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The value of having social media followers is plummeting
Over the past few years we’ve seen a slow decline in the value of having “followers” on social media, as the algorithms continue to shift to show content to all users as they see fit.
YouTube, while it’s changing quickly, is an example of the old model. More often than not, videos are shown to users that have specifically subscribed to a channel and not to as many other users on the platform. For example, look at the videos from WIRED; they have over 11M subscribers, but very few videos get even 1M views. That’s the case almost every time on YouTube and other traditional social media — a subset of your subscribers will see your content, that’s it.
On the other hand, look at TikTok. In pulling it up right now, here are stats on the first three videos that were shown to me:
- 9.6M video likes from a person that has 33.5K followers
- 575K video likes from a person that has 119K followers
- 1.9M video likes from a person that has 192K followers
That’s certainly not always the case. There are creators on TikTok that have millions of followers with videos that only get a small percentage of that many views, but that’s kind of the point — followers and views are quite disconnected.
