How Can You See Who Your Subscribers Are on YouTube

Discover how to see your YouTube subscribers and use analytics to understand your audience and grow your channel.

At Lillian Purge, we specialise in Local SEO Services and explain how can you see who your subscribers are on youtube so you can understand your audience and engage more meaningfully.

Subscribers are your most loyal audience members. They’re the people who actively want to see more of your content and are more likely to engage with your videos by liking, commenting, and sharing.

By learning who your subscribers are, you can identify what kind of content they prefer, which demographics you appeal to, and how your channel is growing over time. This helps refine your strategy, attract similar viewers, and increase watch time and visibility.

How YouTube Displays Subscriber Information

YouTube gives you access to subscriber information through YouTube Studio, the platform’s built-in analytics dashboard. However, due to privacy settings, you can only see subscribers who have chosen to make their subscriptions public.

When users subscribe to a channel, they have the option to keep their subscriptions private. If they do, their names won’t appear on your subscriber list. You’ll still see the total subscriber count, but not every individual subscriber.

How to See Who Your Subscribers Are on YouTube

Here’s how to check your subscriber list step by step:

  1. Log in to YouTube Studio
    Go to studio.youtube.com and sign in with your YouTube account.

  2. Go to the Dashboard
    Once inside YouTube Studio, look at the left-hand menu and click on “Dashboard.”

  3. Find the Subscribers Section
    On the Dashboard, scroll down until you see a box titled “Recent Subscribers.” This section shows a list of the most recent people who have publicly subscribed to your channel.

  4. Click “See All”
    Below the “Recent Subscribers” box, you’ll see a link that says “See all.” Click this to view a full list of your visible subscribers.

  5. Filter or Sort the List
    You can sort your subscribers by “Most recent” or “Most popular” (based on their subscriber count). This helps you understand who your top or most influential followers might be.

This list will only show subscribers who have public subscriptions and have been active within the past 28 days, though older subscribers can still appear if they haven’t changed their privacy settings.

What Information You Can See About Your Subscribers

For each visible subscriber, YouTube shows:

  • Their channel name and profile picture.

  • The date they subscribed to your channel.

  • Their own subscriber count (if they have a public channel).

This gives you insight into the types of viewers who are engaging with your content. If other creators or influencers are subscribing to your channel, that may indicate growing authority within your niche.

How to View Overall Subscriber Analytics

While YouTube limits visibility into individual subscriber details, it provides extensive analytics about your audience as a whole.

To access this information:

  1. In YouTube Studio, click “Analytics” in the left-hand menu.

  2. Select the “Audience” tab.

Here, you’ll find data such as:

  • Total subscribers gained and lost over time.

  • Returning vs new viewers.

  • Geographic location of your audience.

  • Age, gender, and device breakdown.

  • The time your subscribers are most active.

This data helps you tailor your content strategy based on who watches your videos and when they’re online.

Understanding Subscriber Privacy Settings

As mentioned earlier, you can only see subscribers who have chosen to make their subscriptions public. By default, YouTube keeps subscriptions private, so many viewers don’t appear on creator lists.

To give you a clearer perspective, studies suggest that only around 10 to 20 percent of subscribers keep their subscriptions public. That means the number of visible subscribers is only a small portion of your total audience.

How to Encourage Subscribers to Stay Public

While you can’t control a user’s privacy settings, you can encourage engagement in ways that increase public visibility:

  • Remind viewers to subscribe and turn on notifications at the end of your videos.

  • Build a strong sense of community so subscribers feel proud to be associated with your channel.

  • Give shoutouts to public subscribers or thank them by name in your videos or comments.

When subscribers see this type of interaction, it can motivate others to make their subscriptions public so they can be recognised too.

How to Track Subscriber Growth Over Time

Monitoring how your subscriber count changes helps you understand the impact of your content strategy.

In YouTube Studio:

  1. Click “Analytics.”

  2. Under the “Overview” tab, find the “Subscribers” section.

  3. Use the date range tool to compare subscriber growth over weeks, months, or custom periods.

This lets you see how specific videos or campaigns influence your growth. For example, if a tutorial or trending topic video brings in more subscribers, you can focus on creating similar content.

What to Do with Subscriber Insights

Once you know more about your subscribers, use that data to improve your content and engagement strategy:

  • Create targeted content: Focus on the topics and formats your audience prefers.

  • Adjust posting times: Upload videos when your subscribers are most active.

  • Engage with your audience: Respond to comments, run polls, and ask questions to build relationships.

  • Collaborate with similar creators: If other YouTubers in your niche follow you, collaborations can expand your audience.

  • Analyse retention: Use audience retention reports to see which parts of your videos hold attention.

Using this information helps you make more data-driven decisions that grow your channel sustainably.

Common Mistakes When Reviewing Subscribers

  1. Focusing only on subscriber numbers – Growth matters, but engagement and watch time are better indicators of success.

  2. Ignoring analytics – Without reviewing metrics, it’s easy to misjudge what content drives results.

  3. Expecting to see all subscribers – Many viewers keep subscriptions private, so the visible list doesn’t reflect your total audience.

  4. Neglecting engagement – Subscriber counts are meaningless if your audience isn’t interacting with your videos.

Avoiding these mistakes helps you get a more realistic and actionable understanding of your subscriber base.

Final Thoughts

Seeing who your subscribers are on YouTube provides valuable insight into the audience behind your channel’s growth. While privacy settings mean you can’t see every subscriber, YouTube Studio offers plenty of tools to understand your audience’s preferences, behaviours, and engagement patterns.

By combining this knowledge with consistent content creation and interaction, you can strengthen relationships with your viewers and attract even more subscribers.

At Lillian Purge, we help creators and businesses build stronger online visibility by aligning video content, SEO, and audience strategy for lasting results.

We have also written in depth articles on how can you block a youtube channel and how do i logout of youtube as well as our YouTube Hub to give you further guidance.