It could soon become a lot easier to find videos on YouTube or uncover the next big vlogger.
YouTube is experimenting with an “Explore” Tab, which is currently available to a small subset (one percent) of iOS users. However, if the test goes well, the platform could roll out the feature to all users.
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YouTube’s director of product management and host of YouTube’s Creator Insider channel, Tom Leung, posted a video explaining how the feature works along with its aim:
“Explore is designed to help you be exposed to different kinds of topics, videos or channels that you might not otherwise encounter, but they’re still personalized,” Leung said. “They’re still based on your viewing activity.”
The feature competes with other social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. Ultimately, it’s designed to persuade users to spend as much time as possible on YouTube.
The new Explore tab, meanwhile, will be more similar to the Explore tab offered by, say, Instagram, which aside from the personalized “for you” channel, also offers up feeds dedicated to science, sports, art, and more for users to scroll through. Twitter provides a similar service, which lets users scroll through different types of feeds that aren’t necessarily full of people that they follow.
Along with testing an Explore feature, YouTube recently announced support for hashtags—another step to help users find videos (and help creators attract viewers).
The video platform now allows uploaders to add hashtags to their descriptions and video titles to make it easier for viewers to find their channels and content. Like in other places on the internet, YouTube's hashtags are clickable and will bring up a results page with other videos tagged with the same thing. The website will even display the top three hashtags at the bottom of the video and above its title.
For social media influencers, YouTube’s Explore feature could beef up their followings and help them better attract audiences. That could lead to more ad revenue on their videos or even marketing partnerships with organizations.
For marketers, it means more opportunities to find influencers that can reach target audiences. It could also help grow branded channels.
From the creators' perspective, Leung says the tab should help their audience growth as people access a wider variety of content -- currently YouTube's recommendations are usually based around creators whose videos they've already watched.[…] In May, the company revealed that it has 1.8 billion people registered viewers every month. Before that, we learned that 400 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute—plenty for the "Explore" feature to draw from.
Similarly to Instagram’s Explore tab, the feature will help users discover more videos and creators that usually get buried under the thousands of other daily content uploads.In addition to users discovering more videos, this feature will also work in favor of creators. Their videos will be exposed to new audiences, even if they don’t make the trending list, that have probably never stumbled across their channel before.
[…] Currently, YouTube recommend videos to users that are often from the same creators that they watch frequently or showcase already established YouTubers.
Though this feature is just in the testing stages, YouTube is already communicating with its influencers—something the platform has been criticized for in the past.
In his video, Leung said:
A lot of folks have been saying, “Hey, you guys at YouTube: You’re running experiments all the time. Why don’t you let us know ahead of time if it’s going to impact creators or if you think creators will be interested.” And we kind of did that with the video Barbara did about the custom thumbnail experiment—this one is another [type of announcement video].
What do you think of the feature, PR Daily readers?
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