YouTube Creator Blog

Improving Custom URLs on YouTube

Friday, December 16, 2016

At YouTube, we want to make it as easy as possible for fans to find and watch your channel. That's why we've spent years building the tools to help your audience stay on top of your videos -- from subscriptions, to notifications, and even custom URLs.

Last year, we announced that YouTube no longer requires a Google+ profile when you want to upload, comment, or create a channel. As part of this change, today we’re launching a new custom URL system that works independently from Google+ and also unifies your identity across YouTube.

Currently, we have two systems for claiming a custom URL:

A YouTube system that generates URLs in this format: youtube.com/ChannelName
A system integrated with Google+ that generates URLs like this: youtube.com/c/ChannelName

With these two systems in place, we began to see instances where two channels could request URLs with similar names in these two different formats. This is confusing for fans, and not a great experience for creators either.

Our new system will fix that problem. With today’s launch, both URLs from the older systems will now point to the same channel. This means that, in our previous example, users can now reach the same channel with either youtube.com/ChannelName or youtube.com/c/ChannelName. And with a new system in place, we’ll also avoid duplicating channel names in the future. This also means that claiming a new YouTube custom URL does not involve a custom URL for your Google+ profile, and vice versa.

We believe this is a positive change for the millions of channels that have custom URLs today, as well as those who will request one in the future. However, as we make this transition, there is a group of less than 0.02% of channels with custom URLs who will have to claim a new URL due to duplication conflicts -- when youtube.com/ChannelName and youtube.com/c/ChannelName point to different channels. If you are part of this group, you will be notified and can claim a brand new custom URL from your channel’s advanced account settings until May 31, 2017 to make this change.

We are making every effort to work with creators to find a solution that supports their needs on YouTube. That’s why we created custom URLs in the first place and we’re excited about how this change will benefit both fans and creators in the long term.

Posted by Tom Leung, Director, Product Management for Creator, recently watched THE $21,000 FIRST CLASS AIRPLANE SEAT

New Creators for Change ambassadors and resources are here!

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

This post originally appeared on the YouTube Official Blog

Back in September, we launched YouTube Creators for Change, a global initiative dedicated to amplifying (and multiplying) the voices of YouTube creators who tackle division and hate with videos and stories of hope, connection, and understanding. And as 2016 comes to a close, we’re proud to say that YouTube Creators for Change is growing.

We’ve established local Creators for Change initiatives in Australia, France, Germany, and Turkey, bringing together creators who have uploaded thousands of videos about countering hate through unity. We’ve opened up sets at YouTube Spaces in New York and Los Angeles where creators will record the first video-based StoryCorps interviews. And today, we’re thrilled to introduce our five newest Creators for Change ambassadors: All India Bakchod (India), Cameo Project (Indonesia), Dina Torkia (United Kingdom), Franchesca Ramsey (United States) and John Green (United States). You can learn more about these inspiring creators at the Creators For Change website, which launches today, too!

These new ambassadors will join the six existing ambassadors in engaging their communities on topics like hate speech, xenophobia, and extremism. And to do our part, we’re equipping each one of them with a $25,000 grant to use toward a social impact project of their choice. In fact, this past weekend John Green donated his grant to charity in connection with Project for Awesome, a live-streamed annual fundraiser that brings together video creators from all over the world who support charities that, as the vlogbrothers say, “decrease world suck.”

In the coming months, our 11 ambassadors will also help us choose creators who are already making their voices heard on social issues that matter to them. And as part of our original $1M commitment, each of these emerging creators will be given equipment and production grants. They’ll also receive mentorship support from the program ambassadors and an opportunity to participate in educational workshops at our YouTube Spaces.

Finally, to help all those creators who want to use their voices and videos to take on topics they care about, we’ve collaborated with Upworthy to create a helpful series of best practices for creating effective social-change videos.

You can find this video, information on all our ambassadors and more on the YouTube Creators for Change website. So check it out! And stay tuned for more updates in the coming months.

Juniper Downs, Head of YouTube Public Policy, recently watched "This Christian community opened its heart to new Muslim neighbors."

New tools to shape conversations in your comments section

Thursday, November 3, 2016

Your relationship with your community is what makes YouTube unique. Whether your fans are Nerdfighters or Mirfandas, they’ve created a close-knit bond with you and your content. We realize that comments play a key role in growing this connection and we’re dedicated to making your conversations with your community easier and more personal. We've been listening to your feedback and we’re excited to roll out new comment features, including:

Pinned comments: promote a specific comment by pinning it to the top of your feed. This lets you highlight great engagement from your fans or share information with your audience.
Creator hearts: show some love by giving a heart to your favorite comments. This is a new and easy way to acknowledge comments from your community.
Creator usernames: when you comment on your channel, your username will appear under the text with a pop of color around it so your viewers can easily tell that the comment is coming from you. If you are a verified creator, you will still have a verification checkmark appear beside your name.

We also want to continue to help you shape the tone of your conversations on YouTube. Here’s a refresher on some existing tools along with a new beta feature we’re launching in the coming months.

Choose moderators: Earlier this year, we launched a new comment feature that lets you delegate moderation, giving people you trust the ability to remove public comments from your videos.
Blacklist words and phrases: You may have comments with certain words or phrases held for your review and approval before being published.
Hold potentially inappropriate comments for review: We’re introducing a new beta feature that allows you to hold potentially inappropriate comments for review. If you choose to opt-in, comments identified by our algorithm will be held and you have the final decision whether to approve, hide, or report these comments. We recognize that the algorithms will not always be accurate: the beta feature may hold some comments you deem fine for approval, or may not catch comments you’d like to hold and remove. When you review comments, the system will take that feedback into account and get better at identifying the types of comments to hold for review. If you’d like to try this out, submit your channel information here.

We’re excited to see how you use these features to grow stronger communities and have more constructive conversations in your comment sections.

Posted by Courtney Lessard, Product Manager, recently watched I made a robot to help me argue on the internet

Update: Improving Content ID for creators

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Update, 11/1/2016: In April, we announced that we’ve been developing a new solution that allows your videos to earn revenue while a Content ID claim is being disputed. We’re excited to share that this is now available to all creators in the YouTube Partner Program! Here is a refresher on how this works: If both you and the Content ID claimant want to monetize your video, we will continue to run ads against it and hold those funds separately while the dispute is resolved.

While you can dispute a Content ID claim at any time, the vast majority of disputes are made within the first 5 days of a claim being placed on your videos. Our new system is designed accordingly: If you choose to dispute a claim within the first 5 days of receiving it, we will hold revenue from the day the Content ID claim was placed. If you choose to dispute a Content ID claim after 5 days of the original claim, we will start holding the revenue on the date the dispute is made. Read more about how this works here.

As always, thanks to everyone for sharing feedback about our copyright processes. We’re always working to improve our systems, with the goal of empowering creators with the freedom of opportunity to build a business and succeed on your own terms.

-David Rosenstein, Content ID Product Manager

Original post from 4/28/16:

At YouTube, one of our core values is a belief in the freedom of opportunity. We believe anyone should have the opportunity to earn money from the videos they create and turn their channels into successful businesses. That’s why we opened up the YouTube Partner Program nine years ago and why we remain the only platform where anyone with an idea and a camera can turn their videos into full time jobs.

We understand just how important revenue is to our creator community, and we’ve been listening closely to concerns about the loss of monetization during the Content ID dispute process. Currently videos that are claimed and disputed don’t earn revenue for anyone, which is an especially frustrating experience for creators if that claim ends up being incorrect while a video racks up views in its first few days.

Today, we’re announcing a major step to help fix that frustrating experience. We’re developing a new solution that will allow videos to earn revenue while a Content ID claim is being disputed. Here’s how it will work: when both a creator and someone making a claim choose to monetize a video, we will continue to run ads on that video and hold the resulting revenue separately. Once the Content ID claim or dispute is resolved, we’ll pay out that revenue to the appropriate party.

We’re working on this new system now and hope to roll it out to all YouTube partners in the coming months. Here’s a closer look at how it’ll work once it’s live:

We strongly believe in fair use and believe that this improvement to Content ID will make a real difference. In addition to our work on the Content ID dispute process, we’re also paying close attention to creators’ concerns about copyright claims on videos they believe may be fair use. We want to help both the YouTube community and copyright owners alike better understand what fair use looks like online, which is why we launched our fair use protection program last year and recently introduced new Help Center pages on this topic.

Even though Content ID claims are disputed less than 1% of the time, we agree that this process could be better. Making sure our Content ID tools are being used properly is deeply important to us, so we’ve built a dedicated team to monitor this. Using a combination of algorithms and manual review, this team has resolved millions of invalid claims in the last year alone, and acted on millions more before they impacted creators. The team also restricts feature access and even terminates a partner’s access to Content ID tools if we find they are repeatedly abusing these tools.

We will continue to invest in both people and technology to make sure that Content ID keeps working for creators and rightsholders. We want to thank everyone who’s shared their concerns about unintended effects from Content ID claims. It’s allowed us to create a better system for everyone and we hope to share more updates soon.

David Rosenstein, Content ID Group Product Manager, recently watched “Coachella VR 360 – Week 1 Sunday Highlights”

Keep ‘Em Watching with End Screens

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Your best videos leave your fans hungry for more. They can be a great hook for viewers to discover more of your work, find out more about who you are or go deeper into the topics you cover. That’s why we’re excited to launch End Screens, a new mobile-friendly tool that lets you engage viewers right as your video finishes and encourages them to watch more on their devices.

How do they work? In the last 5-20 seconds of your videos, you can now choose to show hard-to-miss thumbnail overlays that prompt viewers to watch your other videos, subscribe to your channel, visit collaborators’ channels, and more. Currently, many creators use Annotations, a desktop-only tool that allows you to add clickable links to your videos, to manually create end screens. This will no longer be necessary, as the new End Screens are not only easier to create, but also allow you to reach more viewers on desktop and mobile. After testing End Screens with a number of creators, we’ve incorporated feedback to make the tool work even better. We couldn’t be happier to make it available to every creator on YouTube.
So how will you use End Screens? We can’t wait to see the ideas you come up with.

Posted by Muli Salem, Product Manager, recently watched "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Trailer #2."

A new, optional feature for paid promotion disclosure

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

YouTube creators are among the most influential voices in media today. Since brands increasingly recognize the value of the connection creators have with their fans around the world, they are investing in collaborations to reach viewers in interesting and authentic ways. At the same time, viewers appreciate transparency when brands and creators collaborate on paid promotions such as product placements, sponsorships or endorsements.

While there are a variety of ways creators can disclose paid promotions, today we are launching a new, optional video feature that adds visible text on the video for the first few seconds a viewer watches, informing viewers of a paid promotion. Creators can also choose to add this text disclosure to any existing video without losing their view count or other video metrics.

We’re excited to provide this feature in response to requests for an easy-to-use notification, but since there is no global disclosure standard, creators and brands should check and follow applicable laws as they may vary greatly by region.

We’ve always asked creators to notify YouTube as well when a video contains paid promotion by checking the “video contains paid promotion” box in their Video Manager. We do this to remove the video from the YouTube Kids app in line with our existing policies, and we may replace the ad served with one that does not conflict with the promoted brand partner.

You can find more information about this new feature and our paid promotion policies in our Help Center. To learn more about disclosure rules and regulations, refer to your local legal resources, such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the United States, Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) in the United Kingdom, or the Direction générale de la concurrence, de la consommation et de la répression des fraudes (DGCCRF) in France.

Muli Salem, Product Manager, recently watched Magnets and Marbles.

Last chance for 2016! Enter to win a spot at YouTube NextUp!

Friday, September 30, 2016

In February we launched YouTube NextUp, a contest to give creators the opportunity to attend a week-long creator camp to accelerate their channels. Since then, over 200 up-and-coming channels have been selected to attend camps at YouTube Spaces in LA, NY, London, Tokyo, Berlin, Mumbai and Sao Paulo. These up-and-coming channels took a 5-day crash course in video production, learned from top creators and NextUp grads and received vouchers for new equipment.
Now YouTube NextUp is going more global than ever before. We’re excited to announce the launch of our final round of 2016 contests. If you live in the following countries, you’re invited to enter:
North America
NextUp LA + NY - USA
NextUp Toronto - Canada
South America
NextUp Sao Paulo - Brazil
Europe
NextUp London - UK (including Northern Ireland), Ireland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands
NextUp Paris - France, Belgium, and Luxembourg
NextUp Berlin - Germany, Austria, and Switzerland
Middle East and North Africa
NextUp Amman - Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen
Asia
NextUp Tokyo - Japan
NextUp Bangkok - Thailand

What’s it like winning YouTube NextUp? Check out what the latest NextUp London class experienced in the video below:

Channels selected to join the NextUp class of 2016 are eligible to receive:

A $2,500 voucher for production equipment (or local equivalent) to help you make your video dreams a reality.
A spot at a week-long creator camp at YouTube Spaces around the world. You’ll team up with production experts to harness new techniques in camera, lighting, and sound and receive coaching from YouTube Partnerships team on how to grow your audience.
Mentorship by YouTube NextUp grads, plus the opportunity to meet and work with other fast-rising creators.

To see if you’re qualified to enter the YouTube NextUp contest and check out all the creators in the NextUp class of 2016, visit youtube.com/nextup.

Elizabeth Hartnett, YouTube Global Program Manager - NextUp, recently watched "Ew! With Hannah Hoffman and Natalie Barbu" from NextUp NY grad Joey Ahern

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