Rene’s Top Five on YouTube: March 28, 2024 edition

👋 Meet Johanna! When Neal Mohan went from YouTube’s Chief Product Officer to CEO last year, YouTube needed a new CPO… and we’ve gotten a terrific one in Johanna Voolich! I had the opportunity to sit down with her and ask her about herself, her priorities in her new role, and share some creator questions with her from Jacklyn Dallas and Andru Edwards on thumbnail A/B testing and AI tools. And the best news is — this is just the first episode of our new YouTube product-centric series, Release Notes. You can watch the full video on Creator Insider and read all about the new series on the YouTube Blog! (And while you’re on Creator Insider, check out this week’s Newsflash about audience segments for retention, and while you’re on the Blog, check out the 2024 #WomenOfYouTube mentors!)

🩳 Members-only! If you use Memberships on YouTube, and routinely provide your fans with videos and live streams, now you can mix in some Shorts as well for variety. It can be a great way to share a quick update, some BTS, a bit of news, give a sneak preview, ask a question, or just check in between videos and streams. Works the same as other formats, just upload and set or schedule to Members Only. See how it works at YouTube Creators!

🤯 Mythbusters! Hot on the heels — feeds? — of last week’s new Creator Tips Shorts series, where we dove deep into thumbnail best practices, this week is all about the algorithm… and mythbusting the ever loving stuffing out of it! With the help of YouTube’s senior director for growth and discovery, Todd Beaupré, we’re going over myths about when it’s best to post, if one bad video can kill your channel momentum, whether you need to delete outlier videos, and more!

🙋Q&A: “If I uncheck the ‘Publish to subscriptions feed and notify subscribers’ will it improve my long form video performance? Should I uncheck it for Shorts?” Shorts don’t trigger notifications on upload, so that part won’t make a difference. For long-form, most subscribers watch from the home page, so unchecking the sub feed/notifications box wouldn’t prevent them from seeing it on home anyway. Also, performance in one traffic source also tends to affect that specific traffic source (search affects search, home affects home). So subs not seeing it in notifications or sub feed, or clicking in and out quickly, wouldn’t really affect performance on the home page either. You can uncheck that box if you really don’t want subscribers to see a video or set of videos, for example if you’re making a bunch of previously unlisted live streams public all at once, but I wouldn’t encourage anyone to uncheck it in hopes of improving performance for the algorithm..

📈 Tip of the Week: Continuing our theme of Todd and myth-busting, and flipping the tables on the video about deleting high-performing videos is this post on deleting low-performing videos: “YouTubers: Don't delete videos unless you have a very, very good reason. When you delete a video, you delete your channel's connection to the audience that watched that video. If you want to maximize your growth, keep your videos public or unlist them if you must.” In other words, if you remove a video from your public page, you remove it from the watch history of every viewer who’s ever seen it, potentially reducing the likelihood they’ll be connected to your work and recommended future videos from your channel. So think twice, then thrice, even… quadrice? before deleting, privating, or unlisting any videos purely because you think it’ll change your channel’s performance or audience.

Now get with the contenting!