YouTube Creator Blog: News

RSVP for our last 2012 YouTube Partner Meet-Ups

Friday, August 31, 2012

Registration is still open for our remaining 2012 YouTube partner meet-ups! We are excited to meet with more of the YouTube community and facilitate our partners mingling with each other. Each of these meetups will offer you a chance to meet your fellow partners, learn about program and product updates, and take your content creation and audience development techniques to the next level.

Details and registration forms are at these links:

NYC meet-up Oct. 29: http://goo.gl/WSnWB

Note: form closes Oct. 8
Our schedule in NYC includes:

Another episode of "Partner Support Talks with..." featuring ImprovEverywhere.
Panels on audience development and Creator Playbook updates.
Product updates and announcements.
Opportunities to discuss channel optimization directly with Partner Support.

LA meet-up Nov. 12: http://goo.gl/QG9aM

Space is limited, so please take note of the date each form closes and RSVP soon! We'll be sending confirmation emails with details to those we can accommodate.

We look forward to seeing you at these upcoming events!

Devon Storbeck, YouTube Partner Support, recently watched “11 Month Old Twins Dancing to Daddy's Guitar.”

Our August featured “On The Rise” partner is thevfxbro!

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Congratulations to Aaron of thevfxbro! As a result of strong fan support and recognizable efforts to optimize his channel and videos according to our best practices, Aaron is our featured “On The Rise” YouTube partner for August. His channel and four engaging videos are featured on the YouTube homepage today.

As a film student at Biola University, Aaron perfected his video editing skills and special effects knowledge while mastering programs like Final Cut and Adobe AfterEffects. This work was a natural fit for YouTube, and he’s found success by sharing his expertise with the YouTube world. The thevfxbro channel hosts such videos as the walkthrough of the video effects Aaron used in his “I Am Legend” spoof, his adorable “copy cat,” and how the “Hunt for Pikachu” video was created. Check out his library of video editing tutorials as well as behind-the-scenes footage explaining how Aaron - and his friend Zach from FinalCutKing - use special effects to create their videos.

Here are a few words from Aaron:

Wow! Having started film school 4 years ago I never thought that it would have ended with me running a YouTube channel with an audience that I not only get to share my videos with, but help along the way. The crazy thing about YouTube is that it’s so new and we have no idea where it’s going to take us. I am so excited to see where this platform takes us filmmakers. Feel free to check out my channel that has awesome videos with visual effects as well as training and tutorials to help you take your own videos to the next level!

If you’ve enjoyed this monthly On The Rise blog series and want to see more rising YouTube partners, check out our On The Rise channel. Keep an eye out for next month’s blog post, as your channel may be the next one On The Rise!

Christine Wang and Devon Storbeck, YouTube Content Partnerships, recently watched “Bentley the Bulldog Puppy is fussy.”

Expanding custom thumbnails to more partners

Friday, August 24, 2012

Why not just give custom thumbnails to everyone?focus on watch time when suggesting videosCommunity Guidelinesabuse of this featureAndy Stack, YouTube Product Manager, recently watched “Written By A Kid: Scary Smash.”

Tags removed from video watch pages

Friday, August 17, 2012

upload interfacevideo managerShiva Rajaraman, Director of Product Management, recently watched “Y.N.RichKids - Hot Cheetos & Takis.”

Our August “On The Rise” nominees need your help to reach the homepage!

Thursday, August 9, 2012

On The RiseherehomepageGoogle+FacebookTwitterworldfoodprogrammikeyssmailvahchefstrengthprojectmarchettinothevfxbroOn The Rise channelDevon Storbeck, YouTube Partner Support, recently watched “The 90-year-old world record holder in pole vault - BBC News.”

Mikeyssmail is July’s YouTube Partner On The Rise!

Monday, July 30, 2012

On The RiseMikeyssmailhomepagecrocodile stitchsmall flowerripple afghan Get ready, set & hook! That's what we strive for here at The Crochet Crowd®. Our mission is to provide free education so that the fibre arts isn't one day a skill that we all remember but have lost the ability to actually do it. Many of us turn to crochet and knitting as a way to cope with our personal situations, find time to relax and to express our creativity. No matter what your skill level is, there's always room for more in our 'Crowd'. In 2009, we changed the focus of our channel to be community oriented instead of just revolving around myself, Michael Sellick. This switch in focus opened up a gateway of cross connection between individuals, companies and remarkably removed global borders to help and encourage each other with our skills. I am very proud of The Crochet Crowd® Members and love watching them expand their skills through picture postings and comments on our Facebook Fan Page. As my viewers grow and learn, so do I. Thank you to the voters and members of 'The Crowd' for using my videos as your educational resource. Our community is forever evolving and extremely active, if you don't believe me, come to TheCrochetCrowd.com to start your fibre arts journey. Thank you everyone, Happy Hook'n. On The Rise ChannelChristine Wang and Devon Storbeck, YouTube Content Partnerships, recently watched “That Gotye Song.”

Get a birds-eye view of your channel with the Creator Dashboard

Thursday, June 28, 2012

YouTube Creator Dashboardyoutube.com/dashboard

db-feedback@youtube.comHelp CenterJung Kim, UX Designer. Recently Watched “Metallica - Orion Festival 2012.”

Improvements to Scheduled Publishing

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

scheduled publishingWhat’s new with standard publishingNotify subscribers at time published (i.e. first set public), not time uploadedNo more “0% published”What’s new with scheduled publishingVideo ManagerWe’re not donescheduled-publish-team@google.comVladimir Vuskovic, Product Manager, recently watched "Why do YouTube views freeze at 301?"

Monday, June 25, 2012

WorldFoodProgramOn The Riseour homepageglobal hunger problemspecific issuesthe impact of the WPF’s initiatives

Thanks to everyone who voted for us, and especially to YouTube, for this incredibly cool opportunity. At the World Food Programme, we believe that hunger is the world's greatest solvable problem. It affects nearly a billion people worldwide and yet we have the means to solve it. WFP is the world's largest humanitarian aid agency on the front lines of hunger. When we're not saving lives in emergencies, we're helping families get back on their feet. When we're not serving meals in schools, we're protecting mothers and children from malnutrition. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and find out what it's like to drive across the Sahara, ride a yak through the Himalayas or fly a helicopter in South Sudan as we deliver food assistance to some of the most dangerous and remote places on Earth. We’ll see you there.hereOn The Rise ChannelChristine Wang and Devon Storbeck, YouTube Partner Support, recently watched “Milk in my Sippy Cup!”

Meet our May “On The Rise” nominees

Thursday, May 10, 2012

On The RiseOfficial YouTube bloghomepageGoogle+FacebookTwitterAnyoneButMeWebSeriesSTRskillschoolgr8bluesgtr

tdarnell

jakatak69

GardenGirlTV

On The Rise ChannelDevon Storbeck and Christine Wang, YouTube Partner Support, recently watched “Lion tries to eat baby PART 1.”

Using annotations to help fund your creative projects

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Over the past year, crowdsourced fundraising has exploded as great way to raise money for creative projects. We’ve seen lots of you using platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo to fund projects, and we want to make it easier for even more of you to use these tools. We’ve teamed up with these platforms so you can now link directly to project pages on Kickstarter or Indiegogo through annotations.
We’ve been inspired by creators who have funded projects through these platforms, like Freddie Wong’s Video Game High School and James Rolfe’s Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie, and we hope this helps many more of you launch the projects you’ve been dreaming about. To use the feature, go to your Video Manager, click “Edit” and select Annotations. You’ll see the following screen, with an option to link to any existing Kickstarter or Indiegogo project page:

Some creators are already using the new annotations feature to help fund their latest projects, and here’s what it looks like:You can find more information on annotations here, and in our help center. For even more fundraising goodness, we have a page on Kickstarter highlighting some projects to check out, and if you’re interested in being considered for the page, you can share your project with us on this form.Andy Stack, product manager, recently watched “Visiting the Abyss” and “Push to add drama!”

Reminder: Upcoming workshops - some times have changed!

Monday, April 9, 2012

Directing for the Web 101 WorkshopForm to register is here7-8:30 PM
Cinematography 101 WorkshopForm to register is here7-8:30 PM
Vlogging 101 WorkshopForm to register is hereMonday, April 23, 20127-8:30 PM

Networks can now segment revenue per channel

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Simon's Cat in 'Shelf Life

Introducing our February “On The Rise” nominees

Friday, February 10, 2012

On The RiseyourOfficial YouTube bloghomepageFacebookTwitterThePortraitArtCaliforniaTravelTipsmarydoodlesyoyomax12wwwboyinabandcomEricTheCarGuychannelDevon Storbeck and Christine Wang, YouTube Partner Support, recently watched “9 Year Old Jonny Mizzone - How Mountain Girls Can Love - Sleepy Man Banjo Boys.”

Partner Meet-Ups in February & March!

Friday, February 3, 2012

goo.gl/qMTjDgoo.gl/Txe9tgoo.gl/pFSsIgoo.gl/1qNiWTaylor Marcus, YouTube Partner Support, recently watched "Keyboard Cat Redux."

YouTube Release Notes: Updates to Browse page, Video Editor and Video Manager

Thursday, January 26, 2012

This week we’re kicking off our recurring Release Notes post for 2012, highlighting some of the most recent updates to YouTube. Our scrappy engineers have been hard at work to make your experience even better, and here’s what’s new.New look for BrowseBrowseYouTube.com/browseVideo Editor with new featuresannouncedYouTube homepage updateYouTube.com/editorVideo Manager with oldies and new goodiesVideo ManagerupdateDavid Wang, product specialist, recently watched “Somebody That I Used to Know - Walk off the Earth (Gotye - Cover),” Alan deLespinasse, software engineer, recently watched “Extreme Sheep LED Art [HQ],” and Jung Kim, User Experience Designer, recently watched “[M/V] ITAEWON FREEDOM (with J.Y. Park).”

Upcoming improvements to accuracy of subscriber counts

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

UPDATE (2/6/12):
We are ready to proceed with removing closed accounts from all user subscriber counts on Thursday, February 9th. A mentioned previously, all users will see a one-time adjustment to their total subscriber counts. For further details about how this affects your channel, you should view your YouTube Analytics "Subscribers" reports.
-----------------------------------------UPDATE (1/11/12): We will be holding off on the single day adjustment (the January 12th date is being postponed) until we can address some discrepancies we found in synchronizing the public counts with YouTube Analytics. Everyone involved in this project is determined to ensure that this change is clearly understood by users, so we will postpone the single day adjustment until we can ensure that both the public count and YouTube Analytics data are consistent and unambiguous. We will let everyone know once we have a firm date in mind.
However, the enhanced techniques for despamming new subscriptions will be implemented as scheduled (tomorrow), as there are no such complications. We will continue to keep everyone up to date on how this develops. -----------------------------------------1/10/12At YouTube, we take the accuracy of subscriber counts seriously. Subscriber counts are a reflection of a creator’s level of engagement with viewers, and a serious source of pride in the community. Many creators also use subscriber counts to measure their expectations for how many views their new videos should receive, by comparing total subscriber counts to number of views received from subscription sources in YouTube Analytics.
As a result, we are enhancing our efforts to ensure that all subscriber counts are as accurate as possible. On January 12th, we will take the following steps to improve the quality and integrity of subscriber counts across the site:

Remove inactive and closed accounts from total subscriber counts. We will remove all such accounts from subscriber numbers on January 12th, and continually update subscriber counts as subscribers become inactive or close their accounts.

Improve techniques for preventing artificial inflation of subscriber counts. Recently, we’ve seen a rise in creative agencies and vendors that claim to increase subscribers while complying with the YouTube Terms of Service. In most cases, those claims are false; the purchase or gaming of subscribers is a violation of our Terms of Service. Accordingly, we are taking the following steps to prevent some users from artificially inflating their subscriber counts:

Effective January 12th, we will implement a more rigorous system that will prevent new subscriptions generated from these malicious sources from being added to subscriber counts.

Beginning January 12th, we will retroactively adjust subscriber counts to not include subscriptions generated by artificial sources on an ongoing basis.

Please note: While we are updating subscriber counts to remove such subscriptions from the totals, we will not stop delivering videos to these subscribers, even if they are artificially created accounts. This means that even if we mistakenly remove a subscriber from a subscription account as invalid, this will in no way affect your views.

By ensuring the quality of subscriber counts, we hope that this metric will be a more valuable data point for creators. Creators who have not attempted to inflate their subscriber counts should only see a limited drop--resulting from the removal of inactive and closed accounts--while users who have benefitted from abuse will get a reality check.

David Boyle, YouTube Staff, recently watched "2012 Taipei 101 New Year Fireworks HD complete 台北101煙火 Taiwan 2011 / 2012 (UFO ?)."

Partner Support talks with.... GloZell1 on January 17

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

On Tuesday, January 17th, the YouTube Partner Support team will be hosting a partner meet-up at YouTube Headquarters. During the meet-up, we'll be live streaming the latest episode of Partner Support Talks with.... featuring a YouTube partner answering questions submitted by YouTube users like you!

In this episode, Partner Support Talks with...GloZell1, we'll sit down with the one and only GloZell to talk about how she's achieved success on YouTube. We'll also ask her YOUR questions, live, on the air.

Is there something you'd like to ask GloZell about her YouTube history? Want her advice on best practices? You have until next Monday to submit your questions (and vote for others) here to be answered live: http://goo.gl/udXvj

Tune in to www.youtube.com/youtube at 4:30pm PST on January 17th to watch the show live! We'll also post the show on www.youtube.com/ytcreators after the show.
Lindsay Hampton, YouTube Partner Team, recently watched "NFL Wild Card Playoff Recap with the FootballWife."

Views and 3rd party services

Friday, January 6, 2012

Viewcounts are incredibly important to us here at YouTube. They serve as a way to recognize and surface great content, and are one of the most scrutinized measures of popularity on YouTube. Careers have been made because of viewcounts - whether you’re simply making a music video with friends or on the way back from the dentist, views matter.

Since views are so important, it’s no surprise that there are companies whose entire business model is built on converting your cash into views. We understand that promotion can be a highly effective way to grow your audience, and we encourage you to promote your content on and off of YouTube. However, we want to be clear that paying for views obtained through some of these companies could very well be a violation of our terms, and one that we take very seriously.

So what do we mean exactly? Let’s get specific.

What is a view?
We consider a view to be an action users want to do. Generally, this means that they initiate the view; for example, they click on something they want to watch or decide not to skip something, and they watch it. Pretty straightforward, right?

A view should be a metric that reflects genuine user interest. In other words, a viewer has a choice, and that choice determines whether or not we count something as a view. It shouldn’t be a gauge of how many people accidentally or unintentionally ended up watching your video.

What isn’t ok?
Services that attempt to gain views through automated means or that force or trick viewers into watching videos are not ok. This could be through a variety of means, including, among other things, deceptive layouts on third party websites that trick viewers into playing a video when they click unrelated elements on the page. It might also be serving up embedded videos instead of intended content, serving pop-unders, re-directing and/or a variety of other methods people use to try to inflate viewership.

At the end of the day, anything that artificially increases the number of views, either through the use of automatic systems or by serving up videos to unsuspecting viewers, is against our terms. Videos and accounts that are found to be in violation of our terms may be closed down and removed from YouTube.

Buyer beware
If you are going to contract someone to help promote your content, it should be someone you absolutely trust, as you may be putting the fate of your channel (and your business on YouTube) in their hands. If they are using methods that aren’t within our terms, you will be the one to pay the price, as it will be your videos and your channel that get taken down. And don’t just take their word for it - ask the tough questions, find out how they promote your content and do your due diligence. Ultimately, you are responsible for knowing and abiding by our terms - this means understanding the nature of the traffic on your channel and making sure you are in compliance with our terms. Ignorance of bad traffic or other actions taken on your behalf may lead to your account being removed from YouTube.
Stefan Vraspir, YouTube Partner Support, recently watched DJ Earworm Mashup - United State of Pop 2011 (World Go Boom)

Subscriptions and Publishing: Updates and FAQs

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

We know there have been issues with subscriptions and publishing reliability for some time, and today we wanted to give you an update on the issues we're facing and where we are with resolving them. We know we haven't met your expectations with this, and here's how we're trying to fix that.

To start, here’s some background on how publishing works at YouTube. Delivering your videos is a two phased system—we process your video and then we deliver that video to your subscribers.

Processing your video
Our engineers are working hard to make video processing even faster, more reliable, and continue adding related features that make your life easier like resumable uploads. We have more to do here in 2012, and will keep you updated with our progress.

Delivering your video
Over the last few weeks we’ve rolled out a subscriptions delivery system that’s 20 times faster and more powerful, able to deliver your videos to even more subscribers as your Channels continue to grow. It’s like upgrading from a unicycle to a racecar.

Once our processing improvements are complete, all the pieces should fall into place to make publishing a seamless and uneventful experience (as it should be). Until that happens, here are some tips to avoid common problems.

The 0% Published problem
What it means: What this generally means is that the video is waiting on processing to complete, before attempting to publish. Until the video has processed in all formats, the status will stay at 0%.

What you can do: Don’t delete your video and reupload. Just wait for your video to become available on all formats you would expect--for a 1920x1080 video that means everything from 240p through 1080p--and then the 0% published should go away very quickly once all formats have processed.

What we’re doing to fix this: We’ve removed the confusing 0% published notification from the new video manager. The icon will now say “Sending to subscribers feeds” instead.

Published video isn’t appearing in feeds
What it means: In almost all reports of this problems, the issue isn’t that videos aren’t appearing in feeds at all, but it’s that the videos are not appearing at the top of the feed, in chronological order. This is because the position of videos in the chronology of the feeds reflects the uploaded time rather than published time. This commonly happens when you upload a video as private or unlisted, then make it public 48 hours later.

What you can do: If you expect to keep your video private or unlisted for an extended period of time before marking it public, consider using scheduled publishing to ensure it gets to the top of user feeds.

What we’re doing: We’re looking at ways to make sure the order of videos reflects the published time rather than the original upload time.

As we are rolling out improvements, we’ll continue to provide updates through the Creator Blog and please keep sharing your feedback in the Partner Forum.

David Boyle, YouTube Staff, recently watched "Wham! - Last Christmas."

Creator Blog

RSVP for our last 2012 YouTube Partner Meet-Ups

Our August featured “On The Rise” partner is thevfxbro!

Expanding custom thumbnails to more partners

Tags removed from video watch pages

Our August “On The Rise” nominees need your help to reach the homepage!

Mikeyssmail is July’s YouTube Partner On The Rise!

Get a birds-eye view of your channel with the Creator Dashboard

Improvements to Scheduled Publishing

Meet our May “On The Rise” nominees

Using annotations to help fund your creative projects

Reminder: Upcoming workshops - some times have changed!

Networks can now segment revenue per channel

Introducing our February “On The Rise” nominees

Partner Meet-Ups in February & March!

YouTube Release Notes: Updates to Browse page, Video Editor and Video Manager

Upcoming improvements to accuracy of subscriber counts

Partner Support talks with.... GloZell1 on January 17

Views and 3rd party services

Subscriptions and Publishing: Updates and FAQs

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