Hello everyone, I'm Ryan Wyatt, and I'm the Head of Gaming here at YouTube.
Gaming has been a key part of YouTube since the platform was founded in 2005.
This year we hosted some of the biggest creators in the world
at our first ever Gaming Creators' Summit.
We showed up big and got to meet some of you in person.
ID3, Gamescom, BGS, and even G-Star.
We continue to focus on helping smaller creators grow on the platform
and hosted several gaming-focused NextUp camps.
We saw lots of creators use the platform to do good
including MatPat, who raised more than $1.3 million
during a single stream for charity.
We've been working hard to make gaming on YouTube amazing for you.
Your feedback has helped us optimize not only our monetization products
but has changed our policy
and has built programs to bring the community closer together.
You may remember that YouTube Gaming used to have a standalone app.
Well, last year we decided to fold it back into YouTube main for two key reasons.
1) To bring gaming-focused features to even more people
and 2) to make it easier for the gaming community to connect
where everyone is already watching.
Since then, gaming on YouTube has had its biggest year ever.
2019 saw massive growth across watch time
views, and gaming videos uploaded.
And in fact, more than 30 million channels uploaded gaming content
and more than 200 million people watched gaming videos each and every day.
In 2019 we saw more people watching gaming content than ever before.
YouTube is truly a global platform and our gaming community reflects that
as we see different trends from region to region
and from country to country.
We're seeing tons of interest across all gaming platforms
which includes PC, console, and mobile gaming.
And in fact
there are now 5 mobile games in our top 15 most-watched games
and that's primarily because of the tremendous growth we're seeing
in Latin America, South East Asia, and India.
And YouTube is unique compared to any other platform
because it's a place that welcomes all types of gaming video
whether it's live streaming, mobile gaming, video on demand
upload, VR, whatever it is.
We want to empower you to build a business doing what you love
on a platform that reaches 2 billion users a month.
I know monetization is very important to all of you
and we're continually thinking of ways to help you earn money on this platform.
Here are the basics you need to know to grow your channel
connect with your audience, and earn money on YouTube.
[BASICS TO GROW YOUR GAMING CHANNEL ON YOUTUBE]
Channel memberships are a way for you to engage with your community
while generating revenue outside of traditional advertising.
With memberships, you can create membership-only perks
like custom emoji during streams, loyalty badges, and much more.
The cool thing about memberships is you can offer flexible pricing levels.
It's been shown to increase the number of paying members
and we recommend you give it a try.
Another new offering is merchandise.
Last year, we partnered with Teespring to enable creators to sell their merch
directly on their YouTube channel via the new merch shelf feature.
We now have 12 partners globally and are rapidly working to onboard more.
On top of this, we recently launched
the ability to pin your merch on top of a live chat
and this gives you a new way to launch products to your community
during a live stream.
We know lots of you have questions about live streaming on YouTube.
We invite you to try it for yourself and keep just a couple of these tips in mind.
[LIVESTREAMING ON YOUTUBE]
First, just give your content some space to perform
by keeping an eye on your upload schedule
and making sure your normal VOD uploads aren't posted too closely before
or after your streams.
Also, you should create highlight reels of your live streams
to reach broader audiences who aren't ready to just dive right into a long live stream.
And keep in mind that there are unique ways to monetize
and grow your business when you live stream.
Super Chat is one of these features.
Last year, there were 100,000 channels who benefited from Super Chat
with some of these videos earning more than $400 a minute!
For your viewers who are aware of Super Chat
stickers should be pretty familiar.
They're available on live streams and they're priced from $1 to $50
and they give your audience a visual way to share their thoughts
because sometimes words just don't cut it.
We partnered with designers around the world
to create characters that would really resonate with your fans.
Lastly, we heard you loud and clear
that our policies need to differentiate between real-world vs simulated violence
and we recently updated our enforcement
to reflect just that.
[NEW POLICIES FOR GAMING CREATORS]
As of early December
scripted or simulated violent content found in video games
will be treated the same as other types of scripted content.
We also made a number of important changes to our policy this year
to reduce hate and harassment based on qualities like race, religion
sexual orientation, and gender identity
with the goal to add more protections for creators to feel safe on the platform.
As part of this, we also announced
the expansion of the automod for comments feature
which captures and moderates toxic comments automatically.
The key point is the creators have control over their community experience
as they can control which comments appear and/or opt out of this feature entirely.
We hope these insights and information
help you feel empowered to succeed on YouTube.
We're very excited about 2020
and we hope to hear from you about how we're doing
and how we can improve gaming on YouTube for gaming creators.
Thank you, and you can go back to playing video games now!