Tag Archive for: YouTube news

YouTube is previewing its latest upcoming features for users, creators, and brands in a new blog post shared by the company’s Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan.

While Mohan was light with actual details – likely because these features are still in development – the post teases new shopping features, ways to share content, and more coming to YouTube this year.

New Ways To Shop On YouTube

YouTube is preparing to double down on its shopping features with a dedicated section and a number of new partnerships and features. 

For example, Mohan says the team is currently working on making videos across the platform more shoppable through user-created tags in existing content. 

YouTube Shopping Preview

The company is also testing Live Shopping, which mixes the experience of the Home Shopping Network with a livestream hangout. For an idea of what to expect when this goes live, Mohan suggests looking to the weeklong Holiday Stream and Shop event hosted on the platform last November. 

Updates to YouTube Shorts

Unsurprisingly, Mohan says the company is planning to focus on expanding its popular Shorts format. Following the smash success of TikTok in 2021, social networks are rushing to establish their own versions of the short-video format. 

YouTube is working to improve its own take on the format with new effects, improved editing tools, better viewer engagement features, and even monetization options. The monetization features mentioned range from implementing BrandConnect with Shorts, expanding the Super Chat feature so users can stand out on live chats, and adding the ability to shop products directly from a Short.

Other Updates

Mohan also hinted at a number of other features and improvements coming to YouTube this year. 

For creators, the blog post says that new insights are coming which will help not only understand your current videos’ performance on the platform but also help “generate concrete content ideas for upcoming videos.”

Channels will soon also be able to establish their own guidelines for community interaction, letting creators set the tone for the conversations occurring on their channel.

Meanwhile, brands may be excited to try out Collaborate Livestreaming, which allows multiple creators or partners to go live together – rather than hosting independent streams on their own channels. 

More To Come

The blog post is just a taste of the many features and updates YouTube is working on and anything previewed by Neal Mohan today could change significantly before they reach the public.

Still, these features give a clear idea of the company’s priorities for the upcoming year, including how it plans to address the continued growth of TikTok.  

YouTube has ramped up its efforts to remove harmful content over the last quarter, as a new report shows the company removing over 100,000 individual videos. 

That is nearly 5 times the number of videos removed in the first quarter of the year, reflecting a big shift in activity following a new hate speech policy introduced in June. 

Additionally, the company says it has removed over 17,000 channels and 500 million comments in Q2. 

Notably, YouTube says a large amount of the harmful content is flagged using machine learning technology to remove the content before it is ever seen by actual users. According to the company’s data, more than 87% of the videos removed in Q2 were first flagged by YouTube’s automatic systems. 

The report also mentions that an update to YouTube’s spam detection tools has driven a 50% increase in the number of channels removed for violating the platform’s spam guidelines. 

YouTube says the report is only the first in a four-part series which will cover the company’s guiding principles:

  • Remove content that violates policies
  • Raise up authoritative voices
  • Reward eligible creators
  • Reduce the spread of borderline content

As such, you can expect to see more details about how YouTube is working to curate the best platform possible in the near future.

Hashtag YouTube

Hashtags are coming to YouTube. The video platform has begun displaying hashtags on videos to help users search and discover other videos on similar topics.

The hashtags appear on any video that has been optimized with the tags in web browsers and the YouTube Android app. So far, the hashtags are not being shown in the iOS app.

Up to three hashtags can be shown in blue text above videos’ titles and can be clicked on to open a search containing related videos.

Hashtags can be used to conduct manual searches for any video containing that hashtag, even if it is just in the video description. Hashtags can also be included in video titles.

There are a few restrictions on how hashtags can be used on YouTube, most of which are common sense. YouTube’s policies explicitly prohibit using hashtags to promote harassment or hate speech, as well as to mislead people about content.

Additionally, the platform discourages users from over-tagging their videos, which would be defined as using 15 or more tags on a single video.

Breaking these rules could lead to a variety of punishments depending on how severe the infraction is or whether someone has committed a previous offense. These could include having your hashtags be ignored, videos being removed from search results, or a video being removed from YouTube altogether.

For now, using hashtags to search provides pretty limited search results. But, I expect that will change as creators begin to optimize their channels.