Please Subscribe to Our Channel

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

You've heard it a thousand times. You're watching a video on YouTube and suddenly they ask you "and please subscribe to our channel", or maybe they tell you where their subscribe button is located since you could never hope to find it on your own.

This trope includes authors asking for you to vote for or donate to them. Or any other time that authors are giving you free content, but then they expect something in return. Whether it's your promise to come back, your vote that their product is indeed awesome, or your hard-earned lucre.

This isn't limited to YouTube. Many magazines, for instance, have full-page ads near the front begging you to subscribe if you haven't already, or subscription cards that fall out as soon as you pick up the periodical. Premium TV channels tend to have ads asking the viewers to renew their subscription.

Not to be confused with Please Subscribe, which is a documentary of various YouTube celebrities of the mid-to-late 2000s, including David Choi, Daxflame, Happyslip and Tay Zonday.

Examples of Please Subscribe to Our Channel include:

Examples of Please Subscribe

  • Is It a Good Idea to Microwave This?: In their more recent[when?] episodes, each member of the cast asks you to subscribe, not to the channel you're watching, but to their personal YouTube channels instead.
  • From Household Hackers we get such gems as, "After we get through today's tip, you'll never again have to wander aimlessly from video to video begging for subscribers like the neglected latch-key child you are." Subtle.
  • Every episode of Mr. Deity since the third season ends with a sketch in which Brian Dalton (sometimes in character) encourages viewers to donate and/or subscribe. In some cases these have been longer than the episode itself.
  • Mike Mozart does this at the end of every Jeepers Media video.
  • Pandora internet radio occasionally shows advertisements for Pandora One, their ad-free subscription version.
  • One Potter Puppet Pals video ends with Harry making this request of the audience, after which a cut back shows Hermione and Ron standing to the side.

'Hermione: "OK, Harry, we will do those things you just told us to do."
Ron: "Subscribe to wha-?"
Hermione: "Shhh!"

  • Dormtainment usually has annotations that say please subscribe, and some of the earlier videos even had them asking producers to consider them for a TV show.
  • Lindsey Stirling usually has a Stinger on her videos where she addresses the viewers and among other things asks them to subscribe to her channel.


Examples of Please Vote

  • YouTube hosts contests, some of which use the thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons as a form of voting to determine who wins.
  • Webcomics with vote incentives, usually a sketch or preview, to encourage people to vote for them on sites like Buzzcomix or TopWebComics: Evil Diva, Earthsong, Slightly Damned, Zap!, Pebble Version, The B Movie Comic, The Zombie Hunters, The Meek, Not a Villain and The Challenges of Zona.
    • The Order of the Stick made some for Buzzcomix in its very earliest days, which you can now see here.
    • Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal used to offer an early look at tomorrow's comic, and a one-panel extra that showed what happened after the end of the current comic if you voted for the site. The former was phased out, and the latter was changed so that you only had to hover your mouse over a red button to access, although it's still often referred to as the "votey comic" anyway.
  • The LittleBigPlanet comment function is never used to comment on the relevant level, but instead consists entirely of people begging you to play and heart their levels. This tendency was parodied in the Metal Gear Solid level pack, where Liquid Ocelot's evil plan was to flood LBP with generic levels encouraging people to heart him so he can become the most popular player.
  • "Please rate this app" is used in so many iPhone applications (apps) that it's become a Stock Phrase.
  • Many webcomics have links to Comicracy, where members vote and comment on one another's comics.


Examples of Please Donate

  • Goblins Life Through Their Eyes offers incentive comics involving a goblin named Tempts Fate in a "please donate or he'll die" donation scheme.
  • Fred Gallagher of Megatokyo takes pride in having averted this trope even during the hard times when he was paying for the bandwith out of pocket.
    • ...With the money he probably made from merchandising.
  • Blind Ferret Enterprises, the business developed for producing Least I Could Do and Looking for Group, founder Ryan Sohmer is viciously against this. When ever he comments about webcomics in general or tries to give advice to people wanting to make webcomics, this is one of the first 'don'ts' on his list, right after 'fail to update when you promise to'.
    • Ironically enough, he started a "Kickstarts" (a donation page) in order to gather 50.000 u$s for the Least I Could Do animated series. Since he posted it on the Least I Could Do main page, he actually did this.
  • Many Web sites offer free anime downloads, like Kametsu.com.
  • Animemusicvideos.org used to have a particularly invasive manner of requesting donations. While the site was displayed, it would randomly pull up a screen asking for donations, then at the bottom of this screen there were three buttons, one of these buttons would say something like 'continue', and the two others would say 'donate'. These buttons would be randomly swapped every time the screen pops up, forcing you to either pay attention or risk mistakenly hitting the 'donate' button.
  • In The Wotch, their donation meter is invariably one of the main cast being transformed into a woman. The more money is donated, the more of the character's body is transformed.
  • Gunnerkrigg Court asks you to turn these spiders into monies to make their dreams come true.
  • Webcomics with donation incentives: Earthsong, Zap! and Girl Genius have wallpapers, Slightly Damned has extra comics, and True Magic has extra comics and wallpapers.
  • When downloading Runman: Race Around the World, you are asked to donate unless you're a "lame dude who only likes to support lame games". Well, bummer, but they'll give you the game anyway.
  • Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name has wallpapers and extra comics as incentives to donate
  • Zebra Girl has a little animation below the comic begging for donations.
  • Gingers Bread has a drawing of Ginger holding a tip jar.
  • Both PBS and NPR are noncommercial and supported in part by Viewers Like You.
  • Faux Pas has a little icon of a dog dish labeled "Randy" (the name of the fox main character) which links to a donation site.
  • Kingdom of Loathing has a "please donate" plea from the creator on its front page, as well as a link to the donation form in the top tray (using the icon menu display option). Of course, considering donating enough money earns you a Mr. Accessory (which are tradeable for special in-game items), this could just be for the convenience of speedrunners and/or people after the Item of the Month.
  • In June 2011, Precocious began a series of strips in which the characters broke the fourth wall to ask for donations.
  • Gerald Day, a British creator of low-polygon Poser content, asks for PayPal donations of £1 or US$1.50 from Poser artists who use his free items.
  • Mr. Deity, attached to the end of each episode is a clip of the creator rather shamelessly begging for donations. The clips are hilarious and have gotten increasingly elaborate over the years, the ones for season 3 form a mini-storyarc.

Now please consider becoming a member of All The Tropes.

Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Please_Subscribe_to_Our_Channel?oldid=1987597"