Rene’s Top Five on YouTube: August 1, 2024 edition
Aug 01, 2024 – [[read-time]] minute read
Summer in Montreal — hot, humid, and construction here, there, and everywhere! But at least your friendly neighborhood YouTube Creator Liaison is finally back in his/my home neighborhood for a few days, which is just long enough to scour YouTube, X/Twitter, Instagram, Threads, and Discord for the most impactful creator happenings of the week. So let’s go!
🌋 Science! The latest Creator Insider Podcast just went live! After I had the absolute pleasure of speaking at OpenSauce, the Maker and STEM creator event in San Francisco, several of their organizers and featured creators came back with me to YouTube HQ to speak with… all of you! That’s William Osman Kevin the Backyard Scientist, Allen Pan, Up and Atom, Michael Reeves, Emily the Engineer, and Tibees all sharing their thoughts on educational content on YouTube, how to communicate STEM topics, ideas, thumbnails, and just what exactly can stand up to lava! Go watch!
📝 Appeals! Starting this week, YouTube is rolling out a way for creators to appeal some types of YPP suspension up to 7 days BEFORE they take effect. In other words, before creators lose access to monetization! The intent is to 1) Help reviewers get more information before suspensions happen, 2) ensure channels aren't suspended during an ongoing appeals process, and 3) help creators prevent loss of access to monetization when an appeal is successful. You can find more details on the YouTube Community Forum and Creator Insider, where Lauren also covers some updates to channel pages!
📺 TV! Many creators like myself grew up wanting to be on TV. Fast-forward to now, and creators are incredibly becoming TV. When people sit down and turn on, now more than ever, YouTube is what they’re turning to. This is especially meaningful for creators who produce deep, rich content that’s best enjoyed leaned back and on the bigger screen. But don’t take my word for it, the New York Times has a terrific piece up this month quoting YouTube CEO, Neal Mohan as well as creators Rhett and Link from Mythical, and Michelle Khare of Challenge Accepted fame. Give it a read and also check out the Financial Times on how YouTube Sports are showing up in the living room as well!
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🙋 Q&A: “Can you put 1-hour long podcasts on the same channel as 1-minute long Shorts?” Great question, and a variant on one we get all the time, which is — can you have multiple formats on the same channel, like long-form and live? Many creators used to feel like we had to have dedicated channels for each format. A live channel, a long-form channel, a clips channel for Shorts or cut-down long-forms, a podcast channel. Now, YouTube studio has made it much easier from a content-management and analytics segmentation perspective to put all your video eggs in one channel basket. Which means you absolutely can do it. But should you? And that really comes back to — same audience, same channel; different audience, different channel. For podcasts specifically, Shorts that basically highlight the best sound-bites and most meaningful moments can work great on the same channel, using the related video link to give people who discover them in the feed to follow them back to the full episode. But if the Shorts aren’t really in line with the longer videos, they may work better on their own channel where they can find their own audience. If you’re not sure, experiment on the same channel, give it a few weeks or months, really see what works best for you and your channel, and if it doesn’t, try a different channel!
📈 Tip of the Week: If views start going down, you can try to be more sensational to drive them back up, but that strategy might also backfire by burning the audience out. In other words, you get the click on that sensational video, but the person behind the click doesn’t really enjoy it, so next time they see one of your videos, they don’t click. That’s part of the theory behind YouTube’s focus on satisfaction over raw engagement. Not all watch time is equal. People might watch something sensational but they might not feel great after and not come back. But if they watch something that really satisfies them, they may come back again for more, maybe again and again. That’s better for creators and for YouTube. Here’s Todd Beaupré, YouTube’s senior director of growth and discovery, explaining how it works!
Not get with the — satisfying! — contenting!