As you may have heard, several prominent YouTube stars are up in arms about a perceived dip in their subscriber totals and view counts. Everyone has his or her own theory for why those numbers appear to be in decline, but no matter who is correct, the downturn in question does seem to be happening. A recent chart shared by Kotaku shows that, among YouTube’s elite, a noticeable dip has occurred in recent months in terms of both views and subscribers.
The chart cited by Kotaku comes from Social Blade, a notable provider of YouTube-related statistics. Here, Social Blade has looked at channels with more than ten million subscribers and mapped their numbers over the past year. After hitting high points in April and July respectively, viewership and subscriber gain for the surveyed channels have decreased dramatically, with the biggest drop coming between July and September.
One interesting note in Social Blade’s chart is that it does not include channels run by big media companies or by music video providers like VEVO. While that does allow the sample to focus on the people we think of as YouTube stars, it does potentially eliminate the channels that are thriving right now. If the theory posed by Matthew Patrick is correct, big companies that can have enough resources to release one substantial video each day should have the power to even this chart out a bit.
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Still, the numbers here are concerning. YouTube has repeatedly told its denizens that everything is normal, and it went so far as to get into a little back-and-forth with Social Blade on Twitter. We’ll see if the video site has anything else to say as its most notable users continue to pipe up.
