- Hello Insiders, I'm Chien,
I'm a product specialist in notifications.
Today, we'll be talking to you about
some upcoming changes to notifications.
I know a topic that is very well set up for,
and then also talk about some improvements we're making.
But before we get started, I wanted to introduce James.
- Hi, I'm James.
I'm the product manager for notifications at YouTube.
- All right, James,
I know this is not your first time on this channel,
but for our new subscribers,
you mind giving me a quick overview on what your team
has been working on in the notification space?
- Yeah, I think the big change we talked about
last time we were on Creator Insider
was some updates to YouTube Analytics,
to sort of help creators understand a little bit more
about how their notifications are working.
So it's worth just recapping that,
'cause I know the creators that use it have found it
really, really powerful and insightful,
and not all creators are using it,
so it's worth flagging that there's two cards we added.
One was a channel-level card.
So it shows the percent of subscribers
that have turned on notifications for your channel,
and have enabled YouTube notifications.
And then there's also a video-level card.
So for your latest video upload,
you can see how many notifications were sent,
the click-through rate for these notifications,
and how they contribute to views
to the performance of that particular video.
So if you haven't used those cards,
I'd encourage you to go have a look,
and you can kind of see how well
these notifications are working for you.
- Thank you, James.
Yeah, I know a lot of creators are very excited
about these cards and these metrics,
but like, to Jame's point, if you haven't seen it,
we'll put a Help Center link down below.
So, with that quick overview, thank you on that part,
tell us James, what's next?
- We talked just a second ago about push notifications,
but within the remit of my teams,
we also send email,
and as many of you perhaps reported or noticed,
we send quite a lot of email, particularly for uploads.
And we heard creator and viewer feedback
that maybe we're sending too many of certain types.
And so, we want to evaluate this
and see if we could make that email channel, you know,
more effective and maybe get rid of some of the noise.
Essentially we send today,
we send push notifications for your latest upload
and we also send an accompany email
if a viewer has hit the bell.
And actually what we've found
is there's something like less than .1%
of the new upload emails are actually opened
and clicked back to YouTube.
And so then we start asking ourselves, you know,
is email the best format for these kinds of updates?
And maybe, actually, we should be looking at things
like push notifications and deferring
back to the other subscriber tools.
Things like the subscriptions feed,
the notifications inbox.
And so we ran an experiment to turn off these emails,
and we ran this for a long time,
we wanted to really understand how well they work.
So we ran a three-month experiment
and assessed the impact of if we turn off these emails
does it affect creators,
does it affect viewers for small channels,
big channels and that kind of thing?
And so what we've found is actually,
if we turn off emails for your new uploads
there's no measurable loss of views for any channel,
both these huge kind of MCN channels,
and then right the way down to small channels
that are just starting out.
And actually what's interesting,
we found there's actually a very marginal,
small increase in views.
And so we wanted to understand this a little bit better.
So if we turn off emails,
actually it looks like some videos are performing better.
And so, as I said, we did this kind of channel size slicing,
and we really dug into the experiments.
And we also, so we validated actually,
that what tends to happen
is people tend to use push notifications
a little bit more when you turn off the emails,
and they do tend to come back to the app
and consume more videos.
The other thing we wanted to understand
is how creators might feel about this change.
And so we floated this with a creator kind of focus group.
And again, we spoke to small and large creators
to help us make this decision,
and they told us that actually they don't see email
as being critical to the success of their video.
And so we're planning to turn off these emails.
- Thank you for that explanation James,
help me understand, and help the group understand this,
so you're saying if we turn off these emails,
and it seems like we will experiment,
how will this change how subscribers interact with YouTube?
- Yeah, so it's worth mentioning, there essentially,
there are a few other ways that,
I kind of mentioned some a second ago, that subscribers,
your subscribers know about your new video.
So, we send lots of push notifications,
and I should make it really clear
we have no plans to change those.
And by those, I mean the little messages
that are sent to your phone,
and their appear on Android, iOS or Chrome,
we have no plans to change those at all.
There's of course the subs feed, you know,
the the subs box as some of you may call it.
And then alongside that, there's the notifications inbox.
And we have no plans to change
any of those three mechanisms.
And they all work really well.
And actually what happens is,
I think that the emails tend to get lost in email in boxes.
You know, we get lots of them,
with tools like Gmail now,
may put some of the YouTube emails under a social tab.
So it might be hidden.
And so actually email doesn't look that effective.
And so when you turn them off,
what happens is that people tend to go and seek out
the alternative channels.
Whether it's the subs feed,
the notifications, or the notifications inbox,
we have more come back to the app
and visit the subscriptions page,
which is what this chart's showing.
It's showing that there's kind of a modest increase,
the blue line between the version
where we turn off emails,
and the version where we retain the emails,
and this blue line essentially says that, you know,
in the version where we turn off the emails,
the subscription page visitors go up a little bit.
And so actually, the people are coming back to the app.
They're looking at, in this example,
were looking at the subscriptions page,
and they're seeking out your videos there.
We think that's a better experience.
Which is why we wanna turn off these emails.
And there's another interesting thing we observed,
is that as more people are live streaming
with the lockdowns in many countries
and the recent sort of covid issues we've all been through,
we've seen live streams increase, and live streams,
you know, sending an email for a live stream
doesn't make a lot of sense.
And we saw that, essentially, typically,
emails get opened many hours after we send them.
I think in the case of live streams it's around three hours.
And so, sending an email that gets opened
three hours after you've live streamed
doesn't really work for these streams.
And so a push notification
that tends to get opened almost immediately,
it's a better product fit for helping your subs
become aware of your latest stream or your latest upload.
So generally we think that the push notifications,
the subs tab and the inbox are just a better solution
for keeping your subscribers up-to-date.
- That sounds like a really great trend
in terms of these experiment results,
but also just the kind of like high-level how subscribers
are interacting with YouTube in general.
I have to ask for all the creators out there,
are there any other ways this is gonna affect creators?
One of the things we observed is that many creators
use the same email account as a viewer and as a creator.
So, it's the same YouTube login.
And so your email inbox,
many of you may be able to relate to this,
has both all of your emails, all of these bells,
and then maybe you also got,
arguably much more critical stuff,
strikes, community guidelines,
which is very important to creators, obviously.
And so, we wanted to maybe clean up the email inbox
to really help surface these messages
that are more critical to you as a channel.
And so we feel that, you know,
we can get rid of some of the noise from YouTube overall,
and really highlight some of these more important emails.
Hopefully that's a better change for creators in general.
- Well, it sounds like we're rolling forward on this.
Just kind of curious, there's a lot of emails out there,
How do you plan on turning this off?
- Yeah. (chuckles)
So, it turns out turning down a campaign of this size
takes a little bit of time,
and in which we've been trying to work through it
in a thoughtful way,
and so we will stop sending these subscriber notifications.
And as I said, we will continue to send push notifications
to mobile devices, to Chrome browsers.
And then we also wanna make sure that...
There's a very small percentage of people who do open them,
and we're gonna send them a sort of farewell email
explaining to your subscribers
and your viewers who may be using them,
what the alternatives are, that we're turning them off,
and how they can still find your videos.
And so we'll be sending them help center articles,
and some guidance there to help them out.
- Excellent, thanks for the update James,
I think it's good that we're also trying to make sure
that the subscribers of all of these channels
are well-informed, and they know where to go next,
and how to still consume the same content
that they've always been consuming off of these channels.
So after that, I'm kind of curious
when the next time you're in Creator Insider,
or more specifically, what's next for notifications?
- As I mentioned, during COVID we've seen quite a lot
of increase in live streams and premiers,
and we wanna help people discover these live streams.
Obviously the restrooms are very timely.
We wanna make sure that your subs are showing up
exactly as they start.
And so we've actually shipped quite a few changes recently
to support these streams,
and to sort of try and aid the discovery
of the live streams.
The other piece, kind of related to that,
is around the live stream reminder.
So that's the sort of manual toggle you can set
for a specific stream,
and that will then send you a reminder when it starts.
And we wanted to ship some reliability changes there
to bring them up to the same reliability standard
that we've brought the bell up to in the last year or so.
And so now we have the same kind of reliability metrics
that we track internally
to make sure that these things are working perfectly.
And so we're really happy
with the way that reminders work now.
And then the third, kind of a viewer and a creator fix,
we're thinking about the inbox,
the inbox tab in the YouTube main app.
We're looking at how we can help people
find their latest updates,
help your subscribers find the most recent bell,
for example, within that tab.
And generally just considering some improvements there.
So that's something we're looking at next.
- Third, time's a charm.
So hopefully, (James laughs)
once we have rolled those out,
that you can come join us on Creator Insider again
to talk about all of these changes.
- Yeah, I look forward to it.
- Perfect, well, that's a wrap for today.
So please, please, please put feedback
for anything that you want in terms of James,
comments, concerns, et cetera, in the comments below.
If you liked this video,
don't forget to thumbs up this video,
and until next time, bye all.
- Thanks.