Is My YouTube Channel Dying During The Pandemic?
Why the numbers on Social Blade don’t tell the entire story.
My YouTube channel is dying. Social Blade confirmed it (according to the Monthly Gained Video Views graph on my channel profile page). My channel peaked at 8,442 views in January 2020, fell to 3,394 views in February, slumped to 2,832 views in March, and slid to 2,632 views in April.
No doubt something else kept my audience preoccupied during that same time, say, looking for toilet paper in the middle of a pandemic.
Social Blade collects publicly available data about profiles from various social media platforms. For data that’s not publicly available, estimates and projections based fill in the missing gaps. Making Social Blade a one-stop website for critics and trolls — and the bane of content creators.
Those numbers — data, estimates and projections — don’t always tell the entire story when it comes to YouTube channels.
The most popular estimates on Social Blade is how much earnings from ad revenues a channel should make.
For example, my channel should make an estimated $11 to $178 USD in annual earnings. That would be great — if my channel qualified for the YouTube Partner Program.
My channel needs 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 public hours of watch time in the last 12 months to qualify. My channel currently has 286 subscribers and 1,170 public hours of watch time. Based on my numbers to date, it’s unlikely my channel will have any earnings this year.
These requirements came after various adpocalypses (scandals) in recent years prompted advertisers to take their advertising dollars elsewhere. Most people forget that’s YouTube’s number one customer wasn’t the content creators who provide the content but the advertisers who pay the bills. The majority of channels today no longer qualify for ad revenues.
Since Social Blade has access to the subscriber count data, they could change the website logic for the estimated earnings to display “Not Available” on any channel profile that has fewer than 1,000 subscribers. But that would effectively remove a major draw for most visitors to the website.
YouTubers who commented on the earnings estimates by Social Blade say the numbers were off by a little bit to a whole lot. That’s because there is no “one size fits all” number when it comes to estimating ad revenues.
If you’re interested in understanding the variations of ad earnings, check out “This Is How Much YouTube Paid Me for My 1,000,000 Viewed Video” by Shelby Church.
Is my channel dying during the pandemic? Not at all.
Despite declining views during the first four months of 2020, my subscriber count and watch time held steady with an average 14 subscribers and ~82 hours of watch time per month. I gained more subscribers and more watch time with fewer views. That’s a good thing.
When Social Blade updates with the May 2020 numbers, the Monthly Gained Video Views graph for my channel profile should have a sharp uptick. My audience’s back after finding toilet paper in the middle of a pandemic.
