Don't worry, it's not that people like your content less than before.

YouTube announced that it would remove a large number of closed accounts to enhance its website metrics.

"We regularly validate if accounts on YouTube are real and legitimate, which is part of an ongoing process to make sure that our site metrics are free of spam, abuse, and closed accounts to keep YouTube a fair place for everyone," YouTube said in an official statement.

What Are Closed Accounts?

Good question! Closed accounts are those that were either closed by users, that is users who no longer wanted to have accounts on YouTube, or accounts that were closed by YouTube or Google because they violated account policies.

If you want to know if closed accounts were removed from your channel's subscriber count, you will need to check your YouTube analytics for 3 and 4 December 2019 (which were the dates for removing the closed accounts).

You can do this from you YouTube Studio:

YouTube Studio à YouTube Analytics à Select “See more” under the graph à Subscription source à Closed accounts.

Will Closed Accounts Affect Watch Time?

Since the accounts being taken down were originally closed, they should not affect a channel's watch time. Users will only notice a decline in the number of subscribers.

How Does This Update Affect My Channel?

While it will not impact watch time, subscriber numbers are important in a channel's monetization and for expanded features and options.

For example, YouTube stories are only available for channels with over 10,000 subscribers, whereas YouTube's live-stream tipping feature, Super Chat, is made available when a channel passes 1,000 subscribers.

A YouTube spokesperson told TechCrunch: “We’re always working to ensure that metrics on YouTube reflect legitimate user interest and regularly validate the legitimacy of accounts and actions on YouTube channels. We’ve recently identified and removed a number of subscribers that were closed accounts from our systems. Some creators will see their metrics drop as a result, and on average, impacted channels will see their subscriptions decrease by fewer than 15 subscribers.”

Not the First Time

This isn't the first time YouTube has decided to clean its plate when it comes to closed accounts. According to TechCrunch, the video-sharing platform conducted a similar purge in December 2018, and removed many closed accounts over the course of a two-day period.

Seems like it's becoming an end-of-year ritual for YouTube.

"According to social media posts from creators, the impacts of the purge seem to vary wildly by channel. Some only report losing a few subscribers, others say they lost thousands," TechCrunch reported.

Conclusion

While it seems some channels will be affected by the purge, the move does come to clean the slate and ensure that metrics are correct.

Channel operators will need to account for the subscriber decline in their monthly reports for December as well as their quarterly reports.

Having inflated metrics may be a good boost to a channel operator's ego, but overall it is not good for a brand. It's kind of like having fake followers, more or less. Having numbers that don't serve you or your business aren't worth having. They don’t benefit you and actually hurt your metrics.