- Today, I wanted to talk to gaming YouTubers specifically
about a section of YouTube
that I think gamers often overlook.
I certainly do all the time, but really when you explore it,
you can actually learn a lot.
(upbeat music)
- I'm Dan, by the way, and this is VidIQ.
So if you've ever been to Twitch actually,
you've probably seen their section
that's broken out into categories.
Generally speaking, these categories actually represent
different games and how popular they currently are on Twitch
but occasionally you see sections like music
or just chatting in here as well.
Now, the reason this is so cool is because you can go
to Twitch and if you're thinking of streaming a certain kind
of game, you can maybe check which genre would fit
your streaming style and then pick the game
that actually has a lot of concurrent viewers right now.
Now, that's really awesome, but did you know
that YouTube actually has a very,
very similar section of its own website?
What you need to do is when you're on the YouTube homepage,
scroll down on the left-hand side bar
and you see this section called more from YouTube
and you see a few different things here.
There's YouTube Premium, movies and shows, we have live,
we have gaming, fashion and beauty.
If you click on any of these,
you see videos in this category.
So let's start with sports real quick just so I can show you
and you get this cool highlight reel here at the top
and we get a whole bunch of different clips
from different channels that are kind of trending right now.
So there are a handful of these sections,
but none are quite like the gaming option.
So once again, on the left side, if you click gaming,
you start to see a page that looks very similar
to the one we just saw over on Twitch.
We have right here a banner scrolling
through different videos and creators
that are trending right now, and if you scroll down,
we can see the top live games.
This is why we're always going on about
why it's so important to put thumbnails on your livestreams,
make sure they have good titles because when you click
into one of these games, you can see
all the different streams that are live right now.
You can see vibrant thumbnails, interesting titles,
and you can just scroll through here and check out
all the different streams and you get to see also
how many people are just watching these channels,
these livestreams right now, but not only that,
we also can scroll down a little bit more
and just see recommended videos
and this is kind of what I was talking about.
Even if you're not into livestreaming,
if you play Minecraft, you can kind of see what some
of the big folks in this space are doing.
What are they currently interested in?
Scrolling down even further, we can see just recent videos
from their featured creators.
We can see official videos, and in this case,
since we're on the Minecraft tab, these are all the videos
that have come out from the creators of the Minecraft game
from their YouTube channel, and that's really cool
because if you're trying to keep up with news,
which you absolutely should, about your game, here you go,
and then even cooler than that is let's say you're tired
of Minecraft, but you would still like to pivot
to something the Minecraft audience is interested in,
now we have other games from this developer.
Now, this is probably gonna be different
for every single game.
Maybe most popular games maybe only have,
the developers only made the one game, but here we are
with Minecraft Dungeons, Minecraft Story Mode,
we have Scrolls here, Minecraft Pocket Edition,
so just all the different games that you can use,
that you can play for a Minecraft-engaged audience,
and then beyond this, of course, are popular videos
from this category and the list goes on and on and on.
Coming back up to the top though,
there's also some other ways you can filter this.
We're on the home screen right now.
So we're just getting a sample of all these things.
We can click the live tab though
and now we're only seeing livestreams and a lot more of them
than we saw just scrolling through before,
and then we can click recent and see the recent videos
like we did a minute ago, explore,
which this is really interesting, 100 days of Minecraft.
This is a whole theme of videos
that YouTube is featuring here.
Then there's music related to Minecraft, house tutorials.
A lot of different ideas here depending on what kind
of Minecraft creator you are, and now, I'm focused
on Minecraft, let's play tab by the way, that's pretty cool.
I'm focused on Minecraft, but obviously,
that isn't the only game that exists.
Let's see what this looks like when we go into,
how about ARK: Survival Evolved,
which is kind of getting popular once again.
ARK kind of has its moments.
Once again, we see livestreams, we see recommended,
recent videos, all that fun stuff.
If we click on explore, we see different themes here,
and what's interesting is episode one.
Ep one is the top theme which means that any creator
who's ever put ep one in the title
of their video is probably featured somewhere in here
which is kind of, well, I guess it doesn't go too far,
but that's kind of cool.
These are all, I guess, the most popular videos
labeled as ep one.
Just goes to show you how strong
of a search term that is for ARK.
Pvp, Ark 2, so these are basically, as far as I can tell,
creator curated in the sense that because so many creators
have put these terms in their titles and descriptions
so many times, YouTube has determined, hey,
that's a whole category within the space.
Now, you may be wondering, how the heck
do I even get my games to show up in there?
Well, for one, yes, it does help
if you're getting a lot of viewers.
Obviously, those games were all categorized by popularity.
So you're seeing a lot of videos
in there that had a lot of views on them.
However, especially if you're a livestreamer,
I think that's your best bet in getting into this section,
but if you ever hope to get into this section,
maybe you make a video and it takes off
and you weren't expecting it to, the only chance
I believe you have of getting in there is
if you properly categorize your videos,
and this is the one time I'm gonna encourage you
to be very careful about how you categorize your videos.
So here's a video that Rob recently made.
I'm just gonna use it as an example.
If you scroll down past the description, past the playlists,
past the tags, it's all the way down here at the bottom
where you see the category.
Now, a lot of our videos are how to in style.
We make a lot of how to videos, but if you click into here
and you click gaming, you get this section
that no other category has where you can actually
start typing in the name of the game.
So we saw Minecraft earlier, so if I start typing
in Minecraft, we can see autopopulating
all the different Minecraft types in here.
Now, earlier when I showed you the page,
we did see Minecraft Story Mode had its own place,
we saw Minecraft Pocket Edition, I believe,
had its own place which is somewhere in here.
Minecraft is the one I would personally use
because it's the oldest one.
I think most people just click this, but if you click it,
it autopopulates and now if I were to save this video,
it would be labeled officially as a Minecraft video.
Just to give you an example of what this looks like,
I'll click into any of the recommended videos here
about MrBeast, our friend MrBeast,
and then if we scroll down, because MrBeast
has categorized his video as a Minecraft video,
that's when you get the game showing up right here.
So this only shows up if you go into the category
and put it in there yourself which is really important.
So now my question for you is have you ever used
this feature, maybe even without knowing it?
Meaning have you been playing games and making sure
to categorize them properly?
And otherwise, have you ever gone into the gaming section
of YouTube just to find content to watch?
I'm also curious about that because this is a section that,
like I said, even I have been overlooking,
but there's actually a lot of really cool stuff in here,
and if you've been just looking to get recommendations
as a viewer for fun things to watch about a game,
this could be a great place to go, and of course,
if you're looking for ideas on making content,
this can also lead to a lot of different inspiration
and get you thinking in way you might not
have been thinking before.
So let me know in the comments, and don't forget
to subscribe to VidIQ for more videos
just like this all the time.
Be sure to check out our gaming playlist
as well if you want to learn how
to grow your channel this year in 2021.
I will see you next time.