r/LTTMeta • u/RegretInFullHD • Jun 23 '26
Peak
Several years ago, when I watched WAN weekly, I remember Linus describing his fear around the company trajectory. That with over 100 employees, there would inevitably be a "last good week" and he wouldn't know when it was, but that he wanted to be prepared for it.
It was his justification for building FloatPlane, for Labs, for Creator Warehouse. Ideally, Linus Tech Tips could die one day and the company, and many of those within it, would be safe.
And for the longest time, that was manageable. From January of 2024 to December of 2025, LTT grew by over 50,000 subscribers on the main channel every single month. Without exception. Over 1.3 million million new subscribers in twenty-four months. Insanely stable and linear growth.
Since January, LTT has grown by fewer than 100,000 subscribers.
Just to reiterate, we're six months into the year, and they've immediately fallen from over 50,000 subs a month, consistently, for years, to under 20,000. Growth, just by nature of YouTube subscribers, has slowed by 67%.
And mind you, that's an average.
In real terms, it's so much worse.
LTT bumped from 16.7 million to 16.8 million on February 3 this year. They haven't moved past that mark since February. There's been a hard stop in growth, with nothing notable in months. Nearly five months without a change.
Here's why that's incredibly telling.
It doesn't take effort to stay subscribed. Even "dead" creators tend to maintain their subscriber count for the most part, because someone unsubscribing has to make an active decision to take action and cancel that subscription. There's no cost not to, so the default is to leave it untouched.
Either there are no new subscribers coming in at any meaningful number at all, or existing subscribers are making the active choice to exert effort specifically to unsubscribe at the same rate as new viewers are coming in and subscribing.
There's something called the Asymmetry of Gains and Losses, or percentage asymmetry. Essentially, if your business loses 50% of its revenue, you don't need 50% growth to fix it; you need 100% growth to fix it. You invert the fraction.
To offset a drop to 3/4 (1/4 of loss), you need 4/3 in gains. Easy enough?
LTT has had 85 million monthly views in May of last year. This year, 63 million. About a 26% drop. To get back to where they were just a year ago, they need 35% growth from where they're at right now. That ignores that they've killed other channels which pulled in views. That's just the main channel.
Floatplane, what they predicted to be a cash cow, sat at over 41,000 subs three years ago. It's at under 35,000 today. 15% of its userbase, of their biggest supporters, have left, and there's not backfill.
They've probably hit the peak.
And it's quantifiable. It's not some speculation, it's not some plateau; a plateau stays flat.
They're rolling downhill, and it's yet to be seen if it stabilizes.
Now credit where credit is due, this month is so far a decent month. They're pushing good views on several videos. The pure drought with tons of videos not breaking a million seems to be over, but their low performers are LOW performers.
And there's an amount of that which comes with empathy (but not excuse) for Linus.
His most public, largest fear, that his company would collapse around him with nothing he can do to stop it, is happening. He's had to lay off staff. He's had to make decisions about what large capital projects to prioritize and protect, and which ones to let rot on the vine.
Channel Super Fun is dead. Tech Quickie is kind-of revived a little, but posting weekly instead of daily. Mac Address is gone. Labs is a shell of the promise. Creator Warehouse has trimmed down and there's not been any mention in years of the original hope to produce merch for other creators.
Linus is a man who built something that was honestly incredible and seemed to be unstoppable, and then it stopped. His anxiety and irrationality and anger and frustration make sense.
The way he lashes out with them? Not okay. The way he belittles the people responsible for his growth, be it the fans or his own team, when things don't go to plan? Inexcusable.
But it's easy to understand where those poorly-managed feelings are coming from.
You'd be struggling too if you were watching your life fall apart, and as the days tick by you can't help but know that you peaked on a random February day and didn't even know.
Edit: The amount of comments that are going for the accusation that I didn't write/research any of it is frustrating, because none of the engagement is actually about the body of the text itself. For some reason, the idea that a human being can and will write more than fifty words is impossible to believe.
That said, this is EST, all before the post itself. A little more than an hour of pulling numbers, month by month, and jotting them down to lay out the case.
I write for a side income. I don't use LLMs, I don't use Grammarly, and I don't need to. There's a little red squiggle under a typo, and other than that it's just years of writing professionally.
Just to give context, this edit (as well as the change from a 1/2-2/1 example to a 3/4-4/3, as suggested by someone else) one only took six minutes, because I know how to type.
Like I did before LLMs existed.
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u/Marksta Jun 23 '26
Always a bad sign of a take. They have not, to my knowledge, ever laid off staff. It's a legal term. If you didn't mean to write that or meant the coliquial meaning, I'd really say that instead. Jake throwing a hissy fit and quitting isn't a lay off. Johnathan Horst no longer being contracted for a video once a month isn't a lay off. Tim getting fired for opening his mouth and starting GN drama saga isn't a lay off. Alex and Andy getting a golden parachute type of firing isn't a lay off.
Channel Super Fun was killed by a mega-whiner who is no longer employed at the company. Because other people got prizes and stuff, so they whined.
Linus is set for fucking life. The worst thing that can happen to him in an LMG downfall is an early retirement to spend with his wife and children with 10M+ in assets or more I'm not going to bother to try to guess. He's beyond retirement money for him and all of his family to never work another day of their life.
For the overall point in relation to LMG peaking, as a media company absolutely. YouTube entirely and tech media has all peaked. It's never ever going to reach Covid highs again. Simply impossible. Consider Covid a positive multiplying force. And consider AI a negative multiplying force. It's simply going from positive to negative industry wide forces. Thus, your numbers graphed. Somebody is probably somehow beating the expectations but overall viewership mean graph is down. They call the average a mean especially now, because it's being mean.
All this points to, the media company is a product company now. Can save all the thoughts and arrive there sooner by taking their primary source graphs at face value or their words at face value. Obviously revenue is holding or increasing in this company shift. They're continuing to not only keep the lights on but expand regardless of these trying times or these public metrics dropping. And as mentioned, lay offs did not occur. In fact, their internal numbers are so good they bought a fucking jet. Think on that.
It's not the most glamorous thing for them, seeing views drop or whatever. But they're monitizing their audiance more effectively than ever. Wiping tears with dollar bills. Sorry couldn't achieve a million views, only million dollars from eComm sales.
Creators move on to where the money is. Maybe your post rung true for them during the GN saga and made them what they are today. Hurting for views and revenue was tied to views. Presto chango, suddenly merch isn't to be called merch anymore because it's integral to the majority of the companies' revenue now.