Dear creators,

Every year, I'm reminded of how unique and special our YouTube community is and 2017 is no different. This was a year of amazing growth and innovation, but I wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on what has also been a very tough year for our creator community. In the past year, we saw a significant increase in bad actors seeking to exploit our platform, from sharing extremist content and disseminating misinformation, to impersonating creators, to spamming our platform with videos that masquerade as family-friendly content, but are not. These actions harm our community by undermining trust in our platform and hurting the revenue that helps creators like you thrive.

In light of this, we’ve just announced new actions to protect our community from inappropriate content. We want to give creators confidence that their revenue won’t be harmed by bad actors while giving advertisers assurances that their ads are running alongside content that reflects their brand’s values.

To do that, we need an approach that does a better job determining which channels and videos should be eligible for advertising. We’ve heard loud and clear from creators that we have to be more accurate when it comes to reviewing content, so we don’t demonetize videos (apply a “yellow icon”) by mistake. We are planning to apply stricter criteria and conduct more manual curation, while also significantly ramping up our team of ad reviewers to ensure ads are only running where they should. This will help limit inaccurate demonetizations while giving creators more stability around their revenue. We will be talking to creators over the next few weeks to hone this new approach.

As I’ve said many times over the years, creators are the lifeblood of YouTube’s community. It is their originality, authenticity, talent and dedication that attracts a global audience to YouTube. It is their passion and presence that turns casual viewers into devoted fans who are eager to learn, share and come together. And it is their inclusiveness that gives over a billion people who visit YouTube every month a place to belong.

Though it’s been a difficult year, time and again, we’ve seen our creators come together to do incredible things on YouTube. We saw an acceleration in channel subscriptions, bringing the total number of channels to hit the 1 million subscriber milestone to well over 5,000. We saw a Reggaeton song explode in global popularity, becoming the most-watched YouTube video in history. And we saw our creators rally their fans after natural disasters in Mexico City and Houston to raise millions for relief, or engage world leaders from Joko Widodo to Jean-Claude Juncker on important issues.

These stories are at the heart of what makes YouTube’s community so special. It’s a place where creators and fans can come together to reach new heights, break records and turn an online audience into a real-world movement. That’s why we need to do all we can to protect this community, to counter threats from bad actors and to ensure that YouTube remains a place where all creators can thrive.

Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube

Source: YouTube Creator Blog

Community has always been at the heart of YouTube. From supporting each other, to touring the world, to making each other laugh, you and your audience have established strong bonds on YouTube. This connection goes beyond video, so about a year ago we invited a few creators to test out a new place to connect with fans in-between uploads with polls, pictures, text, GIFs, and more. We called this place Community. Creators have been doing amazing things with it, such as Anitta sharing behind-the-scenes photos, Marshmello teasing sneak preview GIFs, and Vidya polling subscribers for ideas. So starting today we're excited to expand Community to creators with over 10,000 subscribers.

We’ve been working closely with creators to build, test and refine this product. Now, we want to take this opportunity to share some of our learnings and updates.

• Involve your community: Fans love to participate in the creative process! Grav3yardgirl has been using Community to connect with her eight million strong swamp family, and gather input for what videos they'd like to see. She let her fans choose what to unbox next and heard them loud and clear that they wanted her to bring back the much-loved “Wreck It Wednesdays".
• Bring fans backstage: Creators have been using Community posts to build anticipation for a new video or upcoming big production. Lele Pons shares GIFs that act as a trailer for her next video, while Kevin Durant posts photos on NBA gameday.
• Increase your reach: We’ve seen creators successfully cross-promote other channels and creators they love through Community, such as Anwar, Hannah, Lele helping drive traffic to Rudy’s first music video launch.
• Improved discoverability: As with videos, we want to show the right Community post to the right user, so we’ve made updates to how these posts reach your audience across YouTube. Your most engaged viewers can now see Community posts in the Home feed, whether they’re subscribed to your channel or not. We’ve also optimized our notifications so that your fans are eligible to receive them, but they won’t necessarily get a new notification for every new Community post.
• New formats: We want to do even more to give you easy ways to express yourself and engage with fans, so today we’re also unveiling a new feature. Reels are YouTube’s spin on the popular “stories” format, but designed specifically for YouTube creators. We learned that you want the flexibility to create multiple Reels and have them not expire, so we’ll give you those options. We’re also bringing creator-focused features like linking to YouTube videos and YouTube-y stickers. Just like we did with Community, we’ll be experimenting with a beta version of Reels to learn and improve the product before expanding to more creators.

We’re super excited about building Community on YouTube and we can’t wait to see how you further grow and engage your audience! If you want some ideas and inspiration for your channel, we've created a Creator Academy lesson to help you out.

Posted by Roy Livne, Senior Product Manager, recently watched Interact with your community | Master Class ft Meghan Tonjes

Source: YouTube Creator Blog

Creators tell us they want one central place to keep up with the latest news, creator events, and platform updates from YouTube. The original Creator Hub launched just over a year ago was a first step in bringing together all our creator-facing programs, news and information. Now we’re taking this resource to the next level with the launch of the revamped YouTube Creators Site.

The completely refreshed design was developed for creators, with creators. The first thing we did was take a deep look at how creators were using the original hub and optimized our design to better support their user journeys. Then, we brought in creators into our design process to get their feedback on what they liked, and what could be improved. The end product offers more up-to-date information in a refreshed design that we hope will make it much easier for creators to explore and take advantage of all the resources available to them.




From checking the latest news on our Twitter feed, to staying up to date with our blog, we hope this redesign helps creators at all stages to get inspired, engage and thrive on YouTube.

We’ve added new sections, including detailed information about our Partner Management program, so that creators understand how to get the support they need at every step of the way. We’ve also surfaced an interactive widget that indexes content from the YouTube Help Center and makes it available across the Creators Site.

To celebrate the launch of the new Creators Site, we’re releasing Master Class -- a new series of videos from the Creator Academy. The series is designed to help creators grow their audience by learning about an important range of topics. From analyzing and growing your channel to building a business on YouTube.

We’re really excited about these launches and hope they can provide the resources you need to grow your audience on YouTube.

Alejandro Oropeza
Global Head of Marketing Communications

Source: YouTube Creator Blog

Starting today, we’re opening up a new way to earn extra money on your channel and better help you connect with your fans on YouTube Gaming: sponsorships!

With sponsorships, fans can purchase digital goods directly from your channel and support you via monthly recurring payments of $4.99 USD (local pricing applies). Sponsors get cool insider perks, such as a custom badge for live chat that will help them stand out from the crowd and custom emoji. These badges and emoji are designed by you for your fans. As you gain more sponsors, you will unlock more emoji to be used on your channel. You can upload and use these in real-time as you pass sponsorship milestones.



Sponsors also get access to sponsors-only live chat and immunity from slow mode. You’ll also be able to set up additional perks through 3rd-party services, such as on-stream alerts that you’ve received a new subscriber via Streamlabs or an exclusive Discord sponsors-only server where fans can connect and chat together.





Throughout our early tests of YouTube Gaming sponsorships, we’ve seen some incredible successes. For example, GameAttack makes most of their channel revenue via sponsorships and Super Chat. Rocket Beans earned 1,500 sponsors in their first day. And ONE_shot_GURL’s monthly celebratory wall of sponsors is getting so full, it’s running out of room.

Sponsorships are broadly available to all eligible creators on the YouTube Gaming app. So if your channel is eligible, you can enable it yourself today at youtube.com/features and immediately begin growing your sponsorship base. We’ll also be testing out another version of sponsorships with a handful of non-gaming creators on the main YouTube app. Check out Lauren Fairweather's or Que Diabos’ channel, and sign up here if you're interested in trying it out for your channel.

Whether your channel is still new or you’ve been a creator for years, we want you to be successful, and sponsorships is part of a wider effort to help build your business on YouTube. As we focus on growing your revenue through YouTube Red, Super Chat, and now sponsorships, we're bidding farewell to a service we launched in 2013 called paid channels. This service offered monthly subscriptions for some channels, but with less than 1% of creators using it today, it never achieved popularity with creators or users.

Between all the trials, raids, and meteor strikes, the gaming community on YouTube continues to grow. We’re excited to see how your creativity with sponsorships can help you both build stronger communities and bigger businesses.

Barbara Macdonald, Product Manager, recently live streamed Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle

Source: YouTube Creator Blog

Whether it’s solar eclipses, NBA superstars, the hottest music artists, pro gamers, creators donating to charity, or the world’s most famous giraffe, creators use live to connect with fans during the moments that matter. In turn, we are committed to making live content creation easier and more accessible. That’s why we’re excited to share some new improvements launching today.

Real-time interaction
We know how important it is to be able to immediately engage your fans during live streams. Thanks to ultra-low latency, now you can. Enabling ultra low-latency makes it possible to stream video with just a couple seconds of latency, so you’ll be able to answer fan questions and get viewer input during your “Let’s Plays” faster than ever before. It’s easy to set up and doesn’t require any special software or encoders to work.



New tools to make live chat moderation easier
Live chat messages play a key role in creating connections between you and your fans. We want to help you shape the tone of your conversations on YouTube, so we are excited to introduce new chat moderation tools:

• Inline moderation lets you quickly moderate your chat feed by simply pressing and holding the “alt/option” button on your keyboard to pause the chat feed. Once the feed is paused, you can hover over messages to remove or approve them with a single click. Don’t forget you can also delegate a moderator for your live chat, giving people you trust the ability to remove, flag or hide messages.

• Hold potentially inappropriate messages for review By opting-in, chat messages identified by our system will be held from posting on your streams, then you decide whether to approve, hide, or report them (just like you can with comments). Best part is, as you review more messages the system will get better at identifying the types of messages you want to hold for review. If you want to block certain words or phrases, you can do that too.

• Shared hidden user lists lets your moderators use the same hidden users list across comments and live chat. And in the future hides will work in both live chat and comments, regardless of where you take that action.

Stream more easily from iPhone and iPad right to the main YouTube app
Thanks to Apple’s ReplayKit, you can already live stream directly from many popular apps on YouTube Gaming. Now we’re bringing the feature to the main YouTube app so you can live stream your painting from Procreate, your race from Asphalt 8, your MOBA gameplay from Vainglory and more from any app that supports ReplayKit. You’ll also be able to use your phone’s microphone and front-facing camera to add your own video and audio commentary to the stream.

Regardless if you’re streaming your summer vacation shenanigans from your mobile phone or a battle royale of your favorite game from your desktop, we hope these new tools help you do more with YouTube live and deepen the connection with your viewers.

Kurt Wilms, YouTube Live Product Lead
Recently Watched “EXCLUSIVE - BEHIND THE SCENES OF DANANDPHILGAMES”

Source: YouTube Creator Blog

Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog.

When YouTube launched 12 years ago, it was a single website that supported one video format, 320x240 at 4:3 aspect ratio. Fast forward to today, and YouTube lets you watch any combination of SD, HD, 4K, 360, 3-D, and live video on nearly every device with an internet connection – from desktops to phones, tablets to TVs, game consoles, and even VR headsets.

We’ve also introduced apps and services that give you new ways to watch and get even closer to the content and creators you love. Music fans, gamers, and TV lovers each have unique experiences specifically tailored for their favorite content with YouTube Music, YouTube Gaming and YouTube TV. For families looking for the best way to watch together, we launched the YouTube Kids app. And for fans who want an uninterrupted, ad-free experience, and exclusive original content from creators, there’s the YouTube Red membership.

To put it simply, YouTube’s evolved … a lot. And we’re not even close to done. Over the last few months we've started releasing updates and will continue to throughout the rest of the year. When all is said and done, we'll bring a new level of functionality and a more consistent look across our desktop and mobile experiences.

Let’s start with the YouTube mobile app, which is getting a bunch of new features:

• Clean new design: We’ve made the header white to let content take the lead and moved the navigation tabs to the bottom of the app so they’re closer to your thumbs. We also added new Library and Account tabs that give you easy access to what you’re looking for.
• Videos that move with you: One of the things we’re working on is bringing gestures to YouTube. Earlier this year, we introduced a gesture that allows you to double tap on the left or right side of a video to fast forward or rewind 10 seconds. Give it a try! We already see billions of double taps per day. And I wanted to give you a sneak peek at another gesture I am really excited about. In the coming months, we'll experiment with a feature that lets you jump between videos with a simple swipe of your hand: just swipe left to watch a previous video or swipe right to watch the next one.
• Watch at your own pace: Users love that they are able to speed up and slow down the playback of a video on desktop, and we're excited to bring this feature to the mobile app today, so you can enjoy videos at whatever speed you prefer.
• Adapt to any video, beautifully: We've also been experimenting with new ways to display all videos in the best possible way. Soon, the YouTube player will seamlessly change shape to match the video format you’re watching, such as vertical, square or horizontal. That means you’ll always get the best viewing experience automatically – including vertical videos with no black bars on the sides!
• Browse and discover while you watch: We recently added a feature that lets you view a row of suggested videos while you’re watching in full screen. We're also working on transforming the area below the player so you can browse videos in totally new ways.

Looking beyond the YouTube app, we’ve also been working on a new desktop design. And thanks to all the positive feedback, we're now excited to make it available to all our users around the globe starting today! Our new look applies Material Design to YouTube and delivers a fresh, simple and intuitive user experience that lets content shine – because there's nothing more important than the creators and videos we all love to watch. My favorite feature of this new desktop design is Dark Theme, which turns the background dark while you watch for a more cinematic look.



The bright red cherry on top of this update sundae is a refreshed YouTube Logo and YouTube Icon. Designed for our multi-screen world, the updated Logo combines a cleaned up version of the YouTube wordmark and Icon, creating a more flexible design that works better across a variety of devices, even on the tiniest screens. Why’s it more flexible? When room is limited (say on a smartphone) you can use the brightened up Icon as an abbreviated Logo, which will be seen more easily and read more clearly. You’ll see the new Logo and Icon roll out across mobile and desktop today, and across all our other apps and services soon.

We know this is a lot of change, but we want to make clear that there’s one thing that stays the same: YouTube’s mission. We’re here to give people a voice and show them the world – no matter what device they use.


Neal Mohan, Chief Product Officer, recently watched "YouTube: What will you watch next?"

Source: YouTube Creator Blog

YouTube has always been a place for creators around the world to tell their stories, make connections and earn money. We care about users, creators and advertisers and have, for over a decade, strived to balance and align their interests. In the last few months we spent time addressing concerns from advertisers around where their ads are placed. With new controls and guidelines implemented, many creators have seen their earnings return to normal as advertisers resumed their campaigns. As a part of these recent changes, however, some videos were classified as not suitable for all advertisers, limiting the number of ads served on those videos. There was also no ability to directly appeal in Video Manager. Over the next few weeks, we plan to roll out new icons that will give you a more detailed understanding of how each and every video on your channel (or channels) is monetizing as well as the ability to appeal if you think a video is misclassified. We want our systems to get better and better - and every appeal helps:

Indicates videos that can earn money from the broadest set of advertisers and from YouTube Red. No change from today. Indicates videos are still eligible to earn money in YouTube Red, but will have limited or no ads because the video has been classified as either not suitable for all advertisers, or has been fully demonetized because we believe it doesn’t meet our advertising guidelines. Indicates videos that will receive no revenue from ads or YouTube Red. This might be because of a copyright strike, Content ID claim, or Community Guidelines strike. You can always use our monetization troubleshooter to see what actions you can take on your video. The status of your appeal will now be in blue text below the monetization icon. If your appeal is successful, more ads may be served on your videos.

Source: YouTube Creator Blog

With creators flying in from all over the world to meet one another, celebrate what they’ve accomplished, and get in some quality time with their fans, VidCon is one of our favorite events of the year. Aside from being just plain fun, it gives us a chance to show you what we’ve been working on at YouTube. In fact, just today we presented a bunch of new ways we’re hoping to support creators’ growth on the platform and now we want to tell you too.

Sneak peek at YouTube Studio Beta

Many of you use YouTube Creator Studio on desktop to help manage your channel. And while the current site has some useful tools (that won’t be going anywhere), we’ve decided it’s time to rebuild Creator Studio from the ground up. The new experience will be called YouTube Studio (easier, right?). It’s gonna be awesome, and we hope you’ll help us make it even awesome-r by joining our beta.

The overall plan with YouTube Studio is to let you do more in less time. The design will be refined (like… a lot), and we’ll add a number of new features that creators have already been asking for. A smart inbox that houses personalized suggestions for engaging with fans, collaborating with creators, and more is only one of a series of features we’re working on. And we’re going to need your help to make them better!

If you’re interested in being one of the first people to try out the beta, you can sign up here. The fact is, no one knows YouTube better than creators, so we want you to be the ones to tell us what’s working, what’s not quite working, or what you think is missing.


More love for comments

The relationship creators develop with their community is what makes YouTube unique. And since comments are such an important way for you to connect with your fans, we’re working hard to make them better – and your feedback’s already been a huge help.

First up, a few months ago we introduced a new feature called creator hearts. With just one click, you can now heart a favorite comment and show some love to the person who wrote it. You can also pin comments you like to the top of your feed to be sure that all your fans can see them. And we’ve seen that viewers love this kind of personal attention--they open these notifications at a rate that’s 3x higher than regular ones. We’ve also made it easier to manage the tone of the conversations on your channel thanks to a series of tools that let you delegate moderation to trusted members of your community, as well as a beta feature that automatically holds potentially inappropriate comments for your review.

Finally, we’re working on a new approach to comments that can help your fans get even more out of your channel. We call them comment topics, and they give viewers a way to browse comments according to (you guessed it) the topics being discussed. It's a great way to automatically highlight what's unique and interesting about the conversations on your channel. It’s also totally optional, so if you don’t feel like having comment topics, don’t worry, you can disable them or delete individual topics.














And now… making money

Over the last few months we’ve been really happy to hear that creators are using (and liking!) our new monetization tool called Super Chat. Designed to let you interact directly with your fans even more, Super Chat also represents a totally new way to make money on YouTube. Here’s how it works: during live streams, fans can purchase highlighted chat messages that stand out from the crowd. And over 65% of channels that use Super Chat have more than doubled their income during live streams. Super Chat’s already available for creators in 21 countries and today we’re adding 17 new countries to that list!

As you can tell, there’s a lot going on in the world of creator product updates – and a lot of it is thanks to you! We promise to keep working hard, and we hope you’ll keep helping us make YouTube the best place for you to share your voice, see the world, and connect with the communities that matter to you.

Posted by Manuel Bronstein, Vice-President of Product Management

Source: YouTube Creator Blog

June is a very important time for us here at YouTube. Since our earliest years, YouTube has come together to celebrate Pride and honor the contributions that LGBTQ creators and fans have made to our platform. From the It Gets Better campaign, to the thousands of inspiring coming out videos, to the emergence of popular transgender creators, the voices of our LGBTQ community have been key to pushing society in a more understanding and tolerant direction.

While we stand by that proud legacy, we realize that our commitment to give all LGBTQ creators a voice was unfortunately impacted by our Restricted Mode feature. Restricted Mode was originally designed as an optional feature for public institutions like libraries and schools to prevent the viewing of mature content on YouTube. But in looking more closely at the feature, we found that there was LGBTQ (and other) content that should have been included in Restricted Mode but was not, like kissing at weddings, personal accounts of difficult events, and speaking out against discrimination.

Our intention was never to limit this kind of content; having spoken to LGBTQ creators and YouTube employees, I understand just how important it is that teens and students be able to view it. That’s why we’ve updated our policies to explicitly allow these videos in Restricted Mode -- it still won’t work perfectly but over time our systems will get better. We apologize for these issues and want to reaffirm our commitment that YouTube is a place where all voices can be heard.

To offer a little more detail, here's the latest on our progress on Restricted Mode:

• Our teams worked with dozens of volunteer LGBTQ employees and select LGBTQ creators to get feedback on our policies and we incorporated that feedback into our processes moving forward.
• To date, over 12 million additional videos of all types—including hundreds of thousands featuring LGBTQ content—are now available in Restricted Mode.
• We’ve published and broadened Restricted Mode guidelines to ensure that non-graphic, personal accounts of difficult events are available. For example, personal accounts of individuals who suffered discrimination or were impacted by violence for being part of a protected group will now be included in Restricted Mode, provided they don’t contain graphic language or content. Soon we'll have new content in Creator Academy to describe in detail how to make videos that will meet the criteria for Restricted Mode.
• To help our systems get better, we invite creators and users to submit instances where they think we got it wrong. We review EVERY video submitted, and in those instances where we make changes to include videos in Restricted Mode, those lessons make our systems better.

On a separate note, earlier this year many creators, including LGBTQ creators, expressed confusion and concern about revenue fluctuations in the wake of advertiser concerns around where their ads are placed on YouTube. These were separate issues that unfortunately happened at the same time. As advertisers paused their spend on YouTube it impacted a broad range of creators. We have rigorous training to ensure that anyone who reviews content that’s been flagged for review ensures all content is treated fairly. For more information, please see our Advertiser-Friendly Content Guidelines in the Help Center.

Looking beyond Restricted Mode, we want to reiterate that YouTube is committed to enabling and promoting LGBTQ voices and resources on our platform.

• To celebrate Pride, we’re promoting LGBTQ creators and their content as part of the launch of our fifth annual #ProudToBe campaign. Over the course of the next year, we'll celebrate LGBTQ History Month and International Transgender Day of Visibility. And on June 27, we will also introduce a permanent shelf on our US Spotlight channel to showcase LGBTQ videos throughout the year refreshed on a weekly basis.
• Recognizing the specific needs of at-risk LGBTQ youth, we’re also partnering with the leading organization for crisis intervention services for this community, The Trevor Project. We’re investing in Trevor’s channel growth as well as audience development, to expand their reach. We’re also working with 25 global suicide prevention organizations to help surface assistance via phone and text at the time of need.
• We're partnering to celebrate LGBTQ history with the NYC LGBT Community Center. Google.org recently announced a $1 million grant to the New York City's LGBT Community Center to support the Stonewall National Monument, the first LGBTQ dedicated landmark in the United States. As a part of this support, we're excited to announce opportunities in the near future for YouTube creators to share LGBTQ history with their audience through the Stonewall initiative.

Most importantly, our recent experience has taught us that we need to do a better job of listening to and communicating with our LGBTQ community.

• Over the next few months we will be hosting a series of six Creator Roundtables in YouTube Spaces (in NYC, LA, Toronto, Paris, Berlin, London) focused on discussing initiatives that impact the LGBTQ community and on gathering your feedback to improve our products and programs.
• We’ll also host Creator Council Advisory Sessions, both in person and virtual, to get further feedback throughout the year.

At YouTube, we’re proud to stand with the LGBTQ community to support equal rights. Through Pride month and beyond, we will continue to honor the goal of making YouTube a place that celebrates your voices and community. We want YouTube to remain a place where LGBTQ people and their families, friends and supporters can express themselves, empower others and find a place to belong.

Susan Wojcicki, CEO, YouTube 

Source: YouTube Creator Blog