As a YouTuber, you could show your YouTube channel subscriber count publicly to any viewers. The subscriber count is shown beside a channel name when the channel is searched or when watching a video. A channel owner could also choose to hide the subscriber count.
There could be various reasons for hiding subscriber count of a channel. A brand new YouTube channel might want to hide the subscriber count as many viewers could be looking for videos from established content creators. So, It could be hard to gain new subscribing viewers when your existing subscriber count is very low.
A YouTube channel is considered popular when it has a certain number of followers following it and it has interactions via comments and likes on the video posts.
In the past, you could go to YouTube Studio to hide the subscriber count.
In YouTube Studio, click “Settings”.
Click “Channel”.
Click “Advanced Settings”.
Scroll down to the “Subscriber count” section and untick the option “Display the number of people subscribed to my channel”. Well, this option is no longer there now. The checkbox option used to be there for years and now YouTube has removed it beginning on 29 July 2022. Some YouTubers call it a bad YouTube 2022 update. I understand that this update could upset YouTubers with a small number of subscribers. I used to hide subscribers in this channel too while it was growing slowly in the beginning stages. Let me explain why YouTube has removed this feature that allows you to hide subscribers on YouTube.
Hiding subscriber numbers is an easy way for spam accounts to conceal what they really have going on in order to impersonate larger, established channels.
YouTube acknowledges that “some creators prefer to hide their subscriber count as they try to grow” but the company has deemed the potentially controversial measure necessary to reduce the prevalence of impersonators. The change is sure to upset some people, since YouTube is removing an option here rather than adding something, but the company is making the move nonetheless.
Spam accounts often copy the name of whoever they’re pretending to be but subtly change one or two characters. At first glance, a fake channel might look like the real thing and at scale that’s enough to lure unwitting users to a fake channel or scammy links or whatever else they’re pushing.
So it’s not on the channels themselves that this is necessarily a problem, but if a user is impersonating a famous YouTuber in the comments, and they hide their subscriber count, that can make it harder for regular users to know whether this is the real person making a comment or not.
With the subscriber count shown publicly, the spam YouTube accounts that imitate other established accounts can be easily exposed by looking at the low subscriber numbers. I think this is in the right direction to protect genuine YouTube channels and also protect the viewers from falling into scammers traps. Great job YouTube!
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