We’ve all seen this before, “Subscribe to my channel! I’ll sub back!”
Sounds great, right? Wrong. Sub for sub can be absolutely disastrous for your analytics, your views, your watch time, and your channel in general.
Sub for sub is the act of subscribing to someone’s channel in the agreement that they’ll sub back. This, of course, increases your sub count- how could that possibly be bad? Let’s take a look!
1. Dead Subscribers
Sub for sub tends to create one major thing. Dead subscribers. Dead subscribers are people who have subbed to your channel, but don’t actually interact with your channel in any meaningful way. They don’t comment. If they do click on a video, they close the video as quickly as they opened it- killing your view duration. Or maybe they don’t click on your videos at all. The ultimate goal for your channel is to have quality, interested subscribers. Not people who click a button because you did the same for them.
2. Other creators are not your main target audience
Think of how much effort and time you put into your videos. If you’re anything like me, it’s a lot. You may take an hour or two or six a day creating content— whether it be gameplay, building, or CAS. Then think of how much time you take editing those videos. And rendering. And uploading. Now, imagine how much time other creators put into their videos. As much as we would ALL love to support each other, there just aren’t enough hours in the day. You want to reach people who are on YouTube to WATCH videos. While it’s nice to support your fellow creators, the truth is many of them just don’t have time to watch all of your videos— as well as the 100 other creators they support.
3. Unrealistic Numbers
While it’s great to see your sub count rise— you should also be seeing your views rise along with your subs. If you have 50 subscribers, you should be aiming to have 7-10 views on all your videos as an average sub to view ratio. (The average across YouTube is 10-14%!) If you sub for sub to 50 other subscribers, but stay at 7-10 views... your numbers have decreased. It looks like you have 100 subs— but how many of them truly take a moment out of their day to visit your channel? Sub for sub will bring in many subscribers to your channel— but won’t bring views or watch time with them.
4. Impossible to Keep Up
Let’s say you have done sub for sub. You’ve subscribed to every channel that’s asked you to. You’ve reached out to tons of other creators and asked them to subscribe to your channel in exchange for you subscribing to them. How many of these creators are you watching on a consistent basis? Likely not all of them. If 100 creators put out 3 videos a week between 10-20 minutes long that’s 75 hours of content a week that you’re likely unable to watch. And they’re likely putting themselves in the same position.
5. YouTube Can Delete Your Channel
Yeah. That’s right. If you do sub for sub and have a crazy subscriber count of all people who also follow you... YouTube can just delete your channel. This tends to happen to larger sub count channels, so don’t panic yet.
6. Making Lasting Connections
This does NOT mean you can’t support other creators who also support you. I have MANY other creators in my subscriptions list. While I don’t watch ALL of their videos, I make sure that when I do I watch the video in its entirety and leave a meaningful comment on the video. Supporting other creators and being supported by other creators really helps us to learn and grow our channels in a more organic way. But you don’t want to subscribe to everyone just to inflate their or your numbers. If you subscribe, do it because you enjoy someone’s content. And hope they subscribe to you for the same reason.
