20th of October 2017, Youtube was kind enough to select me as Creator on the rise. This feature is a way for youtube to feature smaller creators and expose them to a larger and more general audience.

I opened my e-mail in the morning and saw the e-mail to the right. I then had to go to the youtube trending tab to verify that it wasn’t a prank. It was not. I was featured on the trending tab on youtube and I was right next to a pewdiepie video.

The important thing about this is how it affected my channel. I monitored the growth of my channel for weeks following this feature and I was expecting the result to be positive but ultimately ended up being somewhat negative.

Initially I saw a large spike in my subscribers which was great, and gave me a huge endorphin rush. I also saw a big influx of views on the 20th of October, but over the following weeks I started to see large jumps in subscribers in the morning and a large drop in subs in the evening. Somehow being featured on the trending tab of youtube had placed me on some kind of spam list where fake accounts would subscribe to in order to seem legitimate, and youtube was purging all of these accounts quickly.

Not only was there this influx of subscribers followed by purges, but it led to my videos performing poorly over the next few weeks as well. The justification I have for this is the fact that there was an influx of people subscribing to the channel who are “normies” and are not into the esoteric or the subtle differences between two microphones. This means that while I was continuing to produce the content that I normally make, the majority of new subs were not interested in them. Therefore, when they are shown my video by the algorithm, they do not click on it. This tells the algorithm it’s a bad video and it stops recommending it to other people.

This led to a few months of very difficult going on the channel, and it took a lot of hard work to pull out of the downward spiral. Eventually I did and we’re now on the way up. Just wanted to document that.