Calls to actions, "like and subscribe", are (sadly) necessary
However much I hate them, you can't avoid them
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This week’s short-ish post is inspired by one of those “offhand posts that reminds me that I have opinions about something.” It’s also a small example of how I guesstimate my way through population problems to figure out if a project is “worth doing” based on how many people it affects.
Also, by the time you’re reading this, I’m very likely already out of a minor outpatient procedure. I’m writing this while waiting for the insanely early “report to the OR” time. So, hah, not even minor surgery will stop this ongoing 3-year post streak.
Vicki happened to post this on Bluesky a couple of days ago, that “If your content is good you don’t need to remind people to lie and subscribe.”
Now, the overall sentiment is probably one we can all get behind. As viewers of content on YouTube and other platforms, we’re all pretty damn tired of creators constantly telling viewers to like and subscribe their videos and channels. After all, as a independent human in full control of my mental faculties, I’ll press buttons when I want to and not because someone else tells me to! And give me those 30 seconds back!
But at the same time, I’ve worked on a LOT of “we need to get a user to take an action” projects over my career. These projects ranged from “finish buying this widget you put in the cart” to “we’re literally giving away free stuff, get it here”. Other times, we just wanted users to click on a button to complete a task that they wanted to complete in the first place. None of those campaigns had anywhere near a 100% success rate. In many instances, we’d be happy to see 10-20% success rate getting people to do what we want. For other types of campaigns that tend to be more “marketing-y”, single digit success rates are expected.
At this point, I’m convinced that it’s impossible to convince 100% of users to do something as simple as clicking a giant button on a web page. Someone will inevitably get distracted, have a technical issue, or otherwise find a way to drop out. This is true even if the button does something good like release a tasty treat from a box in the room or something. The notion that a product will win in the marketplace simply on the merits alone is completely disconnected from reality.
Can’t tech our way out of human problems
At the end of the day, getting humans to do something is not 100% a technological problem. Even if we remove ALL the technical barriers and just present with the users with one magical button on an otherwise empty box that gives them exactly what they want when pressed, we would still have people who don’t press the button for all sorts of very human reasons. I’d bet that we’d even get people who press the button, get what they “want”, but somehow complain that they didn’t actually get what they wanted because the machine misinterpreted their wishes.
Am I a bit jaded about this? Why, yes.
Getting humans to do take some kind of action is never guaranteed, let alone if you don’t even tell them to take the action. People have been banging up against different forms of this problem for ages with little progress.
Technical writers struggle to help users understand which buttons to press to use a tool. Marketing folk struggle to convince people their product will solve the user’s problems. Space designers struggle to create navigation aids so people don’t get lost in buildings. Programmers want people to just click the correct button to “do the thing” and users can’t see the button despite it being giant and blinking. Very smart people in all these fields and more have leveraged and invented technological solutions to help with the problem, and no one has completely solved it with technology because humans are unsolvable in that way.
So, while it pains and annoys me to admit this, we live in a world where usually no one’s looking to promote your stuff if you don’t at least do it yourself. “Like and subscribe!” aren’t going anywhere.
Let’s play with some hypothetical “numbers” to size up the situation.
In the example of telling viewers to like and subscribe to a video, imagine there’s some set of people who like the video on its merits. Some percentage of those people will of be the sort who actually use the subscribe feature on YouTube at all — many likely never use the feature. Some subset of these potential subscribers will go and subscribe on their own without any prompting.
How good the content actually is sets how big the “market” of potential subscribers is. No amount of yelling at users to subscribe on a really bad video that has no appeal will convince people to do so. I’d guess it has the opposite effect due to how annoying it is. So a call to subscribe only serves to do two small things: 1) tell anyone who’s never used the subscription feature before that it exists, and 2) remind anyone who normally would have subscribed but are distracted to do so. Both these situations are tiny groups of people. Everyone else would have either subscribed or moved on without any prompting at all.
So the marginal gain for all this must be pretty small because they’re both rare events. Given the proportions of populations that use the feature, I’d guess it’s on the order of single digits of people for every couple thousand viewers. But given that I don’t think the number of subscribers per video is all that high for typical content anyways, it might be enough of a boost on a percentage basis.
Clearly, whatever the numbers actually are, it seems to do something. The number of large creators who engage in this form of self-promotion is almost 100%. These people aren’t stupid and can’t be unaware that these things are an irritation to us. The benefits to them must outweigh whatever costs exists. The fact that everyone else then imitates the leaders of the pack, even for low quality content, just serves to make every viewer’s collective lives just that much more miserable.
But at the end of the day all this math hinges upon the critical assumption that the content itself is good. In trying to juice fractions of a percent out of a metric, the base number has to be large. So a better phrasing of Vicki’s post is probably this:
Unless your content is good, there’s no point in reminding people to like or subscribe
There’s very little magic algorithm juice that benefits me from encouraging people to subscribe to my newsletter aside from having slightly more readership down the line. If I spammed [Subscribe] buttons all over my newsletter posts (which I’ll do for the fun of it at the end of the post just to see how bad it looks), it’ll probably just annoy all of you readers out there. If you readers are anything like me, you’ll feel zero hesitation in unsubscribing the moment you think “Oop, Randy’s drunk the influencer kool-aid. Time to bail before it gets dumber.”
But there’s tons of room between nothing and spamming. And it’s one I admittedly don’t spend enough time toying with to see what works and what doesn’t. So hey, while you’re reading this and maybe sharing it out to some data friends, like and subscribe?
Ew it felt dirty just entering all that.
I didn’t even know I had access to all these sorts of buttons.
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About this newsletter
I’m Randy Au, Quantitative UX researcher, former data analyst, and general-purpose data and tech nerd. Counting Stuff is a weekly newsletter about the less-than-sexy aspects of data science, UX research and tech. With some excursions into other fun topics.
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Thanks to the well-wishes from everyone. I'm fine and safely home. If the recovery keeps up, I'll probably have another post in time for Tuesday just thanks to sheer boredom =D
"Toot a horn" lmao