Hello, and welcome to 'Hank Green watches YouTube videos' - that's not actually what this is.

This is 'Hank Green figures out what happened on the most dramatic day of YouTube's history'...this year anyway.

On... what's the day? December 3rd? December 2nd-ish? YouTube launched a new channel design and some crazy things happened.

So we're gonna talk about those crazy things right now. [referring to the display] That's not what I wanted to do. 

First let's check out VidStatsX Stats X, which is the very useful tool for people like me who care a lot about YouTube, also, you know, as a guy who runs a YouTube conference, I have to keep my eye on what's going on on YouTube, and who is moving around, and I do honestly, legitimately care about what's going on.

So, an interesting thing happened yesterday, top sub gainers for  yesterday, excluding the launch of Ray William Johnson's animation channel, we have: LMFAO, Rihanna, Katy Perry, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Avril Lavigne, Eminem, Shakira - a lot of famous, like normal-famous people getting a lot of subscribers, and now, if we check out Rihanna, for example, we see here, a huge spike. So usually 5,000 subs a day, which is really great numbers... but then 23,000 and 51,000 subscribers. 51,000 subscribers is pretty unimaginable so there must be something going on there that is important.

And I looked around, and I found also Google had a similarly shaped spike, at least, though not at the same level, but a similarly shaped spike. 

So we have actually a lot of similar curves here, CollegeHumor's curve is quite the same, Machinima's  curve is very similar, Adele's curve is very similar, Skrillex's curve very similar - in the last two days of subscriber growth. So there's something going on that's affecting all of those people, fairly equally. 

Now the question is... what could that be? And also, why isn't it affecting Toby Turner in the same way? Why isn't it affecting Smosh in the same way? And why isn't it affecting Jenna Marbles in the same way?

All of these people have bumps, but not bumps of the same size. Interestingly, National Geographic - also a completely different kind of channel from Adele and Rihanna - but a very large and similarly shaped curve. 

So there's something that happened yesterday that encouraged that, and I was curious about what that was. So what I did was I created a fake, young, girl account - I wanna pause here because John's calling me...

...So I was talking to John, so I don't know what I was talking about just now. But basically, when you got to YouTube yesterday, you had a little walk through - [referring to the display] this is my 16-year old girl fake account - and one of the things they did was send you to a channels page and said "subscribe to 3 people". They didn't suggest you subscribe to three people, they basically told you to subscribe to three people so that you could continue on your path of the tutorial. 

[referring to the display] This page is pretty cool. I don't know who all of these people are - none of them got subscriber bumps - so I imagine that not everybody saw them.

But Sesame Street, The Ellen Show, Rihanna, Adele, these people got huge subscriber bumps because these people looked at this page and said: "What is an unoffensive thing that I like?"

So people subscribed to Google, people subscribed to LMFAO, people subscribed to Rihanna, and that's where these bumps came from. 

They were told to subscribe to three things, and these were the things on top. Interestingly, if you look at Rihanna's numbers, she got 50,000 subscribers yesterday, whereas Adele got 12,000 subscribers, and I think that's entirely because Adele - her people didn't put a little icon of her face there, and so no one knew that it was Adele, and that's really embarrassing, and I would fire her YouTube person - if she has one. 

And in general, I would just say to her record label: "You guys suck for not doing that." 

So that's where those giant subscriber bumps came from, and that, as far as I'm concerned, is fine, because when that tutorial thing goes away, you'll have - I think these people will still have big bumps.

It's important to note that this is an account that has no previous YouTube viewing history, it has no YouTube viewing history, it knows nothing. The only thing it knows about me is that I live in Missoula, Montana and I am a 16 year old girl.

So these are the things that which were suggested to me, which I mean I think it's kinda strange that some of these things were suggested but I'm not gonna try and second guess YouTube. 

Another cool thing is that on vlogstars - which you can't see, there's a tab in this category called vlogstars, Vlogbrothers is in there, so that has actually helped us.  

And then the next thing I'm gonna talk about, which is the top sub losses. Also, in addition to a giant boost in the subscription numbers of people like Adele and Beyoncé and stuff like that, there were huge drops in viewership.

What that is, basically, now it's much easier to unsubscribe. So I can look at my - see all of my subscriptions - here they are. I don't actually watch Google's videos so I'm gonna unsubscribe. And that's that. It's done! And I really kinda like that.

And so people who haven't been watching, for example Johnny Paula stopped making microwave videos, or TheStation, LikeTotallyAwesome don't make videos at all anymore, same with BreakingNYC and TeamNoble.

And then you have things like Shay Carl and Dave Days and meekakitty, and these are people who make great videos, and people love their videos, but they have so many subscribers that there's a really good chance that some people don't watch their videos anymore.

There's a million reasons why that could be, maybe they didn't mean to subscribe to them, maybe they subscribed to them in a 'sub box swap' and they just don't watch their videos.

The interesting thing to me, as one half of the Vlogbrothers, is that we didn't see that drop, and we actually got a slight increase.

Now it's interesting if you look at CollegeHumor, [referring to the display] that actually looks kinda similar to what the Vlogbrothers numbers look like. That curve is a little bit similar, and so this may be because if you are checking out stuff, it's possible that one of your suggested channels would be Vlogbrothers and [referring to the display] if you went through all of this and you went "I like vloggers" and you check out the Vlogbrothers and we actually got some subscriptions because of this. 

Now, it's important to note, that this number is not indicative of the number of subscriptions we got yesterday - it's the number of subscriptions we got minus the number of unsubscribers we got. So now we can log into the Vlogbrothers YouTube channel and find out something very interesting.

So when you're looking at these numbers and you're saying, "oh look, the Vlogbrothers did really well yesterday, they didn't lose subscribers like everybody else did", oh but did they?

[referring to the display] Oh so that's wrong. And... dammit.

So you log in in the Vlogbrothers - I had to log in so that I could actually change these things. [referring to the display] So here's our subscription overview [referring to the display] I am logged in - I don't want that - so here's our subscription overview for the last few days, we generated, you get like 300, 400, 500... and then we had a bump.  

571, almost 600, to 810, which was totally freaking awesome, and that's the net subscriber change. That is not the number of subscriptions we got. So compare that to subscribers gained, we actually gained 1,400 subscriptions yesterday, and I think that's yesterday. Yep, that's yesterday. 

So what we also got, was a lot of lost subscribers - we lost 604 subscribers. So, we did, like everybody else, have a huge bump in unsubscriptions, because people went through and were like: "Oh, I was subscribed to Ray William Johnson" - we were at one point in Ray William Johnson's sub box, and we got a ton of subscribers from that.

Most people probably don't watch their videos, and they're like "I don't need to be subscribed to those people". So, um, maybe - I'm looking at this list and there's probably several people that I don't watch on this list, or people who don't make videos anymore, and so I would just go through and be like "Unsubscribe, unsubscribe, unsubscribe."

And there you have my Vlogbrothers videos. You can also see what I've tacked, it's my first go-round for my untacking, and that was just me messing with it yesterday. 

So I'm not saying those are the people that I untack, and I support people in my subscription less, but obviously I do love all of those people. 

And look, they're recommending Frezned, they know me so well! 

So now you know. Vlogbrothers did not - my assumption is that no one was immune to that sub loss, but that we also got a bump because we were in some people's suggested videos that day.

[referring to the display] Here are the videos that they are suggesting to me, which are much better. This is Vlogbrothers and they have a viewing history, so they know. Like, I love Toby Turner, and so... why am I not subscribed to Tobuscus? Why am I not subscribed to Tobuscus? Also, Toby Turner and TobyGames. 

I don't know. That's weird, to me. And I'm not subscribed to pineappleboyfilms - that's dumb - or AlwaysWheezy? What the frick? That's just weird. So anyway.

I keep clicking on more and it's not showing me more, which is a little frustrating, but... now I'm just subscribing to videos. 

So thank you for watching this video, in which I tell you about this dramatic shake up, and why it actually wasn't that dramatic of a shake up.  

There's a... a cop car, just drove by my house. It's like nighttime, and it didn't have it's lights on. And I'm like: "Dude, you're a cop. You should probably turn your lights on." Unless you're hunting... for someone you don't want to know that you're a cop car was coming up. 

I don't know. So yes, [referring to the screen] what is this new comments? I didn't know this feature. It shows me the comments on Vlogbrothers videos. Well that's actually not super useful. 

But it is interesting to see that there are comments on lots of Vlogbrothers videos that we don't watch anymore. For example, this one is on Stock Adviser - that video I did about Britney Spears. Oh my goodness, I'm so ashamed of myself.

Anyway, you will not see me and I'll see you around next time. I probably won't be doing many more of these types of screen casts, but it was a big shake up - it was really interesting, and I wanted to talk about how, in fact, it wasn't that big of a deal.  

And so now you know. Goodbye.