Having a lot of friends on Facebook and a lot of friends (aka followers) on Twitter is a good thing when you are trying to get famous online.  You need people to see what you’re doing and to help spread it around by sharing it to their friends and followers as well. So naturally it must be important to have a lot of friends on YouTube, right?  No, not really.

I currently have over 950 friends on YouTube and I have to say that it hasn’t really helped me very much.  Unlike with Facebook and Twitter, you can’t easily share things with your friends on YouTube. What YouTube did was essentially split followers into two parts - subscribers and friends.  The number of YouTube subscribers that you have definitely matters.  Having more subscribers is directly related to having more views.  Having more friends is not.  And that’s because when you’re subscribed to someone’s YouTube channel you automatically see their new videos when you go to the homepage of YouTube.  But when you’re a friend with someone on YouTube you don’t get any notifications unless they specifically send you a message, and they don’t make it easy to do that to large groups of people.

In order to send a message to your YouTube friends, you have to go through and click on them one by one and then there’s a maximum of about 25 that you can send a message to at once.  The one time I tried to send a video to all of my YouTube friends was with Father Lover and it took me over an hour to send it out to everyone.  Not that’s it’s any easier to send messages to large groups of friends or followers on Facebook or Twitter, but posting something in your status or tweeting is, which would sort of be the equivalent of how your YouTube subscribers receive notification of your new videos.

Here’s today’s vlog about this topic:

What do you think? Do you have a lot of friends on YouTube?  Do you think it matters?

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YouTube Comment of the Day:

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