YouTube's New Features: Clips Feed Update, Collections, and Fan Communities

Transcript

The update for the Clips feed has been rolled out as planned and now displays clips created by you as well as those made by other viewers from your content. You can access these via so-called chips, small oval buttons. You can reach the Clips feed either through the scissors icon on the main page or at YouTube.com/feed/clips - you’ll also find the link in the info description.

Since Thursday, an experiment has been running where the subscriptions area can be redesigned with so-called Collections. This is also a feature that you requested, and in fact, YouTube has already been working on it, although not exactly as we discussed in the Q&A stream. There’s already one such experiment, and I’d be happy to show you what it looks like as soon as I see it in the wild myself. I only know that it exists, but not what it looks like.

YouTube is also experimenting with expanding the Community tab to so-called Fan Communities. This is intended to allow viewers to post on Creators’ community tabs. For me, this immediately sets off alarm bells - maybe I’m being a bit overly cautious and seeing more issues than there actually are. However, it’s still unclear how this will be moderated. It’s unknown whether the Creator has influence over who can post, whether everyone is allowed to post, or only members or those who have subscribed to the channel for a certain number of days or weeks. All of this is still unclear, and it’s also not settled whether Creators can be held responsible for submitted content - so if someone posts junk on your community tab and you get Community Guideline strikes for it. All of this is still an open work in progress.

In principle, the idea is actually quite nice. However, it means centralization again: If all these features are bundled into a single channel and that channel disappears or you lose access to it, you won’t have a community anywhere else. That’s a double-edged sword. I’m curious about your thoughts on this in the comments!

Finally: Next week there will be another Q&A stream! We’ll probably focus on YouTube Analytics, specifically Vertical Live. If you have any questions about it, feel free to write them in the comments - we might even have a guest joining us. In any case, we’ll answer your pre-submitted questions in the chat. So go ahead and write your Analytics questions in the comments below, and we’ll take care of them!

Thanks for watching, see you next week! Take care and keep going!