Expanding Community on YouTube
Community has always been at the heart of YouTube. From supporting each other, to touring the world, to making each other laugh, you and your audience have established strong bonds on YouTube. This connection goes beyond video, so about a year ago we invited a few creators to test out a new place to connect with fans in-between uploads with polls, pictures, text, GIFs, and more. We called this place Community. Creators have been doing amazing things with it, such as Anitta sharing behind-the-scenes photos, Marshmello teasing sneak preview GIFs, and Vidya polling subscribers for ideas. So starting today we're excited to expand Community to creators with over 10,000 subscribers.
We’ve been working closely with creators to build, test and refine this product. Now, we want to take this opportunity to share some of our learnings and updates.
- Involve your community: Fans love to participate in the creative process! Grav3yardgirl has been using Community to connect with her eight million strong swamp family, and gather input for what videos they'd like to see. She let her fans choose what to unbox next and heard them loud and clear that they wanted her to bring back the much-loved “Wreck It Wednesdays".
- Bring fans backstage: Creators have been using Community posts to build anticipation for a new video or upcoming big production. Lele Pons shares GIFs that act as a trailer for her next video, while Kevin Durant posts photos on NBA gameday.
- Increase your reach: We’ve seen creators successfully cross-promote other channels and creators they love through Community, such as Anwar, Hannah, Lele helping drive traffic to Rudy’s first music video launch.
- Improved discoverability: As with videos, we want to show the right Community post to the right user, so we’ve made updates to how these posts reach your audience across YouTube. Your most engaged viewers can now see Community posts in the Home feed, whether they’re subscribed to your channel or not. We’ve also optimized our notifications so that your fans are eligible to receive them, but they won’t necessarily get a new notification for every new Community post.
- New formats: We want to do even more to give you easy ways to express yourself and engage with fans, so today we’re also unveiling a new feature. Reels are YouTube’s spin on the popular “stories” format, but designed specifically for YouTube creators. We learned that you want the flexibility to create multiple Reels and have them not expire, so we’ll give you those options. We’re also bringing creator-focused features like linking to YouTube videos and YouTube-y stickers. Just like we did with Community, we’ll be experimenting with a beta version of Reels to learn and improve the product before expanding to more creators.