YouTube Creator Blog: Product

A friendly reminder and monetization advice

Thursday, February 21, 2013

We’re always working to bring to you the latest tips and updates so you can make the most of your YouTube experience. One of the benefits of being a YouTube partner is your ability to monetize your uploaded content, and we have a few best practices and guidelines to help you understand the monetization process. Read on to review some of the commonly-asked questions and our suggestions for how you can maximize your YouTube earnings!

Keep in mind these monetization basics:

Create an AdSense account. You can enable video monetization and display ads without associating an AdSense account with YouTube, but in order to be paid you’ll need to create - and associate - an AdSense account.
Enable relevant ad formats. Set your monetization ad defaults, and allow all ad types that are relevant for your videos.
Look at the monetization symbol next to your video.

Videos with a grey “$” button are not yet monetized.
Videos with a green “$” button have been enabled for monetization
Videos with an orange “!” symbol next to them indicate that YouTube might need more information to approve your video for monetization. In that case, check your Video Manager and your e-mail.

Make sure you own commercial use rights before you monetize.

Whenever possible, take the opportunity to be creative - create your own unique audio and visuals!
If you want to monetize a video that contains audio or visuals you didn’t personally create, you’ll need the content creator to provide express written permission for commercial use. If you have written permission to use third-party material, be sure to mention/include it when you publish a video or when asked to provide information for monetization.
Check the licenses for any audio you include, and where possible, use royalty-free music that's licensed for commercial use.
Remember that fair use is a tricky subject. Don't assume you can monetize third-party content because you’ve claimed it as fair use.

Going forward, don’t forget to:

Keep your AdSense account in good standing. Encouraging viewers to click on your ads, or clicking on them yourself, is strictly prohibited. Learn more here.
Do your homework to understand whether you actually own commercial use rights. Purchasing a song, game, or program may not mean you own the rights to monetize, and there could be consequences for claiming content you don't own.
Create family-friendly content that advertisers want to sponsor. Keep in mind some advertisers have a family audience and may not want their ads appearing next to content containing profanity, offensive, or derogatory language/images.
Review our policies. Make sure you’re familiar with our spam policies and avoid spamming your viewers.
Follow our audience development best practices outlined in the Creator Playbook to build your fan base and increase views and watch time. Using misleading tags, thumbnails, and metadata may give your fans a negative viewing experience, reduce your watch time, and could affect your monetization status.

Thanks again for helping make the YouTube partner community so vibrant. We hope you find these tips useful, and if you have any additional questions, don’t forget about the resources YouTube makes available: monetization tips and audience development best practices abound in the YouTube Help Center, the Playbook, the Partner Forum, the Creator Hub, the YouTube Creators channel and here on the YouTube Creator Blog.

Vasiliki Kanistra & Devon Storbeck, YouTube Partner Support, recently watched “Kittens On The Beat.”

November 12th Live Stream: YouTube Product Updates and an Interview with OlgaKay

Thursday, November 8, 2012

On Monday, November 12th, the YouTube Partner Support team is hosting a Partner Meet-Up in Los Angeles. The event is at capacity so if you’re not already registered to join us in person, be sure to tune in at youtube.com/partnersupport.

During the meet-up, we'll be live streaming an update from the YouTube Product team on changes to your video management features and YouTube / Google+ identity integration. Additionally, we’ll be livestreaming the next episode of “Partner Support Talks With...” featuring OlgaKay. You can find a schedule for the stream below:

Time	Session
2:00 p.m. - 2:30 p.m. PST	Updates on YouTube / Google+ Identity Integration
2:30 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. PST	Updates on New & Upcoming Video Management Features
3:00 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. PST	Partner Supports Talks with... OlgaKay

We want to hear from you! Throughout the stream we’ll be taking live questions from viewers around the world via comments on youtube.com/partnersupport.

We’ll also be soliciting questions in advance for our talk show with OlgaKay. Have questions for Olga? Submit your questions and vote for the questions you like here: http://goo.gl/KWn4i

Can’t tune in? Don’t worry - as always, we'll also post the episode on youtube.com/partnersupport after the show.

John Langan and Devon Storbeck, YouTube Partner Support, recently watched "BUYRAL - Professional Clicking."

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

Note: form closes Oct. 12
Our schedule in LA includes:

Presentations by well-known partners such as LisBug and RatedRR, who will discuss their experience with audience engagement, production/post-production, and Analytics.
An episode of "Partner Support Talks with..." featuring OlgaKay.
Product updates and announcements.
Group critiques of sample videos and channels, and an opportunity to discuss optimization best practices.

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.”

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.”

YouTube Merch Store for all partners, now with CafePress

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Merch Storegood standingCafePress

PomplamooseGeek & SundryDeStormChristian Weitenberner, product manager, recently watched “The Flog.”

Improving rights management at YouTube

Monday, April 2, 2012

Content IDremember: 1 hour of content is uploaded to the site every second Partner-provided video User-provided video Partner-provided video User-provided video Partner-provided video User-provided videowww.youtube.com/t/contentidLars Krüger, Product Manager, Recently watched “Improv Everywhere - Best Buy Uniform Prank.”

Networks can now segment revenue per channel

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Simon's Cat in 'Shelf Life

Transitioning ads.youtube.com to AdWords for video

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

As you may have seen in your ads.youtube.com account, on April 12th, 2012, we will say a fond farewell to ads.youtube.com as we retire this interface. We’ve listened to your feedback and learned a lot about what video advertisers need to be successful with our tools. In an effort to give you more control over your ads, we’ve created AdWords for video (beta). This new tool streamlines the process of creating a campaign, has access to more ad formats and ad inventory, and gives you powerful tools to understand and improve the performance of your video ads.

All accounts have now been transitioned to AdWords for video.

To manage your account or create a new one, login at adwords.google.com/video. All ads.youtube promotions can still be found in the AdWords interface (adwords.google.com) and any advertiser can create a new video campaign by logging in at adwords.google.com/video

What’s happening to Promoted Videos?
This awesome YouTube video format isn't going anywhere - it's just joining the TrueView family of video ad formats with a fresh look.

Promotions alongside YouTube search results are now known as TrueView in-search.
Promotions alongside YouTube videos and content on the Google Display Network are now known as TrueView in-display.

For more information about AdWords for video (beta), including a step-by-step setup guide, visit the AdWords for video website or or the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Lane Shackleton, Product Manager, YouTube recently watched ‘The North Face: The Denali Experiment Teaser’

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 ?)."

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."

New Channels, new homepage, new look

Thursday, December 1, 2011

as well as making some other site changesNew Channels designhereTheCraftyGeminiBarelyPoliticalFinalCutKingClevverTVDeStormclick here to view the playlistSo what does this mean for you?Help CenterA new homepagecreate a YouTube accountHelp CenterSo what does this mean for you?SubscriptionsUpload regularlyCreate the killer feed for your subscribersA new overall designunveiledYouTube.cominstruction manualvideoA new Analytics experienceannouncedyoutube.com/analyticsSo what does this mean for you?thisEveryone responds to change differentlyThe YouTube team

Announcing YouTube Analytics - the next generation in Insight

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Video can transcend language and cultural barriers. It can showcase real human moments all across the globe, even the silly ones. Take the video of the talking twin babies. That video was shot in Brooklyn, and has been viewed more than 10M times in the US and 30M times outside the U.S. 5% of its views came from Brazil, another 5% from Russia. Turns out, 1 out of 100 people in the Philippines watched these two babies from New York. One of the great joys of a global platform is finding out that people from afar can relate, connect, and appreciate your videos.You’ve been able to discover who is watching your videos and where they’re coming from for awhile now on YouTube, through Insight. Now we want to make it even easier to learn about your audience, so we’ve replaced Insight with YouTube Analytics. Analytics will be released to everyone on a modern browser over the course of the day.Check out some of the latest features in Analytics:

A Quick Overview: A new overview provides all of the information that you care about quickly, while also enabling you to easily access more detailed information.

More Detailed Reports: Analytics now includes more detailed statistics so that you can have a more precise understanding of your content and audiences.

Audience Builders: Discover which videos are driving the most views and subscriptions.

Audience Retention: See how far viewers are watching through your video in the new audience retention report.

The Creator Playbook has also been updated to show you how to use your new Analytics to build and engage with bigger audiences, earn more money, and make better videos.

In the meantime, visit the Help Center for more information on Analytics.Ted Hamilton, Product Manager, recently watched, "British Animal Voiceovers."

Changing the Channel(s)

Thursday, November 17, 2011

We want to make sure that YouTube continues to evolve as a place where you can be successful, and take your careers to the next level. Today, we want to give you an update on two important topics that we know are important to your success on YouTube - Channels and Insights.

Latest Channels design
Your feedback has been super helpful as we’ve experimented with YouTube Channel designs via Cosmic Panda and other initiatives. We’ve listened to that feedback, and we’re ready to share the latest version of Channels with you. You can opt in and play around here.

The main changes you’ll notice are:

Customize Your Channel: You can promote your favorite content in the featured tab and choose a template that fits your content.
Engage Your Audience: You’ll be able to publish content to your subscribers through the new Channels feed--even when you don’t have a new video to upload. Videos you “like” and “favorite” will also appear in the feed to keep your subscribers entertained.
Expand Your Presence: When viewers go to the watch page, some elements of your Channel follow them (e.g. some of your videos), helping you to maintain your presence across YouTube.

This page is your portal into and out of the latest Channels design, so have fun playing around! Once you opt in, changes you make and publish to your Channel will only be seen by others on YouTube who are opted in via this page, and people who are still opted in to the Cosmic Panda experiment. In a few weeks, we’ll be back in touch before we share this more widely, and let you know when to publish the new channel for everyone to see. This is your chance to get ahead of the game and get your channel looking fabulous.

We have resources within the Help Center including a Channels Checklist and Guided Help to walk you through the new design, and as always, we’re always looking for feedback, so please share your thoughts with us.

New Analytics
A big part of your success is understanding your audience so that you can increase your subscribers and views, make better content, and make more money. We’ve put together the new YouTube Analytics (formerly YouTube Insight) to help you measure and achieve greater success.

Analytics is now easier than ever to use, located right within your YouTube.com account, using a simpler design, and with more precise categories that help you compare more metrics to fully understand your audience, channel and monetization. These changes will debut in the coming weeks--stay tuned for more information.

We hope these are welcome bits of news, and we’ll be back with another update on both Channels and Insights in a couple of weeks.

AJ Crane, product manager, recently watched “MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON.”

Now announcing Medals, a new way to celebrate great videos

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

All Time Most Popular Medal

Recently Most Popular Medal

Trending Medal

Partner ForumKurt Wilms, Product Manager, recently watched “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa) (The Official 2010 FIFA ....”

YouTube Release Notes: Updated Video End-Screen, WeVideo added to YouTube.com/Create and more...

Thursday, October 20, 2011

It’s been a while since we published our last Release Notes post, sharing the latest changes to YouTube however big or small. Our scrappy engineers have still been hard at work to make your experience on YouTube even better, so we decided to resurrect this series and share a bunch of our recent changes.
Updated Video End-Screen: We’ve redesigned the end-screen that appears directly after a video finishes playing to make it even easier for you to find the next great video to watch.

Enhanced Playlist Bar: To make the experience of watching videos in a playlist better, we’ve updated the interface for video playlists, making the individual video details more visible from within the playlist and making the next, previous, auto-play and shuffle buttons more distinct.

Updated YouTube.com/Charts page: If you want to keep track of the latest and greatest videos on YouTube or know which videos have had true staying power, check out our updated YouTube Charts page. You can browse through the most viewed (standard and HD), most liked, and top favorited videos of today, this week, this month and of all time. Pulling from our ‘As Seen On’ feature, you’ll also be able to see what videos are being shared and discussed across the web. For those of you with truly niche interests, you can view charts by categories like “How to & Style” and “Pets & Animals,” and also see the most subscribed channels.

WeVideo Now on YouTube: To give you even more options to edit and touch up your videos, we’ve added the cloud-based video editing platform WeVideo as a partner to YouTube.com/Create.
YouTube Localized in More Countries and Languages: We recently added Kenya, the Philippines and Singapore to the list of countries where YouTube is localized, bringing this total number to 35. You can check out what’s popular in these countries by changing your location setting, which you can find by scrolling to the bottom of YouTube.com and clicking on Location. Want to practice your Estonian, Icelandic, Basque, Galician, or Udu? We’ve added these new languages, making the YouTube interface available in the vernacular in 51 languages.

Smart Subscribe button: We’ve added a "smart" subscribe button on the video watch page, that will let you know if you’re already subscribed to the channel of the video you’re watching. If you so, it’ll say "Subscribed!". If not, you’ll see the standard “Subscribe” button allowing you to do so.
Nathalie Arbel, Product Marketing Manager, recently watched “K’Naan NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert.”