities. Don't worry. This is not a personal attack on your channel. This message will have been received by every YouTuber in the Creator Studio over the last couple of days because it affects absolutely everyone.

In YouTube's own words they do "regularly verify the legitimacy "of accounts and actions on your channel." And that includes checking the validity of your subscribers. Now you might call this YouTube's version of channel auditing. Whatever you want to call this, it happens to some degree on YouTube every single day. That's why during the Pewdiepie versus T-Series subscriber race, you saw one of the channels lose thousands of subscribers in seconds. It's all to do with YouTube making sure that the numbers are alright.

Every three or four months, YouTube will do a massive purge of subscribers, or they will fix a problem with subscriber counts. Last December YouTube acknowledged they had an issue removing spam accounts, which led to a huge subscriber killing spree. We ourselves lost over 700 subscribers in that single purge. For the vast majority of channels, they will lose subscribers through accounts that either the user themselves has closed, or because YouTube have terminated them due to a policy violation. Nothing to do with you.

On the other hand, YouTube subscribers gained through artificial means, such as purchasing subscribers through a third party service, could be your fault, and as well as losing those subscribers, you may lose your entire channel. So if you're ever tempted to buy YouTube subscribers, don't do it. And this video will explain exactly why:

On the other side of the coin, you have to consider this. Your channel could be whiter than white, clean as a whistle, but ultimately you have no control over those subscribers. It could be that someone else is acting nefariously not in your best interest. So if you do ever notice anything suspicious happening on your channel, loads more subscribers but no increase in views, it might be better for you to contact YouTube first, if you can.

If you do ever want to scrutinize the subscriber numbers in more detail, in the new Creator Studio you can click the ‘see more’ link on you channel analytics, and then click on ‘subscriber source’ to see a full breakdown of all the subscribers you lose. You gain subscribers, you lose subscribers. Bada bing, bada boom. It's the life of a video creator.

Now, while you may notice a change in your subscriber counts because, let's face it, all video creators have an eagle eye on how many subscribers they've got. The public may never even notice a thing. That's because since September YouTube have been abbreviating subscriber counts to the public, depending on the size of your channel.

In our case, with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, our number increments every thousand. So you might not have even realized we lost 700 subscribers. And at the end of the day remember this. If YouTube is deleting subscribers from your channel, that's because those subscribers don't mean anything to your channel. They're illegal, illegitimate, not wanted by anyone.

Man frustrated with losing 700 YouTube subscribers, vidIQ logo in corner.

Have you noticed a drop in your YouTube subs and wondered what happened? We explain why the platform may have deleted a percentage of your subscribers lately.

Why Did YouTube Just Delete My Subscribers?

Now a very reasonable question to ask me is, "Rob, why have you set 100 subscribers "as the first big YouTube milestone?" Well, let's be honest, getting to 10 subscribers is pretty easy because you could just ask all of your friends and family to help you get there. As for 1,000 subscribers, well, right now that's probably a little bit too ambitious, and that's a trap you don't want to fall into.

Throughout your YouTube journey, which hopefully is going to be a very long and successful one, you want to set yourself manageable targets. The obvious temptation is to target 

1,000 subscribers, along with 4,000 hours of Watch Time

, because it means you're halfway to monetizing your channel. The problem is, this is going to hurt your short-term, day-to-day mindset. Because you won't feel as if you’re making enough progress.

For some channels, reaching 1,000 subscribers can take many months, if not years. If you start with that mindset, and you're into day 17 or day 34, and you haven't yet reached 100 subscribers, how is that going to make you feel? And when you get frustrated, you might start resorting to bad habits and awful tactics early on.

Those include sub-for-sub, which is against terms of service, and as we all know, and never proves to be successful in the long term for successful channels. Spamming other YouTube channels with comments is also a no-no as those actions just center around the ‘me, me, me’ mentality of a YouTube video creator, and that get’s you nowhere.

Key to 100 YouTube Subscribers: Audience Trust

As we will always preach here at vidIQ, it is the value that you give to your audience that will get them to trust you and subscribe to your content. If you get completely desperate, you may resort to buying subscribers, which is the worst thing you can do on your channel.

First of all, it is against terms of service, once again, and it may resort in your channel being terminated. Those subscribers will offer absolutely zero value to your YouTube channel in terms of growing it through views, watch time, and creating a community.

So I personally believe that your first subscriber milestone should be 100 subscribers. When you first start your channel, you'll be getting a new subscriber every few days. Then you'll be getting maybe one or two a day, and then you'll be getting ten or so a week, and that should help you reach that goal as quickly, as hopefully, as possible. Let's give you a best-case-scenario.

#1 Kick Off Your YouTube Channel with Enough Content

You launch your channel, the first video goes up, and to your surprise, lots of people watch it. And then you've got nothing else to show them. It's always a good strategy to give your viewers a collection of videos to watch on your channel. So if possible, don't launch with just one video on your channel, or at the very beginning, you want to try and pump out as many videos as possible, which may be against the schedule that you end up doing.

For example, you might be wanting to post one video a week, maybe in that first week, you want to post three videos so that people who are finding your content have something to feed off of very quickly. It is often the case that viewers won't subscribe to the first video that they watch on a channel. It may take two or three videos to persuade them to push that red button. And if you have more than one video, you can start to communicate to your audience in all of the content that you produce, that it is on a topic that your audience is interested in.

If you can get your audience to enjoy your first piece of content, fall in love with your second piece of content, and then subscribe as a result of the third piece of your content, then you potentially have a viewer there for months, years, a lifetime possibly.

Now, I wouldn't recommend necessarily launching three or four videos at exactly the same time when you start your channel. You want to give each video a moment to breathe on the platform. If you have a batch of videos you want to upload to YouTube all at once, that is absolutely fine, just make sure that they remain private until you're ready to publish them. Then when you do publish them, stagger them by at least one day, and then if you don't intend to post on a daily basis on YouTube, probably give each video at least 48 hours.

Now as I say, three in the first week is probably perfect. You'll quickly learn that when your videos get released, you get lots of bonuses from YouTube, and you find that you have rapid view velocity in the first 24 hours. But if you launch them all at the same time, it's not giving YouTube a chance to distribute that content to the potential audience it's looking for. It might not be possible to sustain the volume of content you push out in the first week or month of your YouTube channel. But give your viewers as much as you are able to provide them when you first launch your channel.

The first subscribers to your channel, who you don't know in real life, are wondrous things. Just consider what's happening here for a second. Somebody somewhere in the world has found your content valuable enough that they want to be notified again when you release more content. And then it gets to ten subscribers, and that's a line of people waiting for a bus. And they've got to say something to them.

Then you get up to 25 subscribers, that is a room full of people, and then you start to get towards 100 subscribers, which is a hall full of people. Can you imagine standing on stage, and speaking to those people directly in real life? It's a terrifying prospect, but every single one of you is doing that every single day as you try to reach this first big milestone. Now these real-life people are very precious to you, and you want to treat them with that respect.

#2 Be Consistent and Focused from the Start

When you have such small sample sizes, if people are subscribing to particular videos on your channel, you want to make more of that content. Yes, we are drifting down the common topic of niching down, one of YouTube's most important strategies. But I'm going to try and keep it fairly light for this video.

Let's say you're watching television, and you come across a new sitcom, and you enjoy the first episode that you watch. You enjoy the characters, the comedy is on point with your type of humor, and you like the way the story is going. What happens if next week, you tune in and they remove half of the characters, there are new comedy scriptwriters writing all of the material, and the story has suddenly jumped the shark in some way? You're probably going to be turned off from that content.

Now that is a bit of an extreme case of course but on YouTube channels, this happens pretty much with all channels. To begin with, and I don't understand this, many creators are a little self-indulgent, because they want to create what they're going to enjoy making, and not realizing there's an audience out there who's already watched some of your previous content, enjoyed it, subscribed to it, and want to see more or less the same thing.

If you continue to deliver content that your subscribers have subscribed for, you will start to build momentum, I guarantee it. And remember, I've already said that the first video a viewer watches on your channel may not convince them to subscribe. However, due to the way YouTube's recommendations work, even if a viewer doesn't subscribe to your channel, they may see more of your content appear in their browse feeds or suggested videos. And if they watch a second video from you which is similar to the first, and they enjoy it more, then that will convince them to subscribe. But it has to stay on topic for the audience's watching habits.

#3 It’s OK to Ask Your Viewers to Subscribe

There's something I want to get you into the mindset of as early as possible in your YouTube journey. It's okay to ask people to subscribe to your channel. Some people have a real mental block about this. Maybe it's because they find it too embarrassing, or because they feel as if they're begging too much to their audience.

This is not the same as sub-for-sub. Remember, the viewer is already watching your video, and you are providing value to them. There's nothing wrong with reminding the audience, "Hey, if you want to see more of this content, "then it might be a good idea "to subscribe to the channel."

There are many ways to ask people politely to subscribe to your channel. For example, in this video, at the very beginning, what did we do? “Hello, I'm Rob, and welcome to vidIQ, the YouTube tool and channel that educates you on your YouTube journey. For more content just like this, make sure to subscribe to the channel, and do this so that you're the first to be notified when there are new videos released.” In 18 seconds, I told new viewers of vidIQ who we are, our value proposition, and why you should subscribe to your channel in a slightly inventive way.

As you continue on through a video, if you get to a point where you deliver something of real value, or a spectacular moment in a video, and that is your payoff to a certain extent, don't be afraid to put in a call to action there as well. And what I mean by a call to action is asking the viewer to subscribe, or something onscreen that you don't even address, it's just there, it just reminds the viewer, "Hey, if you're liking this, "remember to press that red button."

You can also add a subscribe watermark to your videos and this can be really effective for bringing in a few extra subscribers to every single video. We've got a dedicated video on this here:

And, don't be afraid to also put a subscribe link in your channel description, in the end screens, and maybe in a pinned comment. Give your viewers as many opportunities as possible to remind them that it's free to subscribe, and they'll get value from it because you're going to give your audience exactly what they're asking for.

#4 The First Few Months will be Frustrating but Keep Going

Something that's going to be really important throughout your YouTube journey is perspective. You may not like what I'm about to tell you, but it is the truth. When you start your YouTube channel, you have no authority, you have no influence, you have no social proof. From the audience perspective, they are asking the question, "Why should I subscribe to you?" "What makes you different as a video creator?"

From YouTube's perspective, the platform wants more data from your content. It wants to know which audience is watching your content, and for how long, and how successful it is, and whether or not to push that content to more people after they've watched it and indeed subscribed.

I am not going to lie to you, the first few weeks and months on YouTube can be a real uphill struggle. For many creators, hitting that first hundred subscribers was the most challenging thing they did on their channel. But then, hitting the next hundred subscribers wasn't so hard, and then the next hundred, and before you know it, you're up to five hundred, and then your coming into the thousand subscriber mark.

What needs to happen is a connection between the viewer and the content creator. When you build trust, you build a relationship, and you get onto a personal level, you somehow impact that viewer in an emotional way. That creates a bond where the subscription hopefully will happen, and then who knows what beyond that.

Now what I hope I've done throughout this video is establish some of those bonds so you can subscribe. You see what I did there? As this portion of the video suggests, accept and embrace the challenge. Think of it in a completely different mindset. Enjoy the journey.

You need to determine whether or not you enjoy making videos, that's what you're going to be doing the majority of the time. And it could take you 50 videos, 100 videos, six months, to understand whether you like that process. And if you're concentrating more on how you're going to deliver the content to your audience, and observing their feedback, rather than looking at that single metric of subscribers, or that single metric of views and Watch Time, I guarantee you will enjoy the process so much more. And before you know it, you may not even realize it, you'll surpass 100 subscribers.

And if you’re really serious about growing your YouTube views and subscribers, sign up for exclusive access to the 

 and learn how to launch a successful YouTube Channel in just 30 days.

YouTube logo with subscriber count increasing from 97 to 100 and "How to subscribers" text

Let’s take a look at some of the best strategies for reaching that first big YouTube milestone - 100 subscribers.

How to Get More Subscribers on YouTube

How to Hide Your YouTube Subscriber Count [New Method!]

Mr Beast: 13 Numbers Behind His 20 Million YouTube Subscribers

How to Control YouTube Notifications YOU Send to Subscribers

Why You Shouldn't Buy YouTube Subscribers - EVER!

Why Did YouTube Just Delete My Subscribers?

How to Get Your First 100 Subscribers on YouTube