YouTube’s Currency Is Subscribers
I just returned from VidCon, the annual online video conference in LA where thousands of content creators came together for three days of education and entertainment focused around YouTube. Getting subscribers was a big topic.
On the first day, which was focused around the industry and business side of online video, YouTube executives including Salar Kamangar, the CEO of YouTube, came together on stage to talk about the future of their website.

They said that the goal behind most of the things they were working on were to help content creators get more subscribers. It was suggested by them that if you focused on just one thing with your YouTube efforts, it should be on your subscriptions because at the end of the day, they say that’s the key to making your channel successful.
And it makes sense because through subscriptions is how you build a regular audience, which especially for business is important for reaching your prospects multiple times. Viewers who come back repeatedly are the ones who will know, like, and trust you – which is ideal for getting them to buy from you as well!
Subscribers on YouTube are like followers on Twitter or likes on Facebook. People can still see your Twitter profile if they don’t follow you and they can still see your Facebook page if they don’t like it, but the chances of them coming back again are very slim if you don’t see your updates in their feeds.
The same goes for YouTube. When people subscribe to your channel, they see your new videos on the homepage – which is a feed of everyone they’re subscribed to. If you don’t have subscribers, or at least a regular schedule of uploads, you’re essentially starting from scratch with every new video (on a website that has 72 hours worth of video added to it every minute).
On Twitter we tend to focus on how many followers someone has as opposed to how many tweets they’ve written, and on Facebook we pay attention to how many people like a page as opposed to how many posts have been shared on it, so why on YouTube wouldn’t your focus be on the number of subscribers you have as opposed to the amount of videos or views you’ve received?











