Steve Dotto here.
How the heck you doing this fine day?
Me?
I am pretty darn excited because I YouTube has sent me a little present.
Well, they’re still rolling out this present to all YouTube content creators.
It’s called Video Cards or just Cards in the Creator Studio.
What are YouTube cards?
I’m glad you asked because they’re the topic du jour on DottoTech.
So YouTube content creators over the next little while will be getting this little new
icon in their Creator Studio, in the editing modules.
I’m in the editing area for my video and I’ve got this opportunity to add something
called YouTube cards to my video.
Now what are cards?
Well, they’re little basic graphics that will slide across in front of our video and
they really open up some opportunities for us.
But they also really up the production quality for YouTube content creators.
Let me show you what a card looks like.
Now I’ve just enabled my very first one on a video that I posted earlier this week.
So here’s the video.
Let me run the video so you can see how the cards are implemented.
There it is.
I’m going to pause it right now.
Do you see the little graphic here at the very top where it says “Screencasting Secrets?”
What I did is I created a card to promote an upcoming webinar that I’m doing and it’s
got this little information, this little i button here as well.
Now that i button persistent through the video but the “Screencasting Secrets” pops out
when I told it to.
Now what happens when I click on that is this little message pops out of the side of the
video screen.
Now I wasn’t able to find specifics on the scaling and the sizing so I played around
a little bit in order to create this video.
Now this graphic I created was 400 pixels by 400 pixels.
When I created a larger one, it was cut off so that’s the size of graphics that you
create.
I’ll show you how to create the graphic in a moment.
But it’s basically a call to action and anything that we could’ve done previously
in an annotation such as going to an associated website, launching a merchant site or any
of those sorts of things is available to us from here, including subscribing the videos
or playing other videos from this screen.
Now the graphic has to be a PNG file, I do believe.
I tried to upload it with a JPEG and it would not upload so I believe that they are PNG
files.
Now I apologize if I’m still kind of working my way through this but there’s not a lot
of help notes on the topic yet available on YouTube.
So it’s kind on the voyage of discovery still.
Now this area here at the top, the text here “Screencasting Secrets Webinar: Free Webinar,”
this text is user-definable.
We can actually decide what text we want to put in and again I will show you that in a
minute but if I click on this, what will happen is it will then take me to whatever URL I
have it pointed to in that particular graphic and I’ve assigned.
So then now it’s going through, it’s loading, it’s taking me a few seconds but it’s
going through and it’s going to be loading up an opt-in page for my upcoming webinar.
Isn’t that cool?
So let’s take a look.
So you’ve seen now how it looks in action.
Let’s show you how it looks in editing.
If you find the tool here on the very top menu bar where info settings next to annotations.
It’s very similar to annotations but profoundly different than annotations.
Annotations of course are wonderful tools where we can actually overlay elements on
our video that allow people to click, go to our associated websites and subscribe to our
videos.
That sort of stuff we can create within annotations or we can just to titlings but we’re very
limited as far as formatting.
We can’t incorporate new graphics or anything like that so any graphics that we have to
be embedded actually in our video.
With cards, we can actually start to bring in some other graphical elements, meaning
we can really dress up the presentation of our video.
They are similar to annotations but oh so much brand-friendly.
Does that make sense?
Actually, let’s add a new card and I’m going to walk you through the steps that are
involved in creating a card.
You can create a card that’s going to point to your associated website, which is part
of your account with YouTube, to a fund-raising site, to merchandise or to a video or playlist
within your account.
That’s what I’m limited to right now.
If I’m going to send it to an associated website, that means that’s the site that
I’ve authorized with YouTube that is my site that I can point back to and I can put
the URL in.
You can start by putting in the URL.
So in my case it’s going to point back to DottoTech.com and you can go to any page within
your website.
Okay, there we go.
There it is.
So that should be verified now as a page that we’ll go to.
Now it’s going to pull an image from whatever page you’re sending it to, plus it’s also
going to pull the name of the page.
What it’s doing over here is it’s showing the image that it thinks we might want, which
is just one of the images that’s loaded onto the page.
It’s also pulling the name of the page.
I’m going to call this something else, because I don’t want to call it just DottoTech.
So you can actually name here, put the name here of whatever you want.
Mine was Free Webinar that I was promoting if I’m promoting a free webinar.
We can put in our own name here.
Then you can also put in a call to action.
Now the call to action’s going to be what we see in the bottom part of that video.
Remember when we looked at the video?
Again, I’ll show it to you again in a few moments but we can create a call to action.
It could say something else.
They’re suggesting say “Visit website,” “Subscribe now,” “Seating is limited.”
You could put those sorts of things in here.
And finally, you can upload your own image.
Again, it’s limited to a PNG.
You can upload an image.
I created graphics in 400 x 400 pixels.
It seems to resolve fine.
I think it’s going to scale it down to make it fit but I think you want to be careful
with your headroom to make sure that your full message is in.
The good thing is you could test it out as you’re going along.
So I’m going to cancel this because I don’t want to create a new card.
But here I’ve got an existing card which is called “Screencasting Secrets” so it’s
talking about the webinar.
If we take a look in the editing, the call to action says, “Free webinar” and the
teaser text is, “Screencasting Secrets.”
The teaser text is what appears here at the top when it’s playing.
If we take a look back in the video itself, the teaser text is going to be “Screencasting
Secrets.”
Let’s just close this down and let’s take a look on how it resolves again because the
nomenclature, what they name each of these elements is something we have to pay attention
to.
So here’s a graphic.
It’s going to come in about eight seconds, here it is.
So the teaser text is what we see here, “Screencasting Secrets.”
If we look back in the graphic or we look back in the editor, “Screencasting Secrets.”
That’s my teaser text.
So let’s go back and look at it.
If I then click on the i, what comes out is the URL, “Screencasting Secrets Webinar”
and the blue text which looks like a link it says “Free webinar.”
Again, we see it here.
So “Free webinar” is the call to action and “Screencasting Secrets Webinar,” this
name here appears in the bottom box right there.
So this is going to take some playing with to figure out but it’s so nice to see some
nice graphics.
If we take a look at the very end, I’ve got annotations in this video.
Now I don’t have any text-based annotations but if we go right to the end, I’ve got
little annotations over the top of graphics that I’ve embedded in it but it’s so nice
to have this kind of color and design going into our video that we can create ourselves
rather than having to work within the Annotations Editor, which just limits us to basically
a few web-friendly fonts and a few sizes and no ability to create any graphical treatment
to it at all.
Now the other thing that we should be aware of in this is the fact that we can determine
here on the timeline when it appears, when the card appears and we can have multiple
card in our videos.
They could, as I say, point to a website.
They can point to other videos.
So it becomes some nice supporting content within our video.
Another really nice thing about the cards is we can do time-sensitive content.
So you could take and you could build cards, you could build a graphic for a card and you
can quickly add cards to several videos for something like an upcoming webinar.
Then when that webinar is over, you could go in and you can remove the cards.
Now there is one change to the structure of the video as a result.
If we take a look at the video playback here, it is down at the bottom right-hand corner,
the Subscribe button or the channel branding that you can create in your channel has moved
from the top right corner to the bottom right corner.
So actually I have a subscribe link.
You can’t see it here right now.
But it is there.
There is one other quite exciting part of this entire equation and that’s the fact
that this is resolving in on my iPhone.
Now I tested this on my iPhone 6+ or in the newest iOS, the latest operating system for
iOS.
I’ve also tested it on this brand new Samsung galaxy S6 running Android.
The cards did not work on the Android.
I could not access them on it.
Now that might just be something that I’m doing wrong or it’s not quite ready for
Android yet.
Having said that, take a look at the video here.
Let me just run this video back and I’m going to play it on the iPhone for you.
It’s going to play forward and there it is, in comes this.
Now this is important because annotations don’t work for the most part on the iPhone
so the ability to be able to tap on it and bring it out on the iPhone means that we’re
extending this interactivity in YouTube into mobile really for the first time.
So this is a very important step in the evolution of YouTube in mobile delivery, being able
to create interactions, calls to action, asking people to sign up for something, visit our
website, to read the blog or to go for more information.
That is an important step forward as far as YouTube content creators are concerned.
You can tell I’m really a wee bit excited about it and I know that I’m going to be
over the next couple of weeks figuring out all sorts of different kind of creative ways
to use this.
So I’m quite excited about that.
That’s enough.
I hope that you found today’s video to be useful and maybe a little bit entertaining
as well.
Remember there are three different ways to stay in touch with us here on DottoTech.
I’m going to put up some old-fashioned annotations here on the screen.
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If you want to know what perks are involved in supporting DottoTech, I encourage you to
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That is it for today.
Until next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle.