Should You Still Consider Subscriber Count for Your Next Campaign?

There are two different types of influencers. You have your macro influencers, who are pretty big, usually with a million or more subscribers. They’re well known of course, and because there’s so many people in their following, it could mean they can’t engage with most of them. Then you have the micro influencers. These are your smaller channels, that most of the time have such a good engagement with their subscribers. Because they’re able to engage and interact with the smaller number of people, it’s easier to manage.

Let’s talk about a couple things you should take into consideration when thinking if subscriber count matters. Did you know that YouTube doesn’t actually send out notifications to viewers when a YouTuber uploads a new video. To be notified about new videos, the viewer has to turn on notifications for that channel. If you’re subscribed to a channel, but don’t have notifications on, then  what other benefits do you get for subscribing?

One more crucial thing to think about is fake subscribers, or even viewers that don’t bother subscribing. It’s not an uncommon thing for channels to buy subscribers to make their numbers look better. But where’s the correlation between the subscriber number and the average viewership? If the average viewership is only a small fraction of the subscriber count, then it’s certain that there are inactive or possibly bought/fake subscribers. This becomes a big risk, to pay a large amount only to get poor results. Based on some data pulled from this year, at least 15% of advertisers’ spending on influencer marketing is lost to fraud, costing up to $1.3bil annually. Macro influencers can be paid anywhere around $250K per social media post, but because of inflated subscriber/follower counts, as much as $38K is wasted by brands.

So, is that subscriber count what you should focus on? In some cases, sure. There are some macro influencers that can bring in the big numbers. But most of the time, that’s not the case. Put your focus on the more important data in front of you. The views show more of that real subscriber count, the active viewers that you’ll be able to reach. Be sure to ask about previous partnership results, to gauge the potential results that will be brought in. And use the resources available! There are third-party services that provide valuable data that are ignored all the time.

At GGContent, we can check and provide all the data needed to determine if you should be interested in a certain YouTuber or not. We are able to check a channel's overall viewership dynamics, track their subscriber count and views per month, and track the average viewership over the last week, month, year, or overall. There are other easily accessible sites like Social Blade, that allows you to see daily views, daily subscriber gain/loss, and even their estimated CPM earnings. 

Hopefully, this has not scared you away from trying out influencer marketing for your product or service. But more so, that it makes you want to run a more cost efficient and effective campaign! Sometimes bigger isn’t always better, and sometimes big things come in small packages.