Life as YouTube's largest solo video creator has been a rollercoaster for PewDiePie. Overall interest in his channel has waned, with the exception of occasional controversies, but we all know why this apparent decline has happened. It's because the passion shown towards his race to be the most subscribed to channel on YouTube against T-Series has dwarfed all the other things PewDiePie's done in the past.
We all knew this story would come to an end and it abruptly did when PewDiePie asked his audience to stop the 'Subscribe to PewDiePie' meme. But what effect did that have for PewDiePie? Yup, interest fell through the floor. T-Series became the subscriber king and we all moved on.
Now in a recent PewDiePie video, he did go into a tiny bit of detail about his analytics but we thought we'd take a closer look because, in reality, is PewDiePie better off today than he was a year ago?
PewDiePie on YouTube: The Real Numbers
Let's start off with this golden nugget of data. PewDiePie's video about his analytics, is, after seven days with seven million views, already performing better than his average video, which is expected to get six and a half million views after 28 days.
Oh, how did he get that data, Rob, I hear you ask? And what on earth is this tool? I want it. I'm glad you asked because it's now time for the VidIQ shameless plug claxon. In the new YouTube Creator Studio, if you view one of your videos, YouTube will display the expected high and low end of views your average video is expected to get. It's good for seeing if a particular video's done well for your channel. But we decided to take that concept a monumental leap forward with our Compare Views tool which tracks the performance of any video on YouTube during its first 28 days and compares it to the video's channel average, your channel average, or any channel on YouTube's average.
With this tool, we can see how an average video performs on PewDiePie's channel. And since he posts every single day, we've got plenty of videos to look at. What you will find is that PewDiePie is remarkably consistent with one or two exceptions, every video gets between five and 10 million views.
Occasionally, a video may over perform its average, but very, very rarely will you find a dud on the channel. But obviously, it leads to a question that all video creators get asked. PewDiePie has nearly 97 million subscribers and yet, each video only gets between five and six and a half million views. That's less than 10% of his potential subscribers watching his content and not all of those views would be subscribers.
What would help, at this point, is if we could compare PewDiePie's video view velocity against another channel's stats. Let’s pick T series! That channel seems to have much more unpredictable results with views after 28 days, averaging between 475,000 and 900,000 views. T-Series may be the most subscribed to independent channel on YouTube (and by independent, I mean independent from YouTube, so not YouTube Music).
But, on average, less than 1% of T Series’ channel subscribers will watch each video. Now of course, this is offset by the fact that T-Series publish several videos a day and some of their videos get hundreds of millions of views, which helps boost the numbers. But what you can argue here is that PewDiePie has a loyal, consistent audience because they know what to expect from every single video. In contrast, T-Series, by nature of its eclectic music and movie content, is very much a pick and choose what you fancy type of channel.
Now I'm not going to argue about which is the better type of channel to have, it just represents different generations of the YouTube platform. On the one hand, you have the individual video content creator, the personality versus the big movie label, big content, lots to see brand channel.
Mr Beast: Twice as Many Average Video Views than T Series or PewDiePie
But what about the channel that achieves both? Lots of subscribers and an amazing number of views for the size of a channel - we've got just the example. Each video on Mr Beast’s YouTube channel averages, and let me just say that again, averages 13 to 16 and a half million views. But the incredible thing is that this channel is just, and I'll say this again in relative terms, just 21 million subscribers. It has a quarter of the subscribers of either PewDiePie or T-Series, yet averages at least twice as many views per video.
If we dive into a bit of a detail. Each video on Mr. Beast's channel seems to actually increase in velocity after 24 hours, almost as if millions of subscribers get notifications, flood the video with views, which sends positive signals to YouTube, who, in turn, share the video out to an even wider audience.
In contrast, PewDiePie's videos follow the much more traditional route of sharp initial velocity before tailing off after three and seven days. And when you look at the channels side by side, look at how even after seven days, Mr. Beast videos still have upward velocity and momentum, whereas PewDiePie and T-Series average videos completely flatten out, like many videos do on YouTube. That's a sign of YouTube continuing to push all of Mr. Beast's videos on browse pages and suggested videos, long after the videos have gone live.
So, is PewDiePie any worse off today than he was a year ago? Well, the stats do speak for themselves. In May 2018, PewDiePie's channel got 218 million views. In May 2019, PewDiePie's channel got 334 million views, an increase of 53%. PewDiePie, I think you're doing just fine. As are T-Series, who are getting along just fine, but you know what? Mr. Beast might be doing just a little bit better.
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