Here’s why.
Milestones are fun. It’s feels great to earn your first subscriber, your 10th subscriber, your 50th subscriber, your millionth subscriber.
Eight hundred subscribers is 80% of the threshold required for monetization. (The bigger deal is 4,000 watch hours per year. I’m barely a quarter of the way toward that one.)
The Threads community is very supportive.
I had been spending some time interacting with other creators on Threads, and it’s a generally very supportive place.
There’s a lot of encouragement when people reach milestones — even one subscriber! — or if they get their channel monetized.
I’ve tried to get a bit smarter about how I comment, but I’m also known simply to say congrats.
In this spirit, I was just about ready to post my subscriber count to feel all the feels that I had been giving out over the past weeks.
Fishing for compliments (and subs) is a risky easy button.
I resisted posting my sub count though.
Mainly because along with all of the encouraging posts, there are many “drop your channel here” posts and “let’s promote each other” posts.
This kind of engagement and promotion looks an awful lot like gaming the system. I felt like participating in this way would put me at risk of getting the wrong kind of traffic hitting my channel.
Back in my early days of blogging, there were these things called traffic exchanges. People would get websites automatically served to them, and they would (pretend to) engage with the website in return for others viewing theirs. It’s a very low-quality form of traffic.
Google sent me a warning when I sent this traffic to my blog which had AdSense on it. They called it automated and unnatural traffic, and it was putting my AdSense standing at risk.
Fast forward to some creators on Threads today. I have little doubt that YouTube can detect whether people subscribe out of genuine interest for the content, or whether they’re doing so out of obligation.
I don’t want YouTube thinking I’m taking a shortcut to monetization. That’s a sure way to never get monetized there. It would be a just price to pay for being shortsighted.
I participate in this way.
I encourage people’s milestones and accomplishments. Why not?
And if they are doing things that interest me, I’ll subscribe. That’s how it’s supposed to work: willingly, and with excitement as to what will hit their channel next.
No shenanigans!
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Thanks for reading!
Hi, I’m John and I encourage people to work for themselves, and on themselves, every day to sleep better at night. I also hoard side hustles and look for ways to make them work together.
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