Follower Count Doesn't Count
Here's why and what to focus on instead. To save your time and your mental health.
🤩 Hey! I’m Alberto. With my newsletter I want to help you reach your full potential and live your ideal life with a content-based business. I’ve been doing this since 2010.
I talk about productivity, automation, strategy and mindset.
It’s embarrassing, but I must admit I’m jealous of creators with large followings. They look like they made it, right?
But it’s just my lizard brain. After 13+ years of running content-based businesses, I know the follower count means almost nothing. Focusing on your own numbers or those of others is not only a waste of time. It also harms your well-being.
In this article I want to show you why that’s true, and numbers to focus on instead. It will help you invest your efforts in the right direction and prevent you from idolizing the wrong creators.
No one unfollows
I’m an avid YouTube user. When the algorithm surfaces a video from a new creator, I think "Let’s subscribe so I don’t miss anything."
Subscribing or following on most platforms doesn’t cost anything.
So, I’m subscribed to dozens of creators whose videos I never watched. Except for that first one promoted by the algorithm.
Once in a while, I consider cleaning up my following list and unsubscribe from those creators. But I never do it. There are much better ways to spend my time. And, to be honest, the algorithm makes it easy for me to ignore them.
Every follower shares this behavior. What’s the percentage of creators you unfollowed?
This means that the follower number is always growing. After showing up consistently for a few years, it’s relatively easy to have thousands, dozens of thousands of followers.
But very few of those followers actually see your content regularly.
Algorithms (almost) ignore followers
I am or I’ve been active on many platforms: YouTube, Medium, X, Substack Notes. And, as a content entrepreneur, I keep studying also the other platforms.
All their algorithms have one thing in common: they determine your reach based on the individual pieces of content, not on the followers.
Let me explain with an example. My friend Andrea has 175000 subscribers on YouTube. You would expect every new video he publishes would receive at least dozens of thousands of views (unless it’s totally out of topic, of course).
His baseline views are instead faaar less exciting. Look at this recent screenshot:
In our conversations, he confirmed he can count on about 2-3000 views per video from his followers. Numbers go higher only when the topic is more attractive or thanks to search traffic in the long term. In both cases, the bulk of the extra views don’t come from his subscribers.
See for example the video about Claude AI above. It’s doing better than the others because AI is the trendiest topic at the moment.
Andrea is not an exception. Study the numbers of any creator (views, likes, comments). You’ll see that most of his content reaches a tiny fraction of her following. Only some exceptions do very well.
This is because all algorithms work similarly. Every time you publish a new piece of content:
they show it to a small subset of your followers,
if it gets good engagement, they show it to more people that might be interested,
they keep showing it to new people until the response stays strong.
Looking at the first step above, you may say that your following actually matters. The algorithms draw the initial viewers from it.
It matters just a little. When you’re starting out, it’s sometimes too small for the algorithm to learn something from it. When you’re established, your best posts always receive most of their views from non-followers.
Ridiculous growth (literally)
There’s another way algorithms deceive you. Look at this screenshot shared by Derek Hughes, a very successful author on Medium.com:
Most people seeing this focus on October and November: what an awesome growth! Indeed.
But since then, monthly growth has halved. Why? Did Derek publish half the articles? Did he change niche? Did his writing quality plummet?
No, no, and no.
At a far smaller scale, the same thing happened to me. I investigated and found that other writers experienced the same phenomenon. Suddenly, the algorithm recommended them a lot more than in the past. So, for a couple of months, they earned lots of followers. But the “boost” disappeared as abruptly and inexplicably as it came.
What should you conclude when something like this happens: did you get more followers than you deserved for that short amount of time, or is the algorithm now throttling your growth?
The only useful thing about follower count
Unfortunately, humans are addicted to status signals. Follower count is one of them. Users of all platforms evaluate creators at a glance based on that number.
Having more followers may increase your authority and help you get even more followers. A conundrum, right?
I don’t think so. If you give too much importance to this metric, you put yourself at the whim of uncontrollable and sometimes stupid algorithms. Not the best for your mental health.
Similarly, spending time learning and implementing hacks and tricks to increase your follower count is a waste of time. And it’s so empty.
It’s more constructive, and healthier, to focus on other metrics, other activities that bring real growth. And incidentally, also attract more followers.
What to focus on instead
Instead of your follower count, focus on:
views,
engagement,
conversions.
Design a strategy and create content that improve these metrics. This means mainly writing helpful content that fulfills the needs of your audience, engaging with other creators, and offering valuable products and services. You can read more about it in this article:
Your audience will appreciate and organically follow you. And it’ll be a more wholesome way to use your time.
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Very wise words
Followers are just a social vanity metric
No correlation with revenue whatsoever
It goes back to the human desire of “being approved”
You don’t need approval from an army of anons on the internet
It’s a conundrum. People do judge based on number of followers,on the other hand, number of follows don’t matter, but likes and comments and eventually those turned into clients.