YouTube Expands ‘Stories’ Feature To All Creators With At Least 10,000 Subscribers
YouTube is making its version of Stories — a format initially developed by Snapchat and notably pilfered by Instagram — available to more creators.
Now, any creator with at least 10,000 subscribers will be able to post Stories — a feature that the video giant launched late last year as Reels. Stories serve as a means for creators to interact with viewers between flagship video posts.
YouTube Making Future Exclusive Content Free with Ads from 2020
YouTube will make all its upcoming original programming free and ad-supported from 2020.
That’ll mean you won’t need a YouTube Premium subscription to watch the Google-owned video-sharing site’s original shows and movies, but you’ll have to sit through ads, as originally reported Tuesday by Reuters.
YouTube Will Completely Phase Out Annotations As Of January 15
YouTube is abolishing a feature that many creators have harnessed as a promotional tool over the years — despite the fact that viewers have often found the product to be a veritable nuisance.
Annotations — or the colored boxes that overlay videos and contain links and text — will be completely phased off of YouTube by Jan. 15, the video giant noted in its Help forums.
Over a Third of the U.S. Adult Population Turns to YouTube for Tutorials, Survey Says
Roughly half of all adult YouTube users say the site is very important for helping them figure out how to do things they’ve never done before, Pew Research Center reported Wednesday.
The site’s “how to” videos are especially important for younger generations: the survey, conducted between May and June of this year, found 53% of users ages 18 to 29 felt YouTube was very important for learning how to do things, compared to 41% of users ages 65 and up.
YouTube’s Recommendation Algorithm Suggests Increasingly Longer Videos, Study Finds
A new study from Pew Research Center took an in-depth look at YouTube’s polarizing recommendation algorithm and found that the more they watch, the more users are nudged toward progressively longer and increasingly popular videos.
Only 5% of videos recommended to researchers had less than 50,000 views at the time they were recommended, while 64% of recommendations had more than 1 million views. The most commonly recommended videos were music videos, videos of TV competition shows like American Idol, kids’ content, and life hack videos.
