Can a poker streamer get one million subscribers?

Is it feasible for a poker YouTuber to break into the mainstream like gamers in other areas do?

This week Doug Polk was awarded with the YouTube Silver Play Button, an accolade for achieving 100,000 subscribers (at the time of writing he actually has almost 150,000 but the plaques take a while to make). There are also accolades for getting to one million (Gold), 10 million (Diamond) and 50 million (Ruby).

I won’t claim to have heard about the YouTube Silver Play Button until this week, but as somebody who is getting excited about the potential for poker on the streaming site, it is very nice to see an individual player get one of their accolades. PokerStars already have over 300,000 subscribers, but Polk is the first individual to do so.

There are already lots of people with this particular award, but the next one, the Gold button for one million subscribers, puts you in an elite group of people. So can a poker streamer get to one million subscribers on YouTube?

New ground for the poker media

Not too long ago I would have said no, but I would also have said no to the idea of somebody getting to 100,000 subscribers as well. This is probably because I had my ‘old poker media’ hat on, and without giving away any specifics, I tend to know the traffic figures for most poker sites, book sales for poker books, distribution figures for magazines, and so on. Not many anything in poker content would get near 100,000 unique customers.

However, YouTube has really changed my perspective. Not only is somebody like Polk regularly getting over 100,000 views per video, many of his peers are doing great too. Parker Talbot, who I discussed this with, is also getting huge views for his channel and he is only really posting highlights of his Twitch streams.

I’ve spoken to a lot of YouTube and Twitch streamers and they all estimate that a sizeable portion of their audience is completely new to poker. I also discussed this last month, and I argued that as poker moves towards the world of gaming, potential new players can handle a bit more complexity than previous poker demographics. So it’s not unreasonable to think that Doug Polk’s hand analysis, combined with well produced videos, good humour and focussing on very high stakes pots, could be a hit with random people watching random YouTube videos.

The Matthew Effect

A channel like Polk’s actually could get close to a million subscribers, especially now it already has 150,000. This is an economic principle called ‘The Matthew Effect’ where success itself becomes a self perpetuating economic advantage. The name comes from Bible verse “For whoever has will be given more”. In terms of YouTube, the more subscribers somebody has increases their chances of accumulating even more subscribers, as more eyes, likes, comments and shares will make it more likely new people will discover them.

Polk or somebody like him will also benefit from everybody else talking about poker on YouTube. All the prominent YouTube guys have said the more people who join the party, the more views they get themselves, because it means they appear in more people’s ‘recommended videos’ suggestions.

It certainly doesn’t have to be Polk himself either, it’s worth noting that he only started his channel in June last year. A year is a short space of time and the next big star of poker YouTube could be waiting around the corner, ready to capitalise on the micro industry Polk has helped carve out.

I think if somebody within poker is going to create an account with one million subscribers, they certainly need to be appealing beyond poker, most likely by being funny and/or having a cool globetrotting lifestyle. They also almost certainly need to be a talented player playing at stakes that draw attention. Most likely they would need some help from a renewed interest in poker from a particularly entertaining story in the game like another John Hesp, or an entertaining WSOP, or some Dan Bilzerian craziness.

A lot of obscure games and topics have created YouTubers with a million or more followers, and poker has that Ace up its sleeve in that it promises the potential to win big money, which something like MineCraft does not. For a poker streamer to get one million subscribers probably needs a perfect storm of a lot of factors, but these are very early days for poker on YouTube, and it certainly seems doable.

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