Rene’s Top Five on YouTube: August 17, 2023 Edition
Aug 17, 2023 – [[read-time]] minute read
Hi. I’m Rene Ritchie, your YouTube Creator Liaison! And when I’m not helping YouTube better empathize with creators, and creators better understand YouTube, I’m scouring the internet so I can bring you all the biggest and most impactful stories on the platform and in the creator space!
These are this week's highlights!
🔗 Creators can now add prominent links on our channel headers. These replace the old banner links, are more transparent for viewers, and more numerous — up to 14! — for creators. We can customize the titles, which means we can include calls-to-action. They show favicons on mobile, so they’re super glanceable. And, starting August 23, they’ll be visible to all of our audiences as well. Unlike descriptions and pinned comments, there are only one set of links per channel, but just like descriptions and comments, they’re only a couple or few taps away from any video. Use them to link up your blog, social media accounts, channel-level sponsors, major affiliates, courses, and products — whatever is most meaningful to your business and helpful to your audience! Take a look at how some creators are already using them!
🚀 Attention live streamers! YouTube can now ingest AV1 and HEVC live streams over Enhanced RTMP! That means creators can use the most popular protocol to stream up to 2160p — aka 4K! — with less bandwidth at lower bitrates. All while maintaining high image quality. And yes, HDR is supported via HLS over HEVC, and 5.1 surround sound support has also been added! Find out more in the YouTube Help Center
📊 If you’re deep into YouTube Analytics do yourself — and your channel! — a favor and go to the Audience tab and under the graph, click on SEE MORE. You’ll launch into Advanced Analytics and get a list of your videos sorted by Returning Viewers, along with columns for New Viewers, Unique Viewers, and Average Views Per Viewer. In other words, you can see which of your videos are not only bringing in viewers… but bringing them back! That way, you can not only make more, similar videos to keep the growth going, but figure out additional videos that people who watched those would just love to watch next, and really spark that bingeing! It’s pure metric gold!
🥒 The YouTube Blog is launching a brand-new series where creators have to answer the extra-hard questions… or take a shot of extra-nasty pickle juice! Yeah, total yuckface-dot-gif! First up is Haley Kalil, one of the smartest and most strategic Shorts creators in the industry — and we all get to find out the one creator she’d be more than happy to totally and utterly ghost! We’ve also got more #CreatorAdvice coming your way, hot and fresh from Mark Rober, Ali Spagnola, NerdForge, and William Osman, who wants us all to fail and face-plant, a lot… until we don’t anymore!
🤓 Huge thanks to The Editing Podcast for having me on to talk all things YouTube. The co-hosts, Hayden Hillier-Smith (who’s edited for MrBeast and Logan Paul, among others), and Jordan Orme (who edits music videos, commercials, and more) are absolute geniuses at their craft, and it was such a pleasure comparing how YouTube and traditional media like music, TV, and movies differ… but also don’t. Come for the passionate discussion about the algorithm, stay for how to build an audience that loves your work. Full video on YouTube!
Those are the highlights, now get with the contenting!