VidCon is the place where thousands of creators and fans come together every year to share their passion for YouTube and online video. We came to Anaheim today to offer them a sneak preview of the new features and updates that we’re releasing in the coming months. Here’s a look at the things we’ve been working on to help you make your videos even more awesome, to reach global audiences and grow your businesses on YouTube. 

●        YouTube Creator Studio: Did you know that after Rebecca Black uploaded “Friday” she went on a school trip, not knowing for several days the video was going viral? To help you manage your videos on the go, the new YouTube Creator Studio app lets you see analytics, manage your videos and more. The app is available now on Android and launching on iOS in coming weeks and you’ll see some redesign of the Creator Studio on desktop too.

●        Audio Library, now with sound effects: You’ve used the hundreds of free songs in the Audio Library on millions of your videos. But until now, you’ve had to go through extreme lengths to make your own zombie screams and fighter plane sounds. To make your lives easier and videos better, from today you now have thousands of royalty-free sound effects at your disposal. We’ve also added more tracks to the Audio Library.

●        60 (yeah, six-zero) frames per second: Your video game footage with crazy high frame rates will soon look as awesome on YouTube as it does when you’re playing, when we launch support for 48 and even 60 frames per second in the coming months. Take a look at some preview videos on the YT Creator Channel. Make sure you’re watching in HD!

●        Fan Funding: Your fans aren’t just watching your videos, they’re also helping support your channel through services like KickStarter, IndieGogo, Patreon and more. We’ll be adding another option for you, where fans will be able to contribute money to support your channel at any time, for any reason. A handful of creators are testing this feature soon on desktop and Android, including Dulce Delight, Fitness Blender, The Healthcare Triage, The King of Random, Soul Pancake, Steve Spangler Science, The Young Turks and Thug Notes. If you’re interested in trying it on your channel, sign up here.

●        Creator Credits: Collaboration is a key to great videos on YouTube. You’re already giving your collaborators shout outs in your video descriptions. But what if those text-based shout outs were tags that let viewers click through to their channels, or let you search for a collaborator based on their work and location? That’s our vision for Creator Credits, stay tuned for more. 

●        Subtitles contributed from fans: More than a billion people watch YouTube each month, but not all of them speak the same language and some are deaf or hard of hearing. Automatic speech recognition and automatic translation on YouTube can help, but your fans can do an even better job. In the coming months, your fans will be able to submit translations in any language based on the subtitles or captions you’ve created, helping you reach even more viewers. You can try this out now on Barely Political, Fine Art-Tips, Got Talent Global and Unicoos. 

●        Info Cards: Annotations are useful, but not as ridiculously good looking as say, Blue Steel. In the near future, you’ll see our new interactive information cards with a clean look, which you’ll be able to program once to work across desktop, phones and tablets.

●        SiriusXM & YouTube: We love supporting artists, and so do our friends at SiriusXM. That’s why we teamed up to launch “The YouTube 15”, a weekly show on SiriusXM’s Hits 1 hosted by Jenna Marbles and featuring the biggest names and rising stars in music from YouTube. 

●        More ways to playlist: Along with playlists analytics we recently added to analytics, expect to see more ways to create playlists, so that all the time you spend building them translates into easier discovery for viewers and better results for you.

We take your feedback seriously, which is why we’re focusing on these areas that you’ve told us are most important for you. So keep your comments coming on Google+ or Twitter. We’ll be working closely with you to bring these features and more to the creator community in the future. 

Subscriptions are one of the clearest ways you can see how you’re doing on YouTube. When people subscribe to your channel, it’s a signal they like what you’re doing and want to see more. We know your subscribers are hard-won, and that’s why we recognise big subscriber milestones with things like access to programmes at the YouTube Space and our Creator Rewards programme.

It’s extremely important to us that these numbers stay meaningful so that you can be sure that when your sub count grows it’s because you’re building a community of real fans who are going to keep watching and supporting you.

With that in mind, we’ll soon implement a new process to improve the accuracy of subscriber counts. It’s similar to existing ways we ensure that other site metrics, like views, are free of spam and abuse, and keep YouTube a fair playing field for everyone.

On 16 June we’re going to remove suspended accounts from all channels’ subscriber counts. This means some of you will notice a minor drop in your subscribers. To be clear, these are not active viewers, so you shouldn’t see any impact on your views or watch time. 

From there, we’ll have an automated system in place that removes suspended accounts from subscriber counts as they occur. And, we’ve built our system so that if something goes wrong for one of our viewers and their account is suspended in error, these changes are reversible.

You don’t need to do anything to prepare for this change. Just keep being you, and making YouTube great.

Katie Hushion, YouTube Operations Specialist, recently watched Cute Bunny Jumping Competition.