What's up insiders hot topic for you today?
Notifications. Hello everybody. I'm Barbara. Hi. I'm James the PM for notifications
We have three exciting things that we want to tell you about today last year 2018. We had a couple of
Notification outages what have we done about that kicked off a large project?
it was going to take a long time and we kind of basically went through the whole system and tried to measure it and so
If we look at how at the point at which our Creator uploads a video
And then we go and effect them fresh the method date of that video
you know the thumbnail and were those kinds of things then we do what's called fan-out where we go and get all the kind of
video metadata
And we've distributed to all the the 10 or 20 million subs in some cases and in many cases a creator
Can upload multiple times multiple videos and so we're doing this fan-out process
For a lot of videos for and this is just for one career
This is just for home throat
And then if you imagine we do this for millions of creators and as we we'll know that
critters tend to upload kind of on the hour
Yeah, so then this creates this big spike and in some cases though
I think there were creators in India who are batch uploading 600 videos at the same time
They spit huge hotspots into the system. And then what happens is it what overloads one small part of it?
Yeah
And then that affects all creators and that's that's typically the kind of root cause of an outage the project was kind of going through
the system
Measuring from that point at which the creator publishes the point of which we send all these notifications and putting enter in measurement over that
and then we identify well the
Causes the root causes were we fixed all those now and we believe the system is fundamentally reliable and we can measure it end-to-end
Which is something we're really proud about quick tips to ensure that your viewers get notified. So the first is
Used use do not publish to advantage you get a quota of three per day notifications if you're making four or five videos
Perhaps you can choose to three you want and then you can choose not to syndicate two of them
The second is don't upload on the hour
everyone does that so you couldn't set yourself apart from other craters by
Choosing a crazy time of the day third is it's very normal for people to start a video private and then flip it public
don't then flip it private again and then public again because
You'll get notifications the first time and you won't get than the second time
Yeah, you missed the like you missed the boat there the first time I went public notice one out and then that's it. Exactly
Yeah, yeah that covers the first thing that we wanted to talk about. What is the second so the second is um
In this kind of long-term projects or figure out reliability
We look to a kind of feedback tickets we get from users
Where they complain about something not working and often we dig into them as examples of West
you know things we can understand and telling us that we need to fix and a lot of we found well first of all we
Found these kind of altitudes which we think we fixed now. Yeah, and then the other thing we find is the notifications are complex
There's lots of settings right we know this
Yeah, and we're trying to simplify all make that clear
But we it's still complex today and you have you know phone level settings and your app level settings
and of course the Bell itself, um and in many cases
Users who complain are actually the system's work correctly
But they've got one of these settings misconfigured
And so we're doing a lot of work to trying to generally clarify that system and make it clearer for for users
We've done a couple of things. The first is we've created a new interactive menu. So instead of it just being a little toggle
There's now a menu three states, okay
So to remind you on the Bell, you have none that you turn off the bell flow channel together and you know
No notifications. Exactly. And then the second is
Occasional which is where you get a kind of a personalized sample of notifications and then of course the Bell itself
All right. And so there's those three states are now clearly labeled in a new menu
It says clear for users to understand which setting they're they're getting and the second thing we discovered
Is that the icon for the occasional state?
Was a gray Bell and the icon for the Bell all was a gray bell with little dashes
These do a little line right half of it and we know they were essentially two similar people confused them
Yeah, and that was on us again
and so now we've changed the icon for the occasional state and now it's a kind of a hollow Bell and it implies that you're
Only getting yet partial notifications. Yeah, just which is exactly correct
and then we've also renamed this occasional state we put it personalized because
Occasional was confusing to lots of people they weren't sure exactly what they were getting they sound like tiny changes
But they have they make a big but they make a bigger impact, but it's also worth pointing out
We haven't changed anyone's user settings. No settings of usual have have been changed and no functionality has been changed
Yeah
I think this is really important talk about the process for you to be able to get here and for you to make these changes
Talk about the experiments at all
the different icons all the different words that you use while when determining whether it's
Occasional or personalized the word itself personalized we tested four or five variants
you sent surveys to hundreds of people and we kind of looked for comprehension and
Reflecting what you expect from that experience
so people choose it and essentially they get what they think they're guessing and again with the icon we tested variance with you know,
I said like a half like shading and Pollock
Holly bellows we live in the enzyme which is how many
Variants it for the new icons specifically how many variants would you say you tested? I think we did
I think they're a bunch of designs and I think two or three it went into experiment
And then we chose the one that appeared to put most people into the state. They wanted right?
And in many cases that means that right and when we say you came up with two to three and then ran experiments
That means you Reax parents on a percentage of viewers out there
So right the we are measuring the user comprehension at scale
there's a large percentage of viewers who would have seen all of these different variants and then we measure what is performing the best for
Those users 1% of YouTube users is like tens of millions people lots
lots of people but the net outcome we think
From what this analysis and experimentation is that we've ended up with a series of changes?
Well, so well small, but we'll help viewers choose exactly the level of notifications they want from your channel
All right, that covers number two number three. I'm just gonna ask a question. Hey James, how
Many of my subscribers have actually ticked the Bell. I don't actually know for your channel. Well, I could look at
Really? I'm asking a leading question, which is what is the third thing that is now available to all of you
so we've talked a lot about the Bell and we've talked a little bit how you know your subscribers end up in this state and
We want to now share this information with creators
And so it was it was sneak peek at a couple of weeks ago
But no we will talk about in more detail. We want to add two new metrics to yta
The first is how many of your subscribers are in all have chosen all notifications for your channel?
And then the second metric is how many of your subscribers have chosen all notifications for your channel? And also what we call reachable
Yeah, let's dig in reachable a little bit. It might not be clear to everybody
So what does it mean to be reachable or not reachable by YouTube notification
We've talked a lot about settings for our notifications to get through. It's not just about the Bell
The user actually has to have them turned on in their phone or on the web device
So in Android you can go and turn off notifications
We can turn them on and the same on iOS and if you've turned them off
We don't consider to be reachable and there's not much you can do about that, of course, right?
But these are goals actually we want to keep up
We've met more people reachable because it benefits us and creators. Of course
And so yeah
We want to share how many of these
Users are reachable. And how many of them have turned on the bell for your channel?
And then that should give some kind of expectation about how many views you can expect from notifications
The reason we're kind of announcing all of these changes together, you know the reliability and then the sort of viewer facing kind of clarity
And making these things easier to understand and then also more information for creators is we're trying to really tackle notifications. There's a problem
Yeah, and we realized there's lots of parts of it and these three announcements are kind of hopefully begin to address the overall problem
yeah, and then indeed this further part of that as well, so
Sort of combined with these launches. We're updating help center
There's a new kind of diagnostic tool to help users figure out their settings doubt viewers understands
Like which of these states they're in exactly if they know, you know, they're not receiving notifications
They go through a kind of a flow process that says, you know
I'm not receiving Bell notifications and I want them and why and then it helps you
Self diagnose and he'll often kind of tweak your settings on your phone
And then we're also doing a kind of a viewer version of this video which again does a similar thing
It's explaining some of the changes we've made
And also that actually that has the the settings flow sort of explanation built into the video as well
Yeah, we'll link to that down below
Thank you so much for breaking all of this down and for telling us all about the exciting things that are happening to
notifications in the Bell
We'd also like you to comment so add comments below or sunny read them, yes, give your feedback to James
Let him know comments question concerns. He'll read them. I'll read them
If you dig this video if you want to see more videos on notifications
Hit that like button. And as always we are Creator insider
We are your informal source talking to the tech and engineering teams giving you more from about what is happening at YouTube
So there should be a new menu as any face. I take a look
Yes, what we're just talking about the new bell icon all of that check what state you're in if you want to receive all notifications
Tick the Bell. Is that what we're still calling it?
We still we still get anything and if you want to receive personalized notifications from us
Change it to the holo state, right, correct. Okay. We'll see you guys in the next video. Goodbye