Rene’s Top Five on YouTube: March 21, 2024 edition
Mar 21, 2024 – minute read
Shorts week! Not, you know, a short week, but a week with Shorts! Lots of them! About some really impactful topics! And since it’s my job to help YouTube better understand creators, and creators better succeed on YouTube, it’s just exactly the type of stuff I spend the week scouring YouTube, X/Twitter, Instagram, Threads, and Discord to find! So let’s get to it!
🏷️ Label up! Starting this week, creators need to disclose in YouTube Studio if the content we're uploading has been altered or synthetically generated in a meaningful way. You can find all the details in the YouTube blog post and help center, or get the bullet points from my YouTube Short or Threads post. It follows an earlier blog post from November, and will help viewers by labeling realistic, meaningful altered or synthetic content in the description, or on the player if it’s about something particularly sensitive. You can also check out the discussion on Twitter/X for answers to some of the more common questions!
🩳 New Shorts Series! Hot on the heels of our fresh new podcast on thumbnails and packaging with Chucky from MrBeast and Todd from YouTube Discovery, we’re launching our fresh new 2024 Shorts season as well. It’ll include creator advice on best practices, myth-busting with the teams here at YouTube, news and announcements like the item above, as well as more of what you all loved from last year — insights from our fellow creators. The first series is launching now, and we’ll be replying to questions as well, including with future Shorts, so make sure you ask away! I can’t tell you how excited I am to be ramping all of this up, but I kinda don’t have to — you’ll see it on my face in every Short!
📈 Off the charts! There are two inescapable truths in this corner of the multiverse — the better a video retains its audience, the better it will tend to perform, and Mario Joos (formerly director of retention for MrBeast) will instantly find absolutely anything in YouTube Analytics that relates to retention. Hence, this post: “A new YouTube Studio update enables Creators to analyze their retention charts by audience segments!” And yes, it started rolling out this week and will be rolling out to all creators over the next little while. Mario is excited for 4 reasons: “1. It allows us to learn more about the various preferences of audiences who watch our videos. 2. We can begin to better optimize our content to reach audiences who we haven’t reached before this update. 3. It provides us with more transparency regarding the fact that a single retention chart isn’t an accurate representation of who we are reaching. 4. It helps those who use the promotions tab to learn more about their organic viewership without having the retention charts messed up by paid traffic.” I’m with Mario — I can’t wait to see what creators do with this. For a breakdown of the specific segments, check out his post!
🙋Q&A: Will adding the altered and synthetically generated disclosure labels to your video hurt its performance with the algorithm? This is one of the most frequent questions we’ve gotten since the announcement went up earlier this week and the simple answer is — no. The YouTube discovery system (the algorithm) won’t be using the disclosure labels when determining recommendations or ranking. Likewise, the labels won’t have any effect on a video’s ability to be monetized on YouTube. The videos will perform and monetize based on their own merit, and be subject to YouTube’s policies, including community guidelines and ad-friendly guidelines, just like any other video on YouTube
📈 Tip of the Week: Here’s a little taste from our aforementioned fresh new Shorts series — what a thumbnail really needs to do: 1. Video is competitive, people have infinite options but very finite time. When they’re looking for something to watch, your thumbnail has to get them to stop scanning or scrolling and yank their attention. 2. People won’t click because you want them to. They’ll only click when you make them want to. Once they lock on your thumbnail, it needs to make them so curious, captivated, or otherwise interested, That they’re just itching to click. 3. Worse than losing the view… is losing the viewer. Whatever your thumbnail promises, your video absolutely has to deliver, or people will feel click-baited, bored, or burned… click out, and maybe skip your next videos as a result. So, reward that click immediately in the intro and keep paying it off right to the very end!
Now get with the contenting!