The popularity of YouTube channels is going to get a bit more vague in a few months as subscriber counts get abbreviated.

YouTube have announced that they will start abbreviating how many subscribers channels have by August of this year. YouTube want to streamline how subscribers are shown for channels across all platforms, instead of sometimes showing abbreviated counts and sometimes the number in full.

Channels with less than 1000 subscribers will still show their exact number for the sake of precision at lower numbers. Depending on the number of subscribers YouTube will round down to the nearest hundred, thousand, or million.

For example:

  • If a channel has 4,227 subscribers, the public subscriber count will read “4.2k” until the channel reaches 4,300.

  • If a channel has 133,017 subscribers, the public subscriber count will read “133K” until the channel reaches 134,000. 

  • If a channel has 51,389,232, the public subscriber count will read “51M” until the channel reaches 52,000,000.

YouTube say: “We know that subscriber counts are extremely important for creators and fans alike, so we wanted to give everyone a heads up a few months in advance of this change! We’ll share more specifics with creators as we get closer to the August 2019 date.”

The change will only apply when looking at other people’s channels. Creators will still be able to view the exact number of subscribers to their channels in real-time so that they can track their fans.