The official Star Wars YouTube channel is in trouble.
As we reported earlier, the channel seems to be dropping off in daily views week over week. According to third-party social media tracking platform Socialblade, the average daily view count for the official Star Wars channel is only 136,000.
While that sounds like a lot, this is a channel with 3.5 million subscribers. That’s actually very, very weak. Fan channels with significantly fewer subscribers pull in more views than that on average.
Star Wars Theory, a popular Star Wars fan YouTube channel that was at the center of a controversy involving Lucasfilm exec Pablo Hidalgo, gets two to three times the amount of daily views as the official Star Wars channel.
Ouch.
In the past month, there are several days in which daily views on the official Star Wars channel were under 100,000.
This, despite semi-regular updates of fresh content, most of it focused on Star Wars: The High Republic.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, almost every new video posted on the channel gets massively downvoted by viewers almost immediately.
A video from last week had a whopping 12,000 downvotes compared to a paltry 2,100 upvotes.
Even a brand new video posted today is showing a 2:1 dislike ratio.
One has to wonder how many of the daily views are people only watching to downvote. Which means the actual number of engaged viewers is likely significantly lower.
As expected, the top comments are once again showing support for fired Mandalorian actress Gina Carano. It’s clear that a decent-sized portion of the Star Wars fandom loves the former Cara Dune actress, and this is something that Disney and Lucasfilm will have to properly address with at some point, instead of simply trying to bury it.
While the downvoting could (and likely will be) attributed to some “alt-right trolls” by Disney Star Wars defenders, the waning interest in the official Star Wars channel — and The High Republic content in particular — is very, very telling of where the fandom is right now.
Disney might want to start paying attention before there’s a repeat of the financial fallout from The Last Jedi.
[Source: Socialblade]
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