Eric Siu argues subscriber counts don't measure channel success. He built a site that ranked #1 on Google in two months but got almost no traffic because he optimized for rankings instead of actual views. Focus on engagement and viewership instead.
Subscribers don't matter. What matters are the number of views that you're actually getting. Yes. And like also the engagement. If you had like a million subs, like you actually would get more play, like you would get more viewers. Yeah, but that's not the case anymore. The promise, the game has changed. Back in my early days of SEO, the way I started out was I optimized for rankings and I was like, you know, I like going to EDM festivals and I like light show videos. I'm gonna make a website called lightshowvideos.com. Thank you. Yeah, and I got the number 1 ranking for it. Like took me 2 months to get there, right? And when I got there, I expected an avalanche of traffic to come through. Views, right? I was optimizing for like subscribers instead of views. And what happened? I didn't get any traffic for it. I wasted all the time and effort.
