YouTube’s announced its latest round of tweaks and updates, including new insights into audience behavior, new tools for scanning through Shorts clips, and more ways to recognize paying subscribers in-stream.
First off, YouTube’s rolling out a new analytics card in YouTube Studio which will show you the content formats that your viewers are engaging with most frequently in the app.
As you can see in this example, the new insights break down user behaviors into consumption time within videos, Shorts, and Live, which could help to guide your thinking on what types of videos to upload to maximize attention.
Essentially, it’s a nudge towards Shorts, which is YouTube’s fastest growing content format. The idea is that by showing you just how many of your viewers are engaging with Shorts, that’ll prompt you to try the same, which will then increase the amount of Shorts content YouTube has to show users.
Speaking of Shorts, YouTube’s also added a new scrubber on Shorts clips, so that you can skim through them faster.
I mean, Shorts can only be a minute long, so it’s not like you’ll have to sit through a lot to get to the part you want to see either way, but given our ever-shrinking attention spans, it makes sense to provide an easy option for scanning through Shorts clips – so you can save your precious seconds.
The scrubber bar will appear on all Shorts clips of 30 seconds or longer, and will also be accessible when you pause shorter clips.
Also on Shorts, YouTube’s adding more insight into content remixes, and remixes of remixes, in order to help creators better understand how people are interacting with their Shorts clips. The data will show you how your Shorts reach is expanding, and give you more specific insight into how people are finding your Shorts content.
On another front, YouTube’s also adding a new Super Thanks decoration in the comments stream in YouTube Studio, in order to help creators differentiate between subscriber comments, and comments from other viewers.
That will help you recognize your paying fans, which can also play a role in encouraging more engagement and Super Thanks activity from them in future.
Finally, YouTube’s also adding more insight into the revenue breakdown screen in YouTube Studio, to provide more insight into where your channel income is coming from.
As per YouTube:
“Up until now, YouTube Analytics offered only a single view for all revenue analytics, which made it hard for creators to deep dive into a particular revenue source. We’re happy to announce that we’re restructuring the YouTube analytics revenue page by adding detailed pages to surface important metrics, and allow creators to deep dive more easily across earning methods side-by-side.”
As you can see in these example screens, creators will now be able to access summaries of all revenue data, and select deep dive pages for each monetization method.
Some handy updates, as usual, form the YouTube team, which will provide more ways to manage and maximize your YouTube content.
And Shorts is clearly the focus. It’s worth noting the continued emphasis on Shorts from YouTube, and to consider what that means for your posting strategy moving forward.