After announcing the change in May, YouTube, in an attempt to take the pressure off the creators, is finally changing the way subscriber count will appear to followers.
As per YouTube,
Currently, all creators with over 1,000 subscribers see their subscriber counts displayed differently in different places across YouTube desktop and mobile apps. In some cases, the subscriber count is abbreviated (e.g., 133k) and in other places, we display the full count (e.g., 133,017). To create more consistency everywhere that we publicly display subscriber counts, we’ll begin showing the abbreviated subscriber number across all public YouTube surfaces.
The GIF below shows how the publicly-listed subscriber count will appear on channels.
The update will be rolled out globally this month.
Abbreviated public subscriber counts are gradually rolling out starting next week.
We heard a lot of feedback from the community following our announcement in May – we’ve updated our original post with more info here → https://t.co/YHRfW7JlDr
— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) August 29, 2019
YouTube hopes to make the subscriber counts consistent across desktop and mobile through this change. However, this might have an adverse effect since the brands may not get an accurate sense of the popularity of the platform, causing creators to lose sponsorship opportunities.
YouTube’s blog post explains,
For creators, the change means that brands may not get an accurate sense of their popularity on the platform – especially for niche influencers whose following isn’t as substantial as a channel with hundreds of millions of followers. Even for the channels with hundreds of millions of followers, if they’re at 120,450,000, their 120M subscriber count will be short more than 400,000.
This update might change the way things work since becoming a subscriber will be less of a personal matter from now on, as the Android Police points outs.
