YouTube Update: New Clip Tools, Shopping Sticker Upgrade & Live Stream Policy!

Transcript

YouTube Shopping stickers in Shorts are being upgraded. Instead of opening a palette underneath the Short, viewers will now be directed straight to the seller’s website to purchase the tagged product. If they click on the sticker and there are multiple products tagged, a chevron will appear next to the sticker to open the list of tagged products. The sticker is generated from the first product in the list, but you can change the order to select the desired product as the sticker.

Please note that the YouTube Shopping Affiliate Program is only available if you have over 10,000 subscribers and are located in one of the following countries.

Multilingual audios are getting a thumbnail experiment. If you already have access to Autodub’s “big brother” MLA, where you can upload your own audio tracks instead of YouTube’s automatic translations, you might be eligible for another experiment. You can upload different thumbnails for the various languages, which is pretty cool.

I wish more people had access to MLA so we could see more of this experiment. If you have access to MLA and are participating in the experiment, please send me screenshots as I’m very interested in how it works. Apparently, language-specific thumbnails are incompatible with A/B testing for thumbnails. So you can either use the regular thumbnail or the language-specific thumbnails or the A/B test.

That’s somewhat understandable as otherwise, you’d have to upload three different thumbnails for each video, which would be excessive. But it would also be kind of cool. Share your thoughts on this in the comments.

Also, we’re getting something new related to multilingual audios: We need to talk about clips from transcripts. Essentially, videos and live streams can now be clipped from the transcript as long as multilingual audios and Autodubbing are disabled. Since live streams don’t seem to have MLA or Autodubbing enabled, this shouldn’t be a big issue. You can simply select a section of the transcript, YouTube automatically sets in and out points for the video, and you can add a 30-second intro and 30-second outro if you want.

My advice: Don’t add an outro and only a short intro. A new video will be created, and when you click “Create Draft,” you’ll get the full upload flow for a video. The terminology is a bit confusing as this type of clip creates a new video from your existing video or live stream, whereas clips typically created with the scissors symbol are called, well, clips.

So, it’s a bit unfortunate with the terminology, but I hope we can clarify that. Maybe you have an idea of what we should call them—let me know in the comments. Interestingly, a created clip counts as a new video, so you can clip it again if it’s still too long. Since it’s considered a new video, Autodubbing is re-enabled, allowing you to add a new language.

That’s nice but also a bit weird how the upload flow works for that.

Lastly, we briefly touched on live streaming earlier. YouTube is increasing the minimum age for live streams from 13 to 16 years old. As before, minors—according to YouTube, individuals under 18—must be accompanied by a parent or guardian in their stream, otherwise, they may violate child safety guidelines, and live streaming and live chat will be disabled.

For adults aged 18 and above, nothing changes. This change will be implemented in the coming weeks, and enforcement will follow a few weeks after. If you have any questions about any of these topics, please let me know in the comments. Until next week for more YouTube updates! Goodbye.