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For those with a little more time, on behalf of the team at Social Blade, we wanted to thank you so much for your continued support over the past year! This year was a really big year for us, and we’re even more excited about the future!
For the past several years, the team had been working behind the scenes rewriting everything about Social Blade. The front end, the back end, and even setting up an entirely new place for the website to run from. When you saw the new Social Blade website launch in March 2025, it wasn’t just a new skin; it was an entirely new Social Blade experience from top to bottom.
The biggest problem with the legacy Social Blade website was that while the frontend had changed a couple of times over the years, the backend remained, augmented yes, but largely the same as it was when it was first created on a whim back in 2010. Back then, the site was tiny and only focused on YouTube.
So what are a couple of the changes and what is the reason for them?
First off, along with rewriting the software, we changed from hosting "in the cloud" to "self-hosting". This doesn’t mean Social Blade is running out of our garage though; we’re still in a professional datacenter. It’s just that rather than renting the hardware the website runs on every month, we bought it once, and then it’s ours. There is a large upfront cost in doing this, but after the first year it basically pays for itself. This also means we get much more performant hardware than you can get in your typical cloud, at least not without paying a massive premium.
Next, for the first 15 years the site had been chugging along using MySQL as our database. It held up, but as the size of the data became bigger and bigger, MySQL became slower and slower. We had to remove some features over the years as a result, and also postpone building out new ones. Now we have a hybrid database solution of ClickHouse and PostgreSQL which can run circles, like insanely big circles, around our old database!
So what have we done with all this new power? The first new thing we’ve launched is our video stats product. For the first 15 years, Social Blade had been entirely creator-centric, providing top-level daily creator stats. With video stats, we’ve entered an entirely new dimension. On the creator level we’re currently tracking 73 million creators daily. However, each creator has more than one video of course. When we added video stats, we’re now tracking more than a billion videos daily, something our legacy website would have laughed at. We’re also still working to scale this up even more!
Now that 2025 is almost done, what are our goals for 2026? We have a whole bunch, but I wanted to highlight a couple here.
In terms of performance, now that we self-host, adding more performance is often as simple as adding more servers. Just this past week we racked two more beefy database servers (pictured above) and will be working to get them online in the coming weeks to expand our data processing capabilities. Think even more video stats, better reports, and much more.
Also, we’ve been working on a new version of our Business API to give our business customers more features and much improved performance. This will also allow for a relaunch of our browser extension so you can once again view stats while watching videos. Anyone using the current version of our API should know that once version 2 is rolled out, the existing version will stick around for quite some time to allow everyone plenty of time to migrate over, so there should be no hesitation to continue building on version 1.
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