What happened
What’s Trending founder Shira Lazar and media cartographer Evan Shapiro published the inaugural Affinity 100 on 14 September 2026, written up by Keisha Oleaga, using data from Whalar Group’s Foam. Instead of ranking creators by how many people follow them, it ranks them by how people respond when they post.
The order that came out of it surprised a lot of people.
Blair Imani No. 1, AQ 100. Druski No. 53, AQ 53.7. MrBeast No. 85, AQ 35.7. Dude Perfect No. 89. Mark Rober No. 90.
The top ten also included B. Dylan Hollis, Ash Baber, De’arra Taylor, Chris “Speedy” Morman, Eric “Rico Taquito” Sedeño, DeMarcus Shawn, Tineke Younger, Jackie Aina and Quenlin Blackwell. Further down the list: Golloria at 12, who tests the darkest shades in beauty launches, Amelia Dimoldenberg at 48 for Chicken Shop Date, and Dr. Judith Joseph at 67.
What it is not saying
This is the part the commentary got wrong within a day, and the article itself is careful about it. AQ is a comparative score inside that ranking. It is not the percentage of an audience that engaged, and it does not mean Blair Imani reaches more people than MrBeast. She plainly does not.
What it measures is the pattern of response to a typical post. One creator reaches millions of people who scroll on. Another reaches far fewer who stop, reply, and send it to someone. Both are influence. They are not the same thing, and a follower count cannot tell them apart.
Our own internal data shows a similar path
We measure something different from AQ, so this is corroboration rather than the same finding twice. Ours is the plainest version of the question: how many views does a channel’s median video get for every subscriber it has. We take it inside fixed subscriber bands, against a reference sample in each.
100k to 500k subscribers: 0.088
500k to 1M: 0.064
1M to 5M: 0.049
5M and above: 0.032
From the smallest band to the largest, the figure falls by 64%. A channel with five million subscribers typically gets a smaller share of them watching any given upload than a channel with two hundred thousand does. Two different methods, the same direction.
One reading, and the article offers it too: as a creator becomes a media operation, people keep showing up for the show rather than for the person. That builds enormous reach. It does not concentrate response on a typical post. Neither the ranking nor our numbers can prove the cause, and neither should claim to.
What this changes for a channel your size
If you are under a million subscribers, the useful news is that the number you can move is the one being measured. Reach compounds slowly and mostly outside your control. Response is the thing your opening thirty seconds, your thumbnail and your first line actually touch.
Three things follow from it.
Stop comparing yourself to channels ten times your size. That comparison is discouraging and it is also measuring a different game. A channel your size doing 0.09 views per subscriber is ordinary. Doing 0.2 is genuinely good, and nothing about your subscriber count would ever tell you that.
Know your own figure before you change anything. Take your median video, not your best one, and divide by your subscriber count. That single number tells you whether your audience turns up or whether you inherited it.
If it is low, the fix is the opening, not the posting rate. Publishing more often into an audience that is not responding produces more videos nobody watches.
Want your own views per subscriber, and where it sits against channels your size?
The Quick Scan reads your public uploads and gives you the figure, plus where it lands against a reference sample in your size band. No login, no account access.
Run your free Quick ScanThe part brands will take longest to accept
The question this ranking replaces is “how big is their following”. The question it puts in its place is “why do people pay attention to this creator”. The second one is harder to put in a media plan, and it is the one that predicts whether a sponsored video does anything at all.
For a creator, that shift is good news. It rewards the thing you can actually build.
The full ranking and its method are worth reading in the original: The Affinity 100: The Most Impactful Creators of 2026, by Keisha Oleaga for What’s Trending, 14 September 2026. The numbers about AQ on this page are theirs. The views per subscriber figures are ours.
Common questions
Does a low views per subscriber mean my audience is fake?
Almost never. The usual cause is ordinary: subscribers collected years ago, or from one video that travelled, who were never interested in the rest. They stay subscribed and stop watching. That is an inherited audience rather than a bought one, and the fix is the same.
Is AQ the same thing as views per subscriber?
No. AQ is a comparative score built for that ranking from engagement data across several platforms. Views per subscriber is a single public ratio on YouTube. They are different measurements that happen to point the same way, which is worth more than one measurement pointing anywhere.
MrBeast ranked 85th. Should I ignore what he does?
No, and the ranking is not saying that either. He is running a media business at a scale where the audience relationship is different by nature. Copy the production discipline. Do not expect his subscriber-to-view ratio, and do not measure yourself against it.