High % Watch Time From Non-Subscribers is a Good Thing
Getting less than 50% of your viewership from non-subscribers could be a sign of a contracting audience horizon.
For a little over a year I’ve been seeing this weird call-to-action tactic where youtubers try to get their audience to subscribe by showing them the % ratio of subscribed to non-subscribed watch time. This is concerning to me because it outlines a misunderstanding that they might have about the importance of unsubscribed viewers.
While the call-action itself might work, actually having that ratio go down significantly is objectively a bad thing. The subscriber number on any channel page is a deceivingly static number, and it’s basically a fact that subscribers aren’t forever.
Behind every subscriber is just a regular a person with habits and interests that change over time, and every year there will be people who drift in or out of your audience. This makes it really important to have a constant supply of fresh viewers to tap into.
The ideal scenario is to have your % non-subscriber ratio stay as high and as constant as possible along with a rapidly growing subscriber base. Basically this number represents the current limits of your audience, and the potential audience size that you can currently grow to. A decreasing % non-subscriber ratio is a sign that your content is moving in the wrong direction (where the borders of your furthest audiences are shrinking), and it might be an idea to optimize your content’s core value(s).
Offering creator insight. My brother and I run “NileRed” the largest chemistry-focused science channel on the internet.
