Last updated on June 14th, 2024
You have a problem, but you don’t know about it yet. You are your company’s Chief Marketing Officer, and you’ve been rating your YouTube success by looking at a single number. And it’s the wrong number – or, at least, one that can be very misleading. Unfortunately, you have been praying to a false god, and its name, simply put, is “Views.” Yes, many CMOs still gauge campaign success with this single metric in mind. But when is a view not a view? Are some views worth more than others? And what other numbers should you be looking for?
Subscribers, not Views, are the Holy Grail for Marketers
The most important number for a YouTube channel is not views. It’s subscribers. While views are one of several important factors, it is the YouTube subscriber count, not an individual video’s views, that is the indicator most analogous to the Facebook page Like or the Twitter Follower. Because like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others, YouTube is a social media platform – the second most popular social media network, in fact, after Facebook. The brands making best use of YouTube today understand this, and act accordingly.