Hey so facts are nice, aren’t they?
Dan has, as of 8/12/16, roughly 6,003 million subscribers. That makes him the 182th most subscribed YT channel.
Phil has, as of 8/12/1, roughly 3,694 million subscribers. That makes him the 377th most subscribed YT channel.
There are over 2440 YT channels with over a million subscribers.
Youtube has more than a billion users. 300 hours of video are uploaded to it each minute.
There are millions of people trying to make it, billions of people imagining what it’d be like to try, thousands upon thousands of people struggling to hold on to the interest they once held.
Dan gains around 19k subscribers a week, Phil gains about 16k a week. Both of their channels continue to grow, and the numbers are neither huge nor disappointing, they fall somewhere in the middle and suggest steady growth over a long period of time.
Dan’s biggest subscriber spike dates back years, they’ve actually been gaining subs in similar speed for a very long time now.
Now, when I say they’re not impressive, there are channels with similar view & sub count as theirs that gain several times more per week. ThatcherJoe gains around 60k per week, as does Caspar Lee.
When I say they’re also not disappointing, you can look at Tyler Oakley, who has over 8 million subscribers but has actually been losing about 5k subscribers a week.
What should also be noted is that sub count is hardly everything. Marcus Butler has 4,5 million subscribers, for instance, but his videos are hitting somewhere around 300 - 600k. Charlie McDonnel has 2,3 million subscribers and despite once making videos that would hit several millions of views each, he’s now getting around 200k per video.
You don’t make a dime on subscribers who don’t watch your videos. You get paid per click or watchtime, depending on whether you’re a YT Red subscriber or not.
There isn’t typically an AmazingPhil video that doesn’t hit 1,5 million views in about a few weeks, and there typically isn’t a danisnotonfire video that doesn’t get to 2 million views in the same period of time.
That has been a trend for years.
Both Dan and Phil do really, really well on YT. Individually and as a duo. And the fact that they’re years in and have still managed to keep people interested is a far better indicator of that than a subscriber milestone.
And yeah, sure, you might want Phil to have 6kk, too. Hell, you might want him to have 10kk subscribers. That’s fine. But success cannot be actually measured in deserving, it’s a weird mixture of chance and daring and hard work and sheer stupid luck.
But what I want you to step back from and reconsider is feeling in any way sorry for Phil. Because he’s in the Top 400 on a site of billions, he’s not lost inspiration or determination in 10 years, people still want to watch his videos, he’s currently touring the world, and he probably makes more money than some small developing states.
And trying to convince yourself otherwise just cause the dude he works & lives with, whose success he shares, has higher numbers - why? I can’t help but feel like that reduces Phil to someone to measure Dan’s success by & vice versa.
So yeah. I do want tell you to subscribe to Phil if you wanna, cause he’s awesome, and same goes for Dan.
But mostly? I just kind of wish we stopped embarrassing Phil. Cause he does pretty damn fine for himself, if you ask me.
