Rene’s Top Five on YouTube: October 12, 2023 Edition
Oct 12, 2023 – minute read
Hello Creators! I’m Rene Ritchie, your YouTube Liaison, and when I’m not helping our product and policy teams better understand creators and creators achieve better success on the platform, I’m scouring YouTube, X/Twitter, Insta-Threads and all the Slacks and Discords betwixt and between to bring you your weekly dose of everything new and impactful for creators. Starting with why I’m now in seasonably chilly Toronto, Ontario!
🎤 It’s interview season! Dynamic creator economy duo, Colin and Samir, released their chat with YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, where they delve into the vision for YouTube’s future, the state of Shorts, NFL Sunday Ticket, and the impact of AI on the platform and creators. I had the good fortune of watching this being recorded since it happened the day before Made on YouTube, and it was great to see what C&S felt creators cared most about and how much Neal cares about creators and making YouTube truly feel like our home. Watch the whole interview!
🎤 Genius tech creator, Jacklyn Dallas, also sat down with head of YouTube engineering, Scott Silver, to talk about custom encoding silicon, how ContentID works, the tech behind the platform, the future of AI, and much much more! I got to watch this one as well, and there was this moment I loved where Jacklyn asked about training AI models and Scott just lit up, leaned in, and let just all his tech enthusiasm loose. Don’t sleep on this one either!
🍁 It was #YouTubeCanadianCreatorDay this week, and that meant a warm welcome from Head of YouTube Canada, Andrew Peterson, and Partner Manager extraordinaire, Maria Cortellucci. Creators came in from across the country to meet, greet, share feedback and experiences, and of course — party! There were sessions by Global Lead of Content Strategy, Kyle Monahan, Head of Strategic Shopping Partnerships, Crystal Marrie, Head of Canada Government Affairs & Public Policy, Jeanette Patell, and yours truly. I sat in on a Q&A panel with Maria, Andrew, and Jeanette, and hosted a Generative AI panel with Sabrina from Answers in Progress, James from Hacksmith Industries and AI expert Aryeh Bookbinder. We’re hoping to do more of these, as well as our #YouTubeCreatorCollective meet-ups in the near future!
🩳 Shorts creators! You can now add a Related Video to a Short as part of the upload flow on desktop! It works the same way as adding an End Screen for a long form video and also like End Screens, you can still add and change them at any time after you upload. It’s desktop-only for now — but we’re working on mobile! — so if you’re uploading on mobile, just stick with adding the Related Video link afterwards via desktop.
📈 Tip of the week: Sometimes we creators look at our suggested traffic, see videos that have nothing to do with our own content or topics, and worry that it means the algorithm doesn’t understand our channels. What’s actually happening is that suggested traffic doesn’t just come from related videos. Many of the recommendations in suggested come from the viewer’s watch history and people like to watch wildly different channels and topics. Just look at your own watch history. That said, if you do notice a pattern in suggested traffic, even if a little different than you expect, you can certainly experiment around it and see if you can pull even more views that way.
Now get with the contenting!