Rene’s Top Five on YouTube: September 28, 2023 Edition
Sep 28, 2023 – [[read-time]] minute read
Hi. Hello. It’s been a minute! Well, a week, but that just means it’s once again time for me to scour YouTube, X/Twitter, Insta-Threads and the rest of the internet to bring you the biggest and most impactful stories for the week!
📺 Alongside our big Made on YouTube event in NYC last week, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan sat down with CBS for a wide-ranging interview covering hot topics like AI, misinformation, and the future of the platform. Neal also spent a ton of time talking with creators like Colin & Samir, Whitney, Adrián Santos, Jordan Harrod, Muaaz, Vyyyper, Luria Petrucci, Jacklyn Dallas, Daniel Batal, Dani Verdari, Felipe Szatkowski, and so many more. It’s amazing to see how much creator feedback informs Neal and our other executives, and energizes everything we do at YouTube!
⚡ ️ Following Made On YouTube, I jumped on Colin & Samir’s Discord for an hour-long live stream where we talked about everything from AI to A/B testing for thumbnails. Hundreds of creators joined us for the Q&A and stayed long after to keep the chat going. (I was hanging at YouTube New York for the stream and yes, that is a ruby Play Button the size of a minivan behind me!) You can watch the replay from the Discord.
⚠️ Advertiser Friendly Guidelines (AFG) are what help creators who want ads on their videos — and a share of ad revenue! — understand what types of content brands consider safe to advertise on. It’s not a new concept — back in the day, explicit lyrics could limit your radio play and a R-rated movie will still typically open to way less box office revenue than a PG-rated one. Creators have had to balance art and commerce for basically ever! This week, Conor from our Monetization Policy team posted an important update on YouTube's Controversial Issues Policy and you can check it out on Creator Insider.
🎨 YouTube Create, our all new, all free mobile editing app, is now available in beta on Android in the U.S. and several other countries. (iOS and even more countries coming next year!) It’s meant to give new and emerging creators a step up from the Shorts camera in the main YouTube app to something that can edit both Shorts and long form, and easily provide voiceover, auto-captions, beat-matching, noise reduction, royalty free music and more. YouTube Creators has a full walkthrough!
📈 Tip of the Week: As a creator, I often feel like my successes are my own, but my failures are all the fault of that algorithm! But as a creator who also wants to continuously improve, I also know it’s way more important to figure out what the audience simply didn’t care for and avoid that same reaction in future videos. One way to do that is to look at Traffic Sources > Browse Features > Subscription and see what the click-through rate (CTR) and watchtime/retention are for the video there. Because the subs feed has NO algorithm, it can give you a reality check and show how the humans who actually seek out your content all on their own are reacting to it. If that response rate is low, the bad-for-our-egos news is — we can’t blame the algorithm. The good-for-our-growth news is — we’ve just empowered ourselves to fix it. (Thanks to Todd B for that tip!)
Now get with the contenting!