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Why YouTube Subscriber Counts are Rounded
Why YouTube Subscriber Counts are Rounded

YouTube subscriber counts may be slightly different than what is displayed in the native application.

Denna Bettini avatar
Written by Denna Bettini
Updated over a week ago

If you’ve noticed that the subscriber count in Rival IQ doesn’t match what you see on YouTube, here’s why: YouTube rounds subscriber counts down to three significant figures for channels with more than 1,000 subscribers. This rounding applies both in the YouTube Data API and in other publicly visible YouTube interfaces, but the exact subscriber count is only available to channel owners in YouTube Studio.

As a result, you might see your subscriber count jumping by a large number all at once in our application, even though the increase happened gradually. For example, in the chart below, a channel experienced rapid growth at the beginning of the year and then continued to add about 1,000 subscribers per month. Each step in the graph represents the moment when YouTube’s rounded count increased by 1,000 subscribers.

This rounding is why your subscriber count in Rival IQ might look different from what you see directly in YouTube.
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Given that YouTube only returns three significant figures, the rounding becomes even more noticeable for accounts with more than 1 million subscribers. Please see the chart below to understand the number of subscribers returned via the API, which is what we display in Rival IQ.


The YouTube release notes can be found here.

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