Linus Tech Tips YouTube views plummet as controversy leads to less uploads

Linus Tech Tips has committed to higher-quality videos and a workflow that allows their employees more time to take breaks and ensure quality, but that quality has come at the cost of frequent uploads and overall viewership.

Maintaining a YouTube empire isn’t an easy thing. Content creators have it hard enough with having to maintain consistent uploads, hire editors for their channels, livestreaming, and other things. YouTube’s biggest creators often have entire teams behind them.

Meanwhile, Linus Tech Tips has over 200 employees who work across multiple YouTube channels, merch operations, Floatplane content, and many other things. Linus’ channel is a titan even among YouTube’s giants, and keeping all of those people employed costs a lot of money.

However, churning out that much content took its toll on employees and showed in the final result with some quality errors pointed out by Gamers Nexus amongst others. Linus and those running the LTT empire committed to quality, but it’s becoming clear why they were “chasing the algorithm”.

Linus Tech Tips loses significant view count since YouTube controversy

Though the controversy about LTT’s video quality caused the channel to bleed over 200k subscribers and put them on a week-long hiatus, the new videos for the channel have been fairly well received. And, though uploads come often, they aren’t daily like they used to be on the main Linus Tech Tips channel.

That viewership difference has really shown in the before and after comparison.

Socialblade stats show a massive drop in monthly viewership, a drop that places his viewership for September far below previous months on the channel. And, since Linus Tech Tips started uploading regularly on August 29, these stats aren’t affected by the week-long hiatus for the channel.

So far in September, Linus has around 57 million views in comparison to August’s 93 million.

It’s important to keep in mind that part of this drop is that September hasn’t wrapped up quite yet. Also, Linus isn’t uploading as many videos as before. Yet, even with all that in mind, his viewership is still down drastically.

Here’s a sampling of Linus Tech Tips videos from late July/early August. Even his lowest viewership video in here has 1.2 million views, and though many of Linus’ main channel videos are fairly evergreen and tend to accumulate viewership over a longer period of time than some other channels, the comparison is still a shocking one.

Many of his more recent videos haven’t quite broken the million-view mark and those that have been are hovering right above it. That said, his recent video about buying everything in a Mom & Pop store is doing much better than a lot of his more recent content. It has also been incredibly well-received by the community.

Fortunately for fans of the channel, Linus has many other streams of income for the channel that are far more consistent than YouTube ad revenue. For example, his massive merch storefront and Floatplane exclusive content. That said, declining viewership is never a great sign.

Linus’ viewers have become empathetic with the reasoning behind Linus trying to hit daily uploads and gunning for the algorithm, as many of his viewers have noticed this decline. It remains to be seen whether or not Linus can right the ship and get back to (or even top) the way his videos performed before controversy struck.