Ecommerce Management Advisors
Ecommerce Management Advisors
YouTube upgrades Analytics with format-specific filtering, allowing creators to track real-time performance across longform, Shorts, and livestreams.
YouTube is rolling out an update with changes across desktop, mobile, TV, and YouTube Music.
The update brings visual changes to YouTube’s interface across all platforms.
These changes may improve readability and navigation, particularly on mobile devices.
YouTube’s Chief Product Officer, Johanna Voolich, stated in an interview:
“On the mobile app we’re doing things like updating the colors to be consistent with the YouTube brand and we’re also making the landscape experience a lot cleaner bigger thumbnails bigger font.”
You can now resize and move the miniplayer within the YouTube mobile app.
Additionally, you now have more control over playback speed.
Voolich explained,
“We have variable playback speed but now you can do it at the smallest finest grain increments for people who want to have a lot of control.”
YouTube is introducing collaborative playlists, allowing multiple people to contribute to shared playlists.
Describing a potential use case, Voolich said,
“A really good use case might be I’m having a party I want to invite my friends over I want to watch some comedy together I put on my favorite comedy videos and then I ask them and they could just add theirs to it we can pop it on the TV and sit and watch together.”
This feature will be accessible via a special link or QR code on TV platforms.
A new Sleep Timer feature allows you to set a duration, after which videos will automatically pause.
This may be useful for people who often fall asleep while watching content.
YouTube is implementing a badge system to acknowledge user engagement.
Voolich described this feature as:
“… ways to recognize the community and the super fans and the people for using YouTube and the milestones that they’ve created within the YouTube community.”
For people who watch on their TV, YouTube is launching immersive channel pages.
Now, a video will automatically play when visiting a creator’s channel on a connected TV
This change could potentially impact how viewers discover and engage with content on larger screens.
While many features are available now, some, like playlist voting, are scheduled for release later in the year.
With these changes, YouTube is showing its commitment to improving the platform based on user needs and preferences.
Voolich said, “These are the features that people ask for the most and what the people want.”
She encouraged continued feedback, adding, “Keep those requests coming.”
Featured Image: Screenshot from blog.youtube.com, October 2024.
YouTube expands Shorts to 3 minutes, adds templates, AI tools, and the option to show fewer Shorts on the homepage.
At the “Made on YouTube” event, which was held at Pier 57 on Sept. 18, 2024, CEO Neal Mohan, product executives, and top creators introduced nine new features and tools aimed at helping creators express their creativity, build communities, and grow their businesses.
Here is a quick overview of the announcements:
For more details, you can read about the “Made On YouTube” event here and watch the New YouTube Features — Explained! video below.
In the video, YouTube’s Chief Product Officer, Johanna Voolich, says, “On YouTube, success isn’t one-size-fits-all.” It is as distinctive as the video platform’s talented creators and artists.
Whether it is about expressing yourself, building a community, or achieving financial independence, YouTube aims to provide lasting opportunities for creators to chart their own path to success.
The most eye-catching announcement at this week’s “Made on YouTube” event was Google DeepMind’s Veo.
Screenshot from blog.google, September 2024Last year, YouTube launched Dream Screen, which allows creators to generate limitless backgrounds for YouTube Shorts.
While millions of creators are already using Dream Screen, YouTube announced its plans to integrate Google DeepMind’s advanced video-generating model, Veo, into YouTube Shorts later this year.
With Veo, creators will be able to produce even more immersive backgrounds.
For example, BookTubers could immerse themselves in the world of the classic novel, The Secret Garden, or a fashion designer could instantly bring creative and playful design ideas to life to present to their audience.
This means creators will soon be able to generate standalone six-second video clips for their YouTube Shorts using Veo.
For instance, if you are reviewing your footage and sense that something is needed to bring it all together, you can easily create a single clip that seamlessly integrates with the content you have already filmed.
These creations will include a SynthID watermark, along with a label that clearly informs viewers they were generated using AI.
YouTube also unveiled an Inspiration Tab makeover.
Screenshot from blog.google, September 2024As 20.4 million YouTube creators worldwide already know all too well, generating fresh ideas can be tough.
So, the Inspiration Tab in YouTube Studio is getting a makeover, creating a brainstorming buddy that is powered by generative AI.
It will assist in generating suggestions that you can develop into complete projects, including video ideas, titles, thumbnails, and outlines that align with your style.
Next year, YouTube will roll out a new shortcut that will take you directly to the Inspiration Tab from any source of inspiration, such as your top comments, other videos, or even your own content library.
YouTube understands that the bond between creators and their loyal fans is special. So, they introduced four new tools to build even stronger connections:
Creators can think of this feature as their own space on their channel to discuss videos, share fan art, and connect with others.
Communities are live on select channels, with wider access planned for early 2025.
A new feature to spotlight emerging creators. Fans can “hype” a video, boosting its chances of being discovered.
Hype has already been tested in Brazil, Türkiye, and Taiwan, and will soon roll out to other countries.
YouTube’s automatic dubbing tool allows creators to generate translated audio tracks, making content accessible in multiple languages.
Soon, it will support even more languages, and they are testing a feature that will replicate tone and ambiance for a more natural listening experience.
YouTube is reimagining the Comments tab in the YouTube Studio app, turning it into a “Community” hub for deeper engagement.
Responding to comments can be overwhelming for creators, so YouTube is introducing AI-powered suggestions to help creators craft responses faster, along with tools like community spotlights and audience metrics.
YouTube’s creative ecosystem contributed more than $35 billion to the U.S. GDP in 2022, which supported over 390,000 full-time equivalent jobs in the country, according to a report by Oxford Economics.
“Today, YouTube is the only platform that shares revenue with creators at scale, across multiple formats. Our YouTube Partner Program pays out more than any other creator monetization platform, and we’ve paid $70 billion to creators, artists, and media companies over the last three years,” notes Voolich.
YouTube has also unveiled three new features to reinforce their support for the Creator Economy:
YouTube launched digital items designed to boost real-time fan interaction and provide a new way for creators to earn.
Initially, this will roll out in the U.S. for vertical livestreams, making it simpler for viewers to engage, show excitement, and participate actively, enhancing the live experience.
YouTube Shopping now has over 250,000 creators! The affiliate program is available in the U.S. and South Korea, and YouTube is expanding to Indonesia through a partnership with Shopee.
Soon, YouTube will bring the program to Thailand and Vietnam, allowing more creators to promote products and grow their businesses globally.
Creators are increasingly creating content specifically for the big screen, with TV revenue growing over 30% year over year.
To support this, YouTube introduced features like organizing content into seasons and episodes, making it easier for viewers to follow their favorite shows.
Additionally, YouTube enhances the TV experience with immersive content from creators’ channels, better subscription management, and easier access to links in descriptions.
The annual YouTube event did not fail to deliver. By unveiling nine new features at Made on YouTube 2024, the platform made its biggest splash since Brandcast back in May.
What does this mean for YouTube?
Creators are central to YouTube’s success. They are the ones who bring their ideas, stories, and visions to the platform. And they are uploading more than 500 hours of content to YouTube every minute.
What does this mean for brands and their agencies?
Well, creators have turned YouTube into the second-most visited website in the world, after Google Search.
As of September 2024, YouTube had more than 2.5 billion monthly users, who collectively watch more than 1 billion hours of videos every day. And YouTube Shorts is now averaging over 70 billion daily views from billions of monthly logged-in users.
So, brands and their agencies can reach potential customers while they’re searching, browsing, or watching YouTube videos.
At Brandcast back in May, YouTube unveiled new ad offerings, touted creator influence, and shared strong viewership metrics. At Made on YouTube this week, it announced a lot of new products and updated features that aim to give creators the opportunity to build engaging communities, drive sustainable businesses, and express creativity on their platform.
And as any fan of the movie Ghostbusters (1984) can tell you, that makes this “the biggest interdimensional cross rip since the Tunguska Blast of 1909.”
More resources:
Featured Image: YouTube CEO Neal Mohan speaks onstage at Made on YouTube at Pier 57 on September 18, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images for Made on YouTube 2024)
YouTube launches new Shorts thumbnail editing features, allowing creators to add text and filters on mobile devices post-upload.
YouTube expands course creation feature, allowing more creators to offer paid educational content and unlock new revenue streams.
With the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris officially opening today, DAIVID used its advanced content testing platform to see which ads from the global sporting event have elicited the most intense positive emotions of all time.
Procter & Gamble (P&G) dominates DAIVID’s chart, with five of the top seven ads – including the top three positions.
So, the rest of the search and marketing community will want to figure out what the American multinational consumer goods corporation headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio has understood for more than a dozen years.
A P&G 2014 Winter Olympics campaign honoring the crucial support mothers provide to athletes is the most emotionally engaging Olympic ad ever.
This accolade comes from DAIVID, a creative effectiveness platform, which found that the “Pick Them Back Up” campaign evoked the strongest positive emotions among viewers.
“P&G Thank You, Mom | Pick Them Back Up | Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games” led the chart with 59.6% of viewers responding with intense positive emotions. As the video’s description says, “For teaching us that falling only makes us stronger. For giving us the encouragement to try again. Thank you, Mom.”
Following the (emotional) success from 2014, Thank You, Mom – The Winter Olympics (2018) was close behind in second place with a score of 59.5%.
This video guides the viewer through moms supporting their kids with their dreams and through their circumstances – whether it be bias over color, religion, disability, or sexual orientation.
P&G’s ad from the London 2012 Olympics took third place, with 58.4% of viewers responding with intense positive emotions.
In this 2012 edition of Procter & Gamble’s ad campaign, supportive mothers take their children to practices and help the kids deal with setbacks on their way to becoming successful Olympic athletes.
The UK’s National Lottery ad, ” National Lottery funded athletes – TV advert Extended Version,” took fourth place with a score of 56.9%.
It was inspired by the story of 800-meter runner Jenny Meadows’ mother and showcased how National Lottery funding supports British athletes in achieving their dreams.
Another from P&G’s Thank You, Mom series for the Rio 2016 Olympics was placed fifth, with 55.9% of viewers responding with intense positive emotions.
In this two-minute commercial, P&G features supportive mothers helping their children persevere through difficult circumstances on their way to becoming Olympic champions.
The brand positions itself as the “Proud sponsor of Moms” and uses the tagline: “It takes someone strong to make someone strong. Thank you, Mom.”
Channel 4, a British free-to-air public broadcast television channel, took sixth place with its “Superhumans” trailer for the Rio Paralympics 2016. The 3-minute video ad got a score of 55.7%.
Your Goodness is Your Greatness from P&G took seventh place, with 55.5% of viewers responding with intense positive emotions.
Now, P&G was founded in 1837 by William Procter and James Gamble. Do you think this gave them a head start on the rest of the field?
In a press release, Ian Forrester, CEO and founder of DAIVID, said:
“When it comes to emotional Olympic campaigns, no brand has ever gone faster, higher or stronger than P&G.
The company’s incredible tributes to the role mums play in helping to put future Olympic champions on the path to Games glory really tug at the emotional heartstrings and are capable of turning even the most cynical viewers into emotional wrecks.
‘Pick Them Back Up’ is a worthy gold winner, generating some of the most intense feelings of positivity we’ve ever seen for an ad.”
He added, “It’s also great to see Channel 4’s sensational campaign, ‘We’re The Superhumans’ in the top 6. Generating incredibly intense feelings of inspiration, the ad has played a crucial role in putting the Paralympics firmly in the hearts and minds of viewers all around the world.”
What can I add?
I’ve known Forrester since September 2012, when he joined the Unruly Group as global insight lead. And I talked with him several times over the next six years about Unruly’s Viral Spiral charts, which showed which video ads were among the most shared.
So, I’ve learned that Forrester has the kind of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) that not only Google talks about, but skeptical journalists and bloggers value, too.
That’s why I’ve quoted him – along with other video gurus – in articles like “What’s The Alternative To Spending $7 Million On A Super Bowl Ad?” as well as “How To Make A Video Go Viral.”
And that’s why I’ve cited DAIVID’s critical data and strategic insights in articles like “The Best 5 Super Bowl Ads in 2024 (Brands That Got It Right)” as well as “39 Emotions Digital Marketers Can Use In Advertising.”
But if you want to figure out what P&G already understands, then it’s worth spending a few moments learning more about DAIVID’s methodology.
Based in London, DAIVID leverages technologies like facial coding, eye tracking, and computer vision to help advertisers enhance the emotional and business impact of their campaigns.
Their platform allows marketers to assess and improve ad effectiveness on a large scale using advanced data analysis methods.
DAIVID’s study of the most emotionally engaging Olympics ads utilized its Self-Serve solution, trained on millions of consumer data points, to predict the emotional reactions and attention levels ads would generate, along with their potential brand and business impacts.
The analysis involved 56 Olympic ads, excluding those from the current Paris Olympics.
So, watch the seven ads above and see for yourself what kind of video content triggers intense positive emotions in viewers. You may see something that I might have missed.
But the next time you want to know if your ad creative is working, test it. I know, talking about testing social videos the way that Madison Avenue once tested TV commercials seems like pie in the sky.
But with AI as your co-pilot, making creative testing affordable, you can fix problems and identify solutions faster and easier than it could back in the old days.
Okay, this may not bring tears to your eyes – like “Pick Them Back Up” probably will – but it can help you catch up with P&G, which already has a 12-year head start.
More resources:
Featured Image: Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock
YouTube Shorts introduces new creation tools, including auto layout, text-to-speech, enhanced captions, and more.
Instead of counting the number of clicks or views a video gets, YouTube’s algorithms focus on ensuring viewers are happy with what they watch.
This article examines how YouTube’s algorithms work to help users find videos they like and keep them watching for longer.
We’ll explain how YouTube selects videos for different parts of its site, such as the home page and the “up next” suggestions.
We’ll also discuss what makes some videos appear more than others and how YouTube matches videos to each person’s interests.
By breaking this down, we hope to help marketers and YouTubers understand how to work better with YouTube’s system.
A summary of all facts is listed at the end.
Early on, YouTube ranked videos based on watch time data, assuming longer view durations correlated with audience satisfaction.
However, they realized that total watch time alone was an incomplete measure, as viewers could still be left unsatisfied.
So, beginning in the early 2010s, YouTube prioritized viewer satisfaction metrics for ranking content across the site.
The algorithms consider signals like:
The recommendation algorithms continuously learn from user behavior patterns and explicit satisfaction inputs to identify the best videos to recommend.
The YouTube homepage curates and ranks a selection of videos a viewer will most likely watch.
The ranking factors include:
This covers metrics like click-through rates from impressions and average view duration. When shown on its homepages, YouTube uses these traditional viewer behavioral signals to gauge how compelling a video is for other viewers.
Besides performance data, YouTube relies heavily on personalized relevance to customize the homepage feed for each viewer’s unique interests. This personalization is based on insights from their viewing history, subscriptions, and engagement patterns with specific topics or creators.
The suggested videos column is designed to keep viewers engaged by identifying other videos relevant to what they’re currently watching and aligned with their interests.
The ranking factors include:
YouTube analyzes viewing patterns to understand which videos are frequently watched together or sequentially by the same audience segments. This allows them to recommend related content the viewer will likely watch next.
The algorithm looks for videos covering topics or categories similar to the video being watched currently to provide tightly relevant suggestions.
A viewer’s viewing patterns and history are a strong signal for suggesting videos they’ll likely want to watch again.
Videos from channels that viewers frequently watch and engage with are prioritized as suggestions to keep them connected to favored creators.
YouTube has acknowledged the following external variables can impact video performance:
Being a small or emerging creator can also be a positive factor, as YouTube tries to get them discovered through recommendations.
The company says it closely monitors success rates for new creators and is working on further advancements like:
With viewer satisfaction as the overarching goal, this is how creators can maximize the potential of having their videos recommended:
While putting together this article, I reached out to industry experts to ask about their take on YouTube’s algorithms and what’s currently working for them.
Greg Jarboe, the president and co-founder of SEO-PR and author of YouTube and Video Marketing, says:
“The goals of YouTube’s search and discovery system are twofold: to help viewers find the videos they want to watch, and to maximize long-term viewer engagement and satisfaction. So, to optimize your videos for discovery, you should write optimized titles, tags, and descriptions. This has been true since July 2011, when the YouTube Creator Playbook became available to the public for the first time.
However, YouTube changed its algorithm in October 2012 – replacing ‘view count’ with ‘watch time.’ That’s why you need to go beyond optimizing your video’s metadata. You also need to keep viewers watching with a variety of techniques. For starters, you need to create a compelling opening to your videos and then use effective editing techniques to maintain and build interest through the video.
There are other ranking factors, of course, but these are the two most important ones. I’ve used these video SEO best practices to help the Travel Magazine channel increase from just 1,510 to 8.7 million views. And these video SEO techniques help the SonoSite channel grow from 99,529 views to 22.7 million views.
The biggest recent trend is the advent of YouTube Shorts, which is discoverable on the YouTube homepage (in the new Shorts shelf), as well as across other parts of the app. For more details, read “Can YouTube Shorts Be Monetized? Spoiler Alert: Some Already Are!“
Brie E. Anderson, an SEO and digital marketing consultant, says:
“In my experience, there are a few things that are really critical when it comes to optimizing for YouTube, most of which won’t be much of a surprise. The first is obviously the keyword you choose to target. It’s really hard to beat out really large and high authority channels, much like it is on Google. That being said, using tools like TubeBuddy can help you get a sense of the keywords you can compete for.
Another big thing is focusing on the SERP for YouTube Search. Your thumbnail has to be attention-grabbing – this is honestly what we test the most and one of the most impactful tests we run. More times than not, you’re looking at a large face, and max four words. But the amount of contrast happening in the thumbnail and how well it explains the topic of the video is the main concern.
Also, adding the ‘chapters’ timestamps can be really helpful. YouTube actually shows these in the SERP, as mentioned in this article.
Lastly, providing your own .srt file with captions can really help YouTube understand what your video is about.
Aside from actual on-video optimizations, I usually encourage people to write blog posts and embed their videos or, at the very least, link to them. This just helps with indexing and building some authority. It also increases the chance that the video will help YOUR SITE rank (as opposed to YouTube).”
Sources: YouTube’s Creator Insider Channel (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), How YouTube Works
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Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock
YouTube tests “Add Yours” sticker for Shorts, allowing creators to start trends and viewers to respond.