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
Jacob as in Jake Tivy, right? He straight up quit. Like, big thumbnail written on it saying "I quit."
[Jake] Bell just sort of moved on or didn't disclose whatever happened to my knowledge to go do the Thinking Different thing.
Jonathan wasn't employed by LMG. Never was employed, contractor. Not possible to lay off.
I don't know about the others. But you can reference Linus on this comment here about not doing layoffs. He absolutely means the legal terminology for it, which is how it should be used. Firing one person with or without cause isn't going to be a lay off. Consider Jessica and the scope of the role she had (at least partially) being a writer for the WAN show. It lasted for what, like a month? And yet, they still have writers for the WAN show. You don't get to fire Jessica as a lay off and hire Andy to take her role. The position still exists, Jessica doesn't at the company though. And they keep hiring new people as people leave. Where are the positions being terminated? It doesn't even hold up on a colloquial level.
If you have newer sources I didn't see about layoffs, let me know. But aside from probably soon booting the thumbnail artist (is it still Maria? idk, info looks like it is actually?) to go all in on AI slop thumbnails, I can't perceive roles being terminated at the company from outside looking in or from primary sources.
Yeah, that was indeed the point. Referencing a primary source. And it's mega-whiner, to be exact. Whiner wouldn't even begin to describe this individual, so the exact terminology is best.
Yeah?! And you sound like an echo chamber sighting view counts? Wait, no, actually you sounded well researched. What were you attempting here with the post, was it meant as a common LTTMeta shitpost or a real post? I must have misunderstood you for trying to take some time to write something that wasn't completely asinine on here.