For those who don’t know YouTube, Social Blade may just be a data tool for analyzing user growth and loss. But in fact, Social Blade is indispensable to creators on YouTube and has become part of the platform culture.
Now, Social Blade is facing the risk of being shut down. The real-time subscriber counts will be hidden as YouTube's product team works on an update to the platform in August. The change will affect third-party sites that use YouTube's API to analyze data, including Social Blade. At the same time, a large number of YouTube channels that specialize in live-streaming subscriber count battles (for example, the battle for the number of YouTubers: T-Series vs PewDiePie) will not be able to survive because they will no longer be able to use Social Blade's counter.
YouTube's top star battle: T-Series vs PewDiePie, according to Social Blade
At the same time, YouTube has been gradually adding internal tools and is working to get more people to use the internal metrics tools on these platforms.
Social Blade is the first site to quantify YouTube's popularity in easy-to-understand statistics. That's why Social Blade is so important to this community. Its real-time subscriber counter represents the success or failure of your content on YouTube. Social Blade's counters are as famous as some of the top creators. At the same time, it is also the most beautiful data display.
Some major events in YouTube are often closely related to Social Blade. T-Series' rapid rise was first noticed by Social Blade; the battle between famous beauty bloggers Tati Westbrook and James Charles has also been based on Social Blade's data. Outside of the drama, Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon used Social Blade's live counter to celebrate with his audience when his channel surpassed 20 million subscribers. Watching the counter go over one million, five million, or even ten million has become a culture on YouTube, and it's all because of Social Blade.
Many users tweeted in support of the site on Thursday evening and created the hashtag #SaveSocialBlade in hopes of gaining influence across the United States. "Most of our services are provided free to the YouTube community and don't even require users to log in, so in most cases we don't know who is using our services," said Jason Urgo, CEO of Social Blade. He was undoubtedly surprised and moved by the hashtag on Twitter.
Many content creators also used the hashtag #SaveSocialBlade to emphasize the necessity of Social Blade. Well-known YouTuber and comedian Jesse Ridgway tweeted: "It's very sad to see YouTube gradually kill off Social Blade. For many years, we have been accustomed to using Social Blade to see real-time subscriber counts and simplified statistics."
Urgo said that after the hashtag topic on Twitter sparked discussion, a YouTube representative contacted the Social Blade team. He doesn’t know if this will change the content on his site, but he’s hopeful. Because creators on YouTube are very unhappy right now, and in this case, YouTube will choose to listen.
