Making sure your subscribers count

Subscriptions are one of the clearest ways you can see how you’re doing on YouTube. When people subscribe to your channel, it’s a signal they like what you’re doing and want to see more. We know your subscribers are hard-won, and that’s why we recognise big subscriber milestones with things like access to programmes at the YouTube Space and our Creator Rewards programme.

It’s extremely important to us that these numbers stay meaningful so that you can be sure that when your sub count grows it’s because you’re building a community of real fans who are going to keep watching and supporting you.

With that in mind, we’ll soon implement a new process to improve the accuracy of subscriber counts. It’s similar to existing ways we ensure that other site metrics, like views, are free of spam and abuse, and keep YouTube a fair playing field for everyone.

On 16 June we’re going to remove suspended accounts from all channels’ subscriber counts. This means some of you will notice a minor drop in your subscribers. To be clear, these are not active viewers, so you shouldn’t see any impact on your views or watch time. 

From there, we’ll have an automated system in place that removes suspended accounts from subscriber counts as they occur. And, we’ve built our system so that if something goes wrong for one of our viewers and their account is suspended in error, these changes are reversible.

You don’t need to do anything to prepare for this change. Just keep being you, and making YouTube great.

Katie Hushion, YouTube Operations Specialist, recently watched Cute Bunny Jumping Competition.