YouTube Creator Blog

Protecting Our Community

Monday, December 4, 2017

Dear creators,

Every year, I'm reminded of how unique and special our YouTube community is and 2017 is no different. This was a year of amazing growth and innovation, but I wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on what has also been a very tough year for our creator community. In the past year, we saw a significant increase in bad actors seeking to exploit our platform, from sharing extremist content and disseminating misinformation, to impersonating creators, to spamming our platform with videos that masquerade as family-friendly content, but are not. These actions harm our community by undermining trust in our platform and hurting the revenue that helps creators like you thrive.

In light of this, we’ve just announced new actions to protect our community from inappropriate content. We want to give creators confidence that their revenue won’t be harmed by bad actors while giving advertisers assurances that their ads are running alongside content that reflects their brand’s values.

To do that, we need an approach that does a better job determining which channels and videos should be eligible for advertising. We’ve heard loud and clear from creators that we have to be more accurate when it comes to reviewing content, so we don’t demonetize videos (apply a “yellow icon”) by mistake. We are planning to apply stricter criteria and conduct more manual curation, while also significantly ramping up our team of ad reviewers to ensure ads are only running where they should. This will help limit inaccurate demonetizations while giving creators more stability around their revenue. We will be talking to creators over the next few weeks to hone this new approach.

As I’ve said many times over the years, creators are the lifeblood of YouTube’s community. It is their originality, authenticity, talent and dedication that attracts a global audience to YouTube. It is their passion and presence that turns casual viewers into devoted fans who are eager to learn, share and come together. And it is their inclusiveness that gives over a billion people who visit YouTube every month a place to belong.

Though it’s been a difficult year, time and again, we’ve seen our creators come together to do incredible things on YouTube. We saw an acceleration in channel subscriptions, bringing the total number of channels to hit the 1 million subscriber milestone to well over 5,000. We saw a Reggaeton song explode in global popularity, becoming the most-watched YouTube video in history. And we saw our creators rally their fans after natural disasters in Mexico City and Houston to raise millions for relief, or engage world leaders from Joko Widodo to Jean-Claude Juncker on important issues.

These stories are at the heart of what makes YouTube’s community so special. It’s a place where creators and fans can come together to reach new heights, break records and turn an online audience into a real-world movement. That’s why we need to do all we can to protect this community, to counter threats from bad actors and to ensure that YouTube remains a place where all creators can thrive.

Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube

Expanding Community on YouTube

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Community has always been at the heart of YouTube. From supporting each other, to touring the world, to making each other laugh, you and your audience have established strong bonds on YouTube. This connection goes beyond video, so about a year ago we invited a few creators to test out a new place to connect with fans in-between uploads with polls, pictures, text, GIFs, and more. We called this place Community. Creators have been doing amazing things with it, such as Anitta sharing behind-the-scenes photos, Marshmello teasing sneak preview GIFs, and Vidya polling subscribers for ideas. So starting today we're excited to expand Community to creators with over 10,000 subscribers.

We’ve been working closely with creators to build, test and refine this product. Now, we want to take this opportunity to share some of our learnings and updates.

Involve your community: Fans love to participate in the creative process! Grav3yardgirl has been using Community to connect with her eight million strong swamp family, and gather input for what videos they'd like to see. She let her fans choose what to unbox next and heard them loud and clear that they wanted her to bring back the much-loved “Wreck It Wednesdays".
Bring fans backstage: Creators have been using Community posts to build anticipation for a new video or upcoming big production. Lele Pons shares GIFs that act as a trailer for her next video, while Kevin Durant posts photos on NBA gameday.
Increase your reach: We’ve seen creators successfully cross-promote other channels and creators they love through Community, such as Anwar, Hannah, Lele helping drive traffic to Rudy’s first music video launch.
Improved discoverability: As with videos, we want to show the right Community post to the right user, so we’ve made updates to how these posts reach your audience across YouTube. Your most engaged viewers can now see Community posts in the Home feed, whether they’re subscribed to your channel or not. We’ve also optimized our notifications so that your fans are eligible to receive them, but they won’t necessarily get a new notification for every new Community post.
New formats: We want to do even more to give you easy ways to express yourself and engage with fans, so today we’re also unveiling a new feature. Reels are YouTube’s spin on the popular “stories” format, but designed specifically for YouTube creators. We learned that you want the flexibility to create multiple Reels and have them not expire, so we’ll give you those options. We’re also bringing creator-focused features like linking to YouTube videos and YouTube-y stickers. Just like we did with Community, we’ll be experimenting with a beta version of Reels to learn and improve the product before expanding to more creators.

We’re super excited about building Community on YouTube and we can’t wait to see how you further grow and engage your audience! If you want some ideas and inspiration for your channel, we've created a Creator Academy lesson to help you out.

Posted by Roy Livne, Senior Product Manager, recently watched Interact with your community | Master Class ft Meghan Tonjes

Announcing our new YouTube Creators Site

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Creators tell us they want one central place to keep up with the latest news, creator events, and platform updates from YouTube. The original Creator Hub launched just over a year ago was a first step in bringing together all our creator-facing programs, news and information. Now we’re taking this resource to the next level with the launch of the revamped YouTube Creators Site.

The completely refreshed design was developed for creators, with creators. The first thing we did was take a deep look at how creators were using the original hub and optimized our design to better support their user journeys. Then, we brought in creators into our design process to get their feedback on what they liked, and what could be improved. The end product offers more up-to-date information in a refreshed design that we hope will make it much easier for creators to explore and take advantage of all the resources available to them.

From checking the latest news on our Twitter feed, to staying up to date with our blog, we hope this redesign helps creators at all stages to get inspired, engage and thrive on YouTube.

We’ve added new sections, including detailed information about our Partner Management program, so that creators understand how to get the support they need at every step of the way. We’ve also surfaced an interactive widget that indexes content from the YouTube Help Center and makes it available across the Creators Site.

To celebrate the launch of the new Creators Site, we’re releasing Master Class -- a new series of videos from the Creator Academy. The series is designed to help creators grow their audience by learning about an important range of topics. From analyzing and growing your channel to building a business on YouTube.

We’re really excited about these launches and hope they can provide the resources you need to grow your audience on YouTube.

Alejandro Oropeza
Global Head of Marketing Communications

Even more reasons for creators to love the YouTube Studio app

Friday, September 22, 2017

Creators live life on-the-go. Even with packed schedules, you still find the time to create amazing videos, manage your channel and engage your communities. At YouTube, it’s our job to make your lives easier. That’s why we designed our mobile app with you in mind. Many of you have told us that it’s indispensable to your YouTube journey, including top creators like Swoozie who said: “Studio is where it’s at. I love it, I live by it!” Today we’re giving the Creator Studio app a refresh. Not only will it be called YouTube Studio moving forward but we’re also releasing many new features that you’ve been asking for, including:

Scheduled Posts: We know your fans eagerly await your videos. Now you’ll be able to schedule posts right from your phone so you can set it and forget it. Pick the time, date, and video type (private, unlisted or public).
Subscriber Count Card: Creators frequently tell us how much they love checking their subscriber count to see how many people have become Nerdfighters, Mirfandas, or whatever you may call your fans. For a long time, you could only easily do that on desktop. Now, we’re adding a prominent subscriber count card right at the top of your YouTube Studio app dashboard so you can check up on that subscriber love anytime and anywhere.

In the coming months, we’re going to continue to make the app better and roll out even more updates, such as allowing you to use creator hearts and pin comments straight from the app.

Building on beloved features

We hope the new features above build on the many of the reasons you love using the app already, including:

Actionable Insights: Our analytics insight cards provide simple and easy ways for you to understand your channel stats and suggest ways you can grow your channel. You’ll also get links to education resources based on your channel needs to help you bolster your skills. Did one of your videos experience a sudden spike in views while you were out? With our on-the-go insights, you’ll receive a personalized message when a significant event happens on your channel and tips on how to make the most of what’s happening on your channel. We’ll also be doubling down on adding more helpful tips to grow your channel in the YouTube Studio app very soon.

Custom Thumbnails: An engaging thumbnail can make all the difference. As one of the most requested features for the app, you can upload your own thumbnails for videos from your mobile device.

With over 1.5 billion logged-in users a month, we want to give you the best tools to reach them — and do it on your own time. The continued improvement of the YouTube Studio app is all part of a greater effort we announced at VidCon to build better creator tools across desktop and mobile. We hope you join the millions of creators not only using YouTube Studio, but improving it for other creators out there too.

Jacquelle Amankonah Horton, Product Manager

A new way to earn money with YouTube Gaming

Tuesday, September 19, 2017

Starting today, we’re opening up a new way to earn extra money on your channel and better help you connect with your fans on YouTube Gaming: sponsorships!

With sponsorships, fans can purchase digital goods directly from your channel and support you via monthly recurring payments of $4.99 USD (local pricing applies). Sponsors get cool insider perks, such as a custom badge for live chat that will help them stand out from the crowd and custom emoji. These badges and emoji are designed by you for your fans. As you gain more sponsors, you will unlock more emoji to be used on your channel. You can upload and use these in real-time as you pass sponsorship milestones.

Sponsors also get access to sponsors-only live chat and immunity from slow mode. You’ll also be able to set up additional perks through 3rd-party services, such as on-stream alerts that you’ve received a new subscriber via Streamlabs or an exclusive Discord sponsors-only server where fans can connect and chat together.

Throughout our early tests of YouTube Gaming sponsorships, we’ve seen some incredible successes. For example, GameAttack makes most of their channel revenue via sponsorships and Super Chat. Rocket Beans earned 1,500 sponsors in their first day. And ONE_shot_GURL’s monthly celebratory wall of sponsors is getting so full, it’s running out of room.

Sponsorships are broadly available to all eligible creators on the YouTube Gaming app. So if your channel is eligible, you can enable it yourself today at youtube.com/features and immediately begin growing your sponsorship base. We’ll also be testing out another version of sponsorships with a handful of non-gaming creators on the main YouTube app. Check out Lauren Fairweather's or Que Diabos’ channel, and sign up here if you're interested in trying it out for your channel.

Whether your channel is still new or you’ve been a creator for years, we want you to be successful, and sponsorships is part of a wider effort to help build your business on YouTube. As we focus on growing your revenue through YouTube Red, Super Chat, and now sponsorships, we're bidding farewell to a service we launched in 2013 called paid channels. This service offered monthly subscriptions for some channels, but with less than 1% of creators using it today, it never achieved popularity with creators or users.

Between all the trials, raids, and meteor strikes, the gaming community on YouTube continues to grow. We’re excited to see how your creativity with sponsorships can help you both build stronger communities and bigger businesses.

Barbara Macdonald, Product Manager, recently live streamed Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle

YouTube Live: faster, easier and more accessible

Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Whether it’s solar eclipses, NBA superstars, the hottest music artists, pro gamers, creators donating to charity, or the world’s most famous giraffe, creators use live to connect with fans during the moments that matter. In turn, we are committed to making live content creation easier and more accessible. That’s why we’re excited to share some new improvements launching today.

Real-time interaction
We know how important it is to be able to immediately engage your fans during live streams. Thanks to ultra-low latency, now you can. Enabling ultra low-latency makes it possible to stream video with just a couple seconds of latency, so you’ll be able to answer fan questions and get viewer input during your “Let’s Plays” faster than ever before. It’s easy to set up and doesn’t require any special software or encoders to work.

New tools to make live chat moderation easier
Live chat messages play a key role in creating connections between you and your fans. We want to help you shape the tone of your conversations on YouTube, so we are excited to introduce new chat moderation tools:

Inline moderation lets you quickly moderate your chat feed by simply pressing and holding the “alt/option” button on your keyboard to pause the chat feed. Once the feed is paused, you can hover over messages to remove or approve them with a single click. Don’t forget you can also delegate a moderator for your live chat, giving people you trust the ability to remove, flag or hide messages.

Hold potentially inappropriate messages for review By opting-in, chat messages identified by our system will be held from posting on your streams, then you decide whether to approve, hide, or report them (just like you can with comments). Best part is, as you review more messages the system will get better at identifying the types of messages you want to hold for review. If you want to block certain words or phrases, you can do that too.

Shared hidden user lists lets your moderators use the same hidden users list across comments and live chat. And in the future hides will work in both live chat and comments, regardless of where you take that action.

Stream more easily from iPhone and iPad right to the main YouTube app
Thanks to Apple’s ReplayKit, you can already live stream directly from many popular apps on YouTube Gaming. Now we’re bringing the feature to the main YouTube app so you can live stream your painting from Procreate, your race from Asphalt 8, your MOBA gameplay from Vainglory and more from any app that supports ReplayKit. You’ll also be able to use your phone’s microphone and front-facing camera to add your own video and audio commentary to the stream.

Regardless if you’re streaming your summer vacation shenanigans from your mobile phone or a battle royale of your favorite game from your desktop, we hope these new tools help you do more with YouTube live and deepen the connection with your viewers.

Kurt Wilms, YouTube Live Product Lead
Recently Watched “EXCLUSIVE - BEHIND THE SCENES OF DANANDPHILGAMES”

A new YouTube look that works for you

Tuesday, August 29, 2017

Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog.

When YouTube launched 12 years ago, it was a single website that supported one video format, 320x240 at 4:3 aspect ratio. Fast forward to today, and YouTube lets you watch any combination of SD, HD, 4K, 360, 3-D, and live video on nearly every device with an internet connection – from desktops to phones, tablets to TVs, game consoles, and even VR headsets.

We’ve also introduced apps and services that give you new ways to watch and get even closer to the content and creators you love. Music fans, gamers, and TV lovers each have unique experiences specifically tailored for their favorite content with YouTube Music, YouTube Gaming and YouTube TV. For families looking for the best way to watch together, we launched the YouTube Kids app. And for fans who want an uninterrupted, ad-free experience, and exclusive original content from creators, there’s the YouTube Red membership.

To put it simply, YouTube’s evolved … a lot. And we’re not even close to done. Over the last few months we've started releasing updates and will continue to throughout the rest of the year. When all is said and done, we'll bring a new level of functionality and a more consistent look across our desktop and mobile experiences.

Let’s start with the YouTube mobile app, which is getting a bunch of new features:

Clean new design: We’ve made the header white to let content take the lead and moved the navigation tabs to the bottom of the app so they’re closer to your thumbs. We also added new Library and Account tabs that give you easy access to what you’re looking for.
Videos that move with you: One of the things we’re working on is bringing gestures to YouTube. Earlier this year, we introduced a gesture that allows you to double tap on the left or right side of a video to fast forward or rewind 10 seconds. Give it a try! We already see billions of double taps per day. And I wanted to give you a sneak peek at another gesture I am really excited about. In the coming months, we'll experiment with a feature that lets you jump between videos with a simple swipe of your hand: just swipe left to watch a previous video or swipe right to watch the next one.
Watch at your own pace: Users love that they are able to speed up and slow down the playback of a video on desktop, and we're excited to bring this feature to the mobile app today, so you can enjoy videos at whatever speed you prefer.
Adapt to any video, beautifully: We've also been experimenting with new ways to display all videos in the best possible way. Soon, the YouTube player will seamlessly change shape to match the video format you’re watching, such as vertical, square or horizontal. That means you’ll always get the best viewing experience automatically – including vertical videos with no black bars on the sides!
Browse and discover while you watch: We recently added a feature that lets you view a row of suggested videos while you’re watching in full screen. We're also working on transforming the area below the player so you can browse videos in totally new ways.

Looking beyond the YouTube app, we’ve also been working on a new desktop design. And thanks to all the positive feedback, we're now excited to make it available to all our users around the globe starting today! Our new look applies Material Design to YouTube and delivers a fresh, simple and intuitive user experience that lets content shine – because there's nothing more important than the creators and videos we all love to watch. My favorite feature of this new desktop design is Dark Theme, which turns the background dark while you watch for a more cinematic look.

The bright red cherry on top of this update sundae is a refreshed YouTube Logo and YouTube Icon. Designed for our multi-screen world, the updated Logo combines a cleaned up version of the YouTube wordmark and Icon, creating a more flexible design that works better across a variety of devices, even on the tiniest screens. Why’s it more flexible? When room is limited (say on a smartphone) you can use the brightened up Icon as an abbreviated Logo, which will be seen more easily and read more clearly. You’ll see the new Logo and Icon roll out across mobile and desktop today, and across all our other apps and services soon.

We know this is a lot of change, but we want to make clear that there’s one thing that stays the same: YouTube’s mission. We’re here to give people a voice and show them the world – no matter what device they use.

Neal Mohan, Chief Product Officer, recently watched "YouTube: What will you watch next?"

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