- Welcome to YouTube Creator News,
where I keep YouTube content creators like you
up to date with everything that's happening on YouTube
that impacts you as a content creator.
Today, we've got some interesting news,
but some very important news
if you are a Canadian YouTuber specifically.
Some scary stuff, and this actually,
what I'm gonna talk about with Canada,
something similar actually almost happened
in the US as well, or at least it was a threat.
So even if you are a US content creator,
you definitely wanna stick around for this.
Just to let you know
that some things can be a little bit scary,
a little bit unstable, so to speak,
when it comes to YouTube, but we'll get into all of that
here in just a moment.
So the very first thing that we have on our list today
is the update to the YouTube Creator Studio app.
If you log into your dashboard there on your mobile device,
I'm not sure if this is on Android and iOS,
but I know for sure that it is on iOS.
You should see, or you should see soon,
a new update to the interface
when you log into your Creator Studio
in the actual dashboard.
Now they are also making changes to some other places
or to some other displays inside of the mobile app,
so make sure that you keep an eye out for that,
just a little stylistic update.
And speaking of stylistic updates,
one thing that you may or may not have noticed,
and I can only see this from accessing it
through certain accounts, I cannot see this on all of them,
but YouTube is also testing different layouts
in front of different users on YouTube.
So one that I just ran into personally
is this particular one that you see on the screen right now,
and in this particular one, the reason I'm sharing this one,
this is more of a viewer update,
but for you as a YouTube content creator,
we might need to make some adjustments
when it comes to optimization and things like that.
But I just wanted to bring this to your attention.
You can see how they have,
one, taken the red off of the subscribe button
in this particular scenario,
so you might need to upgrade your graphics for this.
They've also kind of moved things around a little bit,
so you can see some of the icons on the screen right there
are kind of shoved over to the right hand side.
We've got the subscribe button and the join
over on the left hand side, so if you are somebody
that tells people to click on those things in your videos,
then you might need to update that information
when you are sharing it.
But hold tight on that right now,
'cause I'm not sure if they are just testing this,
because again, I have seen different versions of this
and I actually made a tweet,
so make sure that you follow me on Twitter,
asking people for feedback on different versions
that they were seeing.
And at that moment in time,
this version wasn't even out there yet.
So because of that, I just wanted to let you know
that this is out there,
because this might be something that we need to consider
as they do make some of these changes on the platform
in different ways that we need to optimize things
like our descriptions, for example.
Maybe it's gonna impact the character count
or something like that.
But I wanted to bring that to your attention.
In addition to this, content creators that have stores
on their YouTube channels,
this is a really big update, in my opinion.
This is on the monetization side,
so if you have a store attached to your YouTube channel,
you can now have multiple stores
attached to your YouTube channel.
So the use case for this is let's say that you have merch
through somebody like Spreadshop,
and let's say you also have digital downloads
that you offer to your YouTube viewers.
In that particular case, you can connect your Shopify store
for those digital downloads
and maybe for some physical products that you offer,
and then you can also connect your Spreadshop account
or any other service that you use for your merch,
you can connect that,
and then you can basically have both of them
that are spreading awareness
about all of those different things
that you are offering to your viewers, which is a huge win
if you are using those particular features.
And the next thing that we have on our list
is if you are a channel that has, or I'm sorry,
that has memberships enabled and you have people
that are joining your channel membership,
one of the things that they just recently did
is they are now rolling out specific updates,
or notifications, I should say, to your members.
So this is some awareness
that you might wanna spread in your community feed
to some members,
because your members will actually need to go in
and they'll need to opt into some of these things.
So if you are someone that puts out regular videos
for members only, make sure that you let your members know
to turn on the option for that notification,
so that they can know
whenever it is that you upload a members only video,
whenever it is that you go live.
There's a whole menu list of items
that they can turn their notifications on for,
so just make sure that you spread that awareness
for your members as this gets rolled out,
so that you can ensure that they get the notifications
that they need in order to get the full value
out of the membership that you are offering
on your YouTube channel.
The next thing that we have here on this list is,
and this is coming
from the creator insiders YouTube channel,
this specific one, and on this one,
they are doing something really cool
that they kind of teased
that they're going to be rolling out in the near future,
and this is called Data Stories.
Now, with Data Stories, the whole idea here
is YouTube analytics can be complicated, right?
And I know a lot of content creators,
especially those of you that are just getting started,
you might go into your YouTube analytics,
especially if you go into advanced mode,
and you might think to yourself,
"There's a ton of stuff in here.
"I don't even know where to start.
"It's just a big thing of information in here
"and I don't really know what to look at
"or how to actually interpret some of this information
"that I'm seeing."
What YouTube is rolling out to help you as a content creator
better understand what it is that you're looking at
and just better understand how people are responding
to your content, they're rolling out the Data Stories.
Now, what this is going to do is this is going to show you
the videos people are responding to.
They're gonna give you some tips,
in terms of saying these videos
are bringing people back to the platform,
these videos are not, so you can start just getting an idea
of how people are responding to your content
without the need to dig into your YouTube analytics,
which is great for people that don't like to dig
into your YouTube analytics that often.
But I do wanna encourage you, as this does roll out,
it's gonna be great, it's gonna be informative,
we're gonna be able to get
a lot of good information from this,
but you still wanna go into your analytics
from time to time, so you can make sure
that you do have a pulse on what's happening
with your YouTube channel and how people are responding
to your channel at this moment in time.
Now, let's get into some scary stuff here.
So if you are a Canadian content creator,
and for those of you in the US,
I'm gonna tell you just a little insight here
on a thing that we dodged, being US content creators.
But for those of you that are in Canada,
there is something called Bill C-11,
and with this particular bill,
this actually just came on my radar
because I've been traveling, so this just came on my radar
just shortly right before I did this segment,
when I was preparing everything.
And Neil, who's a Chief Product Officer over at YouTube,
he put out a tweet, just sharing a blog post specifically,
I've got a link to that blog post down in the description.
If you're a Canadian YouTuber,
I really recommend that you go down there and you read it,
just so you can get yourself up to date on what is going on,
plus you might get some information there
on how you can possibly contribute
in terms of reaching out to lawmakers and things like that
to make sure that your voice is heard as a creator.
But the problem with this, or what this bill is doing,
is, to my understanding so far,
with the limited research that I've done,
I just wanna make sure that I put that disclaimer out there.
With the limited research that I've done so far,
just reading through that particular blog post,
what it seems like, 'cause it seems like they are,
the government, of course, is getting involved
and they are wanting to change the YouTube home page
to where YouTube isn't necessarily
giving the recommendations that they would normally give.
Instead, they are wanting to change it
to where a Canadian government regulator
gets to prioritize the content that people see
on their home pages.
In my opinion, this is absolute garbage.
So if you are a Canadian content creator,
make sure that you check out that blog post
so that you can try to figure out what it is that you can do
to get your voice heard.
That might be sending a letter somewhere,
that might be hopping on a phone
and calling your local politicians or whatever it is.
But you need to participate
in the stopping of this particular situation.
Now, as a US content creator, because this is something,
'cause I have a US account
so this is something that impacts me as well.
So one thing that we dodged, just to kinda let you know
that this isn't something that just impacts Canadians,
but this is something that can impact other content creators
all over the world,
based on the things that the governments are doing
and based on legislation that they're trying to pass
and things like that.
In the US, we actually had a situation
where they were trying to,
as part of another bill they were passing,
the language that was being used
was actually going to negatively,
or possibly negatively impact
YouTube's recommendation system for the US as well.
So it was gonna be something similar.
Not as extreme, in terms of the government saying,
"Hey, these are the things we wanna prioritize",
but it was going to massively have a negative impact
on the recommendation system.
However, that language got changed
and we ended up kind of bypassing that particular one.
But I just wanted to bring this to your attention,
because, as content creators, it's important for us to know
that little things like this can happen
that can change the platform as we know it.
So just make sure that you are staying up to date
with things like that,
and you are staying up to date with the news here
so when things like this do roll out,
you can make sure that you are informed about them.
Now, really quick, just because I have been traveling.
I do want to cover just a few more things,
just in case this is the only place that you come
for your YouTube news,
and those things happened while I was on the road
over the last two weeks for Vid Summit,
which was a fantastic time, by the way.
But the really quick recap here is first,
if you are a YouTube Shorts creator,
just in case you were not aware of this yet,
they do have where you can add voiceovers and narration
to your YouTube Shorts.
In addition to that, Shorts now count towards monetization,
with the requirements being
that you have to have 1000 subscribers
on your YouTube channel,
4000 public watch hours, just like before,
and if you are doing it all with Shorts, then in that case,
you have to have 10 million public Shorts views
in the last 90 days.
And if you hit those qualifications
and if you are just a Shorts creator,
then you can get into the Partner program with that as well.
So with all of that taken care of,
I just wanna say really quick, I'm super happy to be back,
super happy to be back in the flow.
Today is actually my first official work today,
and I'm excited to share it with you.
And that is the news.
Click into here to stay up to date
with everything that's going on with YouTube.
Thank you so much for watching.
I will see you next time.