YouTube Updates: End of Year Sprint with MLA & SuperChat Goals

Transcript

YouTube thumbnails were limited to 2MB for a very long time, which often meant downscaling from higher resolutions like 180p to 720p. Some time ago, a 10MB data limit was introduced for thumbnails in YouTube podcasts. This is now set to apply to videos and live streams in the first quarter of 2025 as well. This is long overdue and a very welcome change. I’m curious to see how it develops.

Super Chat Goals: We’ve discussed this feature a lot this year. There were some specifics to clarify, but fortunately YouTube listened to us this time and granted moderators the necessary rights to create, edit, and stop Super Chat Goals. The final launch date is scheduled for December 16th. As this date is very close to the end of the year when engineers go on winter break, I think it will be kept. If so, we’ll already have a Super Chat Goal in our Christmas live stream on this channel and we’ll just give it a try.

Staying on the topic of live streaming: We previously announced side-by-side ads. This means that while the live stream is running, an ad will be displayed alongside it—or not. In my opinion, this provides a better user experience as you can continue to follow the stream while an ad is playing. We don’t yet know if these ads will have sound, and there are no specifications from the advertiser’s side yet. It remains to be seen in which direction this will develop and what kind of advertising content will be allowed in live streams.

More information on this will of course be available on this channel when the time comes.

Oh, and one more piece of news: In early January, we’ll see the first wave of web integration. This affects YouTube in the browser on PCs as well as YouTube TV and consoles. These side-by-side ads will also be available there. The second wave is expected at the end of the first quarter of 2025, also on iOS and Android.

Our beloved and hated concern remains multilingual audio. We had the 1% launch and the 10% launch, and now we’re speeding full throttle towards a cliff. The translation quality remains catastrophic. We’ve already been looking for third-party tools to find decent dubbed voice cloning alternatives to YouTube Autodubbing. This is sure to be an exciting story.

December 11th is the deadline. Please remember: This feature is automatically enabled (auto-opt-in). If you don’t disable it, your viewers may suddenly hear a poor English AI translation. So when uploading, make sure to turn off this feature if you don’t want that. We will introduce corresponding tools separately, and I’m sure KB Media will also offer solutions that might be cheaper if you don’t publish 80 videos per month.

Thanks for watching and being here! I hope you could take something away from this patch rundown. See you again next week for YouTube updates before we likely go on winter break. If YouTube doesn’t have any updates, we won’t make update videos either. Maybe we’ll shoot a relaxed tutorial instead. See you next week, ciao!