What Does This Mean?
A YouTube practice in which one user asks another to subscribe in exchange for subscribing back, to inflate both channels' subscriber counts. It appears in comments and video descriptions, often abbreviated, and counts as a form of artificial audience growth.
REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE
"The comment section was full of "sub for sub" requests under a video that only had a few hundred views."
LORE & ORIGIN
Wiktionary's entry for the abbreviation sub4sub defines it as subscribing to a channel in exchange for mutual subscription, often to inflate subscriber counts, and cites a 2008 YouTube guide book that describes users openly offering to subscribe if others subscribe to them, plus a 2012 Twitter post. Sub for sub is the spelled-out form of that arrangement. It is unrelated to the Nigerian-English "sub for me" that Urban Dictionary lists nearby. No originating channel or date is documented for the spelled-out form.
MENTIONS OVER TIME
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