Rene’s Top Five on YouTube: May 30, 2024 edition
May 30, 2024 – minute read
I’m Rene Ritchie, your friendly neighborhood Liaison, which means I spend about half my time helping YouTube better empathize with creators and the other half helping creators better succeed on YouTube. Betwixt and between that, I scour YouTube, X/Twitter, Instagram, Threads, and Discord to find you the most impactful stories of the week. All so that I can share them with you!
🗞️ Watch all about it: Johnny Harris is a creator journalist covering everything from geopolitics to why fast-food ice cream machines are so broken, so often. Prior to working at YouTube, I was editorial director for a large tech network. We’ve both gone from working for media companies to being full-time independent creators, and we’ve both learned a ton along the way. Which is why it was so especially delightful for me to sit down with Johnny at YouTube HQ and talk about the differences between old, new, and creator media, the state of news on YouTube, and where we see it all going next. Yeah, we go deep! Check out the full podcast on Creator Insider.
🛝 Creativity Unlimited: YouTube CEO, Neal Mohan, sat down with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang for a terrific interview on everything from the creator economy to AI, and all the opportunity and responsibility that comes from being, well… YouTube. In addition to Neal continuing his delightful ascent as one of the best collab partners on the platform, and the incredible growth of YouTube on televisions, two of his comments really stood out to me. First, “[YouTube]’s business is successful when our creators’ businesses are successful”. It’s literally the core bond of the Partner Program — that YouTube and creators succeed together — but being so constantly reaffirmed by the CEO, we just can’t hear that enough. Second, that creators want tools, whether they’re AI or not, that let us do what we couldn’t do in the past, or faster than we could ever do it. That’s such an important insight and something I desperately hope all creator tool builders keep in mind as AI continues to develop across the industry. Watch the whole video on Bloomberg’s channel!
🏴☠️ Creators Collected: Last week, creators and crews from some of the top teams on YouTube came together in Salt Lake City, Utah. Todd Beaupré, YouTube’s Director of Discovery and growth, Jessica Wang, Head of Editorial, and yours truly did a talk on demystifying the algorithm. (Fun fact: Whenever you see a new Algorithm video on Creator Insider with me and Todd, it’s the result of distilling down talks like this so we can share them with everyone!). We also had Kim Larson, VP of Gaming and Creators, Thomas Kim, Director of the YouTube Partner Program, and Brynn Evans, Director of UX working on the TV experience, as well as Partner Managers extraordinaire Reed Fernandez and Jason Cosgrove on hand, along with our incredible host, Shaun McBride — the one and only Shonduras. The talks themselves were fantastic but what was even better was all the talking with everyone at the #YouTubeCreatorCollective that followed. From the outside, creators know what we want but can only guess at how the systems at YouTube really work. From the inside, YouTube knows what it wants to build but can’t ever really imagine how creators will respond and actually use all of it. It’s like both sides of a wall trying to imagine what’s on the other side, but when we all come together, we can just ask, learn, appreciate, and figure out how to improve for everyone. Literally all my hearts.
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💛 Members only: Ads may be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about YouTube monetization, but fan funding, including memberships, can be every bit as powerful. If you’re a creator using AdSense, memberships can provide a second income stream. If your content or strategy isn’t well suited for ads, memberships can provide an alternative income stream. Either way, memberships work by connecting you with your audience and providing effectively limitless ways to deepen that connection. If you’re just getting started with memberships and members-only videos, Shorts, streams, posts, and more, YouTube Creators has a brand new video that’ll show you everything you need to know. If you’re looking to take memberships to the next level, YouTube’s Director of Fan Funding, Bangaly, and one of the biggest streamers on the platform, Emily D. Baker, got you on Creator Insider.
🙋Q&A: “If I want to post videos in two languages, should I make two separate channels?” In general, if you think videos will appeal to the same audience, try them on the same channel. If you think they’ll appeal to different audiences, try them on different channels. The one caveat with languages is if you intend to use YouTube’s multi-language audio (MLA) feature where the same video can have multiple audio tracks in multiple languages (see my chat about MLA with MrBeast for more). You upload the main video, then all the separate tracks for all the additional languages you want. (MLA is in testing now and should roll out to more creators later this year.) If you want to make not just separate language tracks but distinct videos as well because you want to better and more deeply serve cultural or regional differences, then separate channels will likely give each the space they need to thrive and grow faster.
Now get with le contenting! (La contenting?)