YouTube will now be showing abbreviated YouTube subscriber counts publicly instead of the full count.
For instance, at some places you'd see a channel's subscriber count as 133,017 and some places you would see them as 133k, from now on you'll only see the abbreviated count like 133k at all places.
The change would be made across YouTube desktop and mobile apps. The platfrom says the move made is to maintain consistency all across.
The changed subscriber count will begin showing in August 2019 across all public YouTube surfaces. Third parties that use YouTube’s API Services will also access the same public facing counts you see on YouTube. Creators will still be able to see their exact number of subscribers in YouTube Studio.
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For channels with fewer than 1,000 subscribers, the exact (non-abbreviated) subscriber count will still be shown. Once the channel passes the 1000 subscriber milestone, we will begin to abbreviate your public subscriber numbers on a sliding scale.
Here are a few examples:
If a channel has 4,227 subscribers, the public subscriber count will read “4.2k” until the channel reaches 4,300.
If a channel has 133,017 subscribers, the public subscriber count will read “133K” until the channel reaches 134,000.
If a channel has 51,389,232, the public subscriber count will read “51M” until the channel reaches 52,000,000.
YouTube shared an early heads-up about it and will share more specifics when the August 2019 date comes closer.