YouTube retiring little-used video responses on Sept 12, developing ‘more effective fan engagement tools’

YouTube has announced on its YouTube Creators blog that it will be retiring the video response feature that allowed users to leave a video response in the comment field instead of the usual text comment. It’s likely not something that many users will even notice, as YouTube notes that video responses currently only have a click-through rate of about .0004%. That means only around 4 out of every 1 million users that see a video response actually click it. The feature will officially come to an end on September 12, but YouTube says it has plans to implement even better fan engagement tools in the near future:

So, on September 12 we’re going to retire this little-used feature as we work to develop more effective fan engagement tools for creators. The team is focused on enabling you to share video links in comments. Doing this in comments will let creators and viewers add more context to a video, and more context should drive more engagement.

Until the new fan engagement features for video comments roll out, YouTube provides a couple tips for finding and sharing video responses from fans:

In the meantime, you can continue to encourage fans to upload videos with specific titles, hashtags or descriptions (e.g., Video Response To Taylor Swift’s Video “22”), so you can find these by searching for them. If you want to highlight them, you can use playlists and channel sections instead of displaying these videos below yours. Any video responses you or your fans have made will still be available and discoverable.