Announced in October, the YouTube Reporting API lets Creators see detailed metrics about their videos. Today, the API has been updated with historical data going back 180 days. In other features, the Android app is testing a feature that allows users to quickly see their progress through a video.
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.
Last month we told you that YouTube had rolled out its new YouTube One Channel design to a limited number of parter channels, but today the new channel layout is officially available to everyone. You can check out an example of the new layout here. YouTube announced on its Creators blog that all users can now opt in to the new channel design by visiting the One Channel website below:
Check out www.youtube.com/onechannel and click the button at the bottom to get started. We’ll migrate your channel to the new design, and walk you through it. For a limited time, you’ll be able to switch back to the previous design if you like.
YouTube provided some tips to get you started with the new channel design:
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Google announced via its Official YouTube Partners & Creators Blog that it would begin rolling Bulk Actions for all YouTube users. The feature allows users to make updates to multiple or all videos at once for tasks, such as: adding tags, selecting monetization settings, and editing the privacy preferences of videos. YouTube said the feature is now available to all users through the Video Manager. Select the videos you want to change to access the feature, and then follow “Actions > Advanced.”
Google announced today on the YouTube Creator blog that it is today rolling out new features for sharing videos on YouTube, Google+, and elsewhere. Now, when uploading a video to YouTube and sharing it directly with social networks, YouTube will allow you to customize the message displayed alongside your video, as highlighted in the image above. Google explained:
Now, when you upload your videos to YouTube, you can write your own post to your fans… Where will this post appear? In YouTube feeds, the text will be merged into the upload feed item (exactly the same as if you were to upload a video, then make a channel post about the same video, but without the extra effort). This also works with the scheduled publishing feature, offering you even greater convenience… As the video and post will be shared to your other connected social accounts as well, you no longer have go to each site to manually customize a post for each video.
Google also noted that it would add users’ public YouTube videos to the Videos tab on their Google+ page if they have opted in to connect the two accounts:
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