Jason Urgo, the CEO of Social Blade, launched the website in February 2008, to track statistics for the website Digg. In 2010, the website switched to track YouTube statistics. In October 2012, Social Blade became an LLC. In 2014, Social Blade launched consulting and channel management services. On October 24, 2018, Social Blade started a popular live stream to show the subscriber difference between T-Series and PewDiePie in an online competition. the stream regularly has 900 viewers and has led to a large increase of their subscriber count. To accompany the attention in April 2019 Social Blade pulled an April Fools' joke where they allowed users to change the subscriber counts and ranks to ridiculously high numbers.
On its Frequently Asked Questions page, Social Blade wrote that "in order to best scale our tracking to meet the needs of millions that use Social Blade, we pull data from YouTube's public API. This means that we're getting the same information you see on public YouTube channel pages, we just work to examine that data across multiple days and aggregate it into a display format that is useful to you." Social Blade is a website that contains subscriber predictions. Social Blade also provides real-time subscriber count updates. Social Blade has also been noted work with content creators and YouTube multi-channel networks to help creators get partnered.
An official YouTube Twitter account, @TeamYouTube wrote that "Please know that third party apps, such as SocialBlade, do not accurately reflect subscriber activity." Social Blade's Twitter account responded to that tweet, commenting "We don't make up data. We get it from the YouTube API. We rely on it for accuracy." Social Blade's community manager Danny Fratella suggested that YouTube content creators may notice subscriber and view count purges more due to a higher accessibility to data-tracking tools like Social Blade.
Media outlets
Social Blade's data and analytics have been cited by mainstream news media outlets and outlets focused on Internet culture as well. Aside from using subscriber statistics reported by Social Blade, media outlets also cite Social Blade in regards to a content creator's or an account's estimated earnings. HuffPost wrote that "Social Blade estimates earnings for each YouTube channel based on the money generated for every thousand ad views. These estimates aren't exact. Instead, they create a minimum and maximum amount that a channel could be earning; in some cases, the range can be huge. Social Blade's support services manager, Jenna Arnold stated that "the range is huge because the CPMs vary SO much. They can be anywhere from $0.25 to $4.00 on average." Urgo has also commented on the $0.25–$4.00 per 1,000 views range, stating "these data points change from time to time and are not an exact science, but generally hold true for most channels. Social Blade's blog has also been noted for being "continuously updated with articles and news of interest to content creators, helping them stay on top of evolving trends and ways to better use YouTube and other social media services."
