YouTube rolls out ‘New to you’ feed with videos outside of your normal recommendations [U]

Abner Li | Oct 25 2021 - 10:02 am PT

For most, the YouTube “Home” feed/page is very good at recommending videos that you’d enjoy watching. It can, however, get repetitive and YouTube wants to tackle that with “New to you.”

Update 10/25: After a testing period, Google says New to you “is now available on the YouTube homepage across mobile, desktop, and TV devices.” Availability on the large screen platform is new.

You may also see a “New to you” prompt as you scroll through your feed. Note: Since this feature is personalized, it may not always be available, and you’ll need to be signed-in to see it.

Original 7/21: On mobile, “New to you” appears as a suggestion in the top carousel just under the app bar. The chip appears after the default “All” view and is delightfully hued in light rainbow colors.

Tapping shows a feed of videos that are “beyond [your] typical recommendations.” Google explained at the start of this month that it heard feedback from YouTube users on how “their home feeds feel a little bit stale.”

Meaning, they come back to YouTube day-to-day and they see the same flavor of recommendations that they’ve seen before.

While content that appears in this feed lets “viewers explore outside their typical recommendations,” there’s still a level of personalization. In my case, I like late night shows and I was recommended a program that I normally don’t watch.

On desktop, Google is surfacing a similar prompt if users scroll down the homepage and haven’t found anything to view yet. YouTube explains that this is different from the Explore feed, which focuses on specific verticals, like gaming, beautify, and trending. Again, it’s much more personalized than existing discovery capabilities.

At the start of July, Google said it would begin rolling out over the course of this month. Several of our devices in the US, UK, and France are seeing “New to you” today in YouTube for Android. If there’s nothing to recommend, it’s located at the end of the top carousel without any colorful touches.