YouTube Views & Subscribers Stats

Introduction
Have you ever wondered about the relationship between the amount of new subscribers and the total view count on FAH’s YouTube channel? Would you like to make an educated guess about what the next milestone will be on their YouTube channel? You might find some answers in this article.

Research Questions
Directly after its premiere up until a couple of hours afterwards, a sketch will normally reach between NUMBER and NUMBER views on YouTube. We can think of these results as the opening night at the box office. We will call this average the premiere views.

How many views does a sketch have after one week or one month? These results can be called (respectively) medium-term and long-term views for new sketches. Sketches over half a year old can be grouped together as archive sketches (since this pool of sketches is also used to pick a sketch for the weekly Monday FAHrchive posts on Facebook by Arms).

Is there a correlation between premiere views and long-term views?

Foil Arms and Hog reached two huge milestones on their YouTube channel in the past couple of months (time of writing: April 2021):
 * In the first week of October 2020 they passed the 100 million video views mark;
 * In January 2021 they reached 500K subscribers.

Methods & Analysis
The data was collected every week approximately 12 hours before FAH premieres the new sketch on Thursday morning (8am Irish time). The starting point for the data collection was September 2020.



Caveat: Arms sometimes does a channel purge where he'll delete outdated sketches (more information on the YouTube Category page). Views and likes for any upload will be removed from the channel after this video is deleted or set to private.

Discussion
(here)

From September to December 2020, an average of 2000 viewers pushed that subscribe button. If a sketch goes viral, this average increases. Since September 2020, the sketch with the most views is Countries Guess Who They Are. The increase in subscribers to FAH’s YouTube channel was 5K or 6K per week for the three weeks following that sketch. One of these videos was The Decades Throw a Party. The House Party Collection is one of FAH's most watched sketch series.

Approximately 25% of the increase in total view count in one week's time can be attributed to sketches posted recently (in the previous couple of months). The other 75% of views are for archive sketches.

An even bigger increase is visible in the total amount of views for their entire YouTube channel. In the autumn of 2020, they gained an average of 600K new views per week. For the first couple of weeks in 2021 this was around 1.4M per week, so more than double.

We can conclude that many new FAHns watched a lot of older FAH videos during these weeks. My explanation is that during the Christmas holidays people have spread the word and their love of this sketch comedy group they've just discovered. During the weeks that followed, those new FAHns had to catch up and binge watched a long list of (older) sketches, resulting in higher overall viewing numbers for the FAH YouTube channel.

Conclusion
(here)

Foil Arms & Hog started to actively use their YouTube channel and post videos more regularly since January 2012. We can assume their channel had at most only a few thousand subscribers at that point. In August 2017 they reached the milestone of 100K subscribers. Fewer than 3.5 years later, they reached 500K. My prediction is that they will double this amount at the end of summer 2022.