A common frustration among YouTube creators and viewers alike is that YouTube subscriptions are broken. That is, subscribers don’t get a creator’s new video in their subscription feed and thus never watch the video. Why does that happen and what can creators and viewers do to fix it? That’s the question we address here: how to fix your broken subscription box.

Any of you guys who are YouTube creators have probably experienced the frustration of hearing premium subscribers, “Hey, your videos. They’re not showing up in my subscription feed. I didn’t realize you were publishing new videos. I’m not getting notified of your new videos.”

Well, why is that happening? Let’s talk about three possible reasons why they might not get your videos and what you can do about it.

Confusing Subscription Feed with What To Watch Feed

One of the biggest reasons why sometimes your subscribers aren’t getting your videos is because they are confusing their subscription feed with their What To Watch feed. And I know for people like us who are active creators here on YouTube, it sounds crazy that anyone can confuse or mix up those two tabs on YouTube. But a lot of newer people who are watching videos, or newer to YouTube, they don’t know the difference between those. And so it is very possible for sometimes those people to go to their What To Watch tab instead of their Subscriptions tab and then wonder why your videos aren’t showing up.

And for those of you who don’t know, the What To Watch tab just shows you recommendations that YouTube thinks you would be interested in based on your past viewing history and the kinds of videos that you are watching and engaging with regularly. In order to see all the videos from channels that you’re subscribed to in reverse chronological order, you have to go to My Subscriptions and you can see all those there.

May Not Be Logged into YouTube

Problem number two is that your subscribers might actually be watching your videos but they’re not logged into YouTube when doing so. And so that when they do go to their What To Watch feed, your videos aren’t showing up there because, as far as YouTube is concerned, they weren’t tracking them because they weren’t logged in.

One little tip for you guys as creators is to make sure you are posting new videos to your channel regularly to give subscribers more and more opportunities to interact and engage with your content, thus driving your videos– more likely– to their What To Watch feed, then displaying your videos more prominently to them in more places. Because the more they interact with your channel, the more they are sending engagement signals back YouTube. Because the more they interact with your channel, the more engagement levels they send back to Google about your content.

Safety Mode Enabled

And number three, sometimes your viewers might have the Safety Mode enabled on their YouTube account, which filters out any video that potentially isn’t, like, acceptable for a two and three year-old. Seriously, like, the moderation filters on Safety Mode on YouTube are crazy strict.

To give you an example, almost half of all the videos I publish here on Video Creators were flagged and unavailable to people browsing YouTube in Safety Mode up until just like a month or so ago because I’ve been working with YouTube actively to fix this bug in their system. Because my videos here, they’re obviously clean. I don’t swear. There’s no profanity, there’s no nudity, there’s no drug references, there’s no racism– anything like that.

These videos are completely clean and yet anyone who had Safety Mode enabled on their account would not see, like, almost half of my videos in search, in related videos, in their subscription feed. It would just be like my videos didn’t even exist. They couldn’t even see the thumbnail of my videos. Everything’s been blocked.

So that could very well be a reason why some of your viewers are not getting all of your videos as well. I would love to hear from you guys though in the comments below– what other things have you experienced that seem to indicate to you maybe this is this problem. Maybe this is why my subscribers aren’t getting all my videos. Or maybe there’s other bugs or issues or problems with the subscription system that you have seen.

And do know that YouTube is working on a complete overhaul of their subscription system which is supposed to roll out sometime in 2015. Maybe then all these problems will go away, but we’ll have to wait and see.

If you want to get more YouTube subscribers and learn better how to craft a YouTube channel that’s designed to get viewers, to convert them into subscribers, and then to convert those subscribers into fans and then into a loyal, hardcore community, I have an ebook. It’s called “30 Days to a Better YouTube Channel” that will teach you how to do exactly that. Each day in the book contains a teaching, something you need to know. Then it contains a task, something that you’re going to do right then on your channel. And then it also includes further resources if you want to really dive deep into that day’s lesson and topic that we’re talking about.

And at the end of those 30 days, you will have a channel that is highly optimized to attract viewers and convert them into subscribers and to really start growing your channel overall. It’s awesome. It’s worked for tons and tons of people, so check it out. Link below or annotation or card around here somewhere if you want to go and check it out.