Архив рубрики: YouTube

Auto Added by WPeMatico

YouTube redesign gives long-form videos, Shorts and Live videos their own tabs on channel pages

YouTube is rolling out a change impacting how videos appear on its platform. The company today announced a redesign that now splits video content into three different tabs on all channel pages — one for YouTube’s traditional long-form content, another for YouTube Shorts only and a third for Live videos, including past, current and upcoming livestreams.
The changes will allow users to more easily access the types of YouTube videos they want to watch — a move YouTube says it made based on user feedback. In an announcement, the company said it heard from viewers they wanted to be able to navigate to the kinds of content they were most interested in when exploring a creator’s channel page, leading to this makeover.

you heard correctly we’re beginning to roll out Videos, Shorts, and Live tabs so you can easily explore these different kinds of content on YouTube
more info here: https://t.co/BaXQnQVUcR https://t.co/8XCdpr7HAH
— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) October 27, 2022

The update also means that Shorts content and Live streams will no longer be found in the main Videos tab on the channel page — something that could appeal to longtime YouTube viewers who haven’t appreciated the infiltration of YouTube’s short-form content into their favorite channel’s video feed in recent months.
However, for those who do like watching Shorts, the redesign gives YouTube a way to direct them to more short-form videos. Now, when users are watching Shorts videos in the Shorts feed in the main YouTube app, then navigate to the creator’s channel, they’ll be sent directly into this new Shorts tab to watch even more Shorts content. This could help YouTube boost its views for Shorts as those users will no longer be immediately lost to the creator’s long-form content, as before.
Initial feedback from users on Twitter responding to YouTube’s post about the changes has been positive, as users are expressing their appreciation for giving each type of content its own separate category.
Image Credits: YouTube
The redesign follows another major update to YouTube this month which introduced, at long last, YouTube handles in the @username format. These usernames will now allow creators to identify their channel and interact with their viewers across YouTube Shorts, channel pages, in video descriptions, in comments and more.
YouTube says the tabbed redesign is rolling out starting today and will be available to all users across all devices in the weeks ahead.
 
YouTube redesign gives long-form videos, Shorts and Live videos their own tabs on channel pages by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch
YouTube redesign gives long-form videos, Shorts and Live videos their own tabs on channel pages

Is MrBeast actually worth $1.5 billion?

Whenever YouTube superstar MrBeast crops up in business or tech headlines, you’re guaranteed to find a slew of bewildered comments: Who is this guy, and why is a YouTuber such a big deal? Am I old if I don’t know who this is? Why is he younger than me, yet makes so much more money? Is this dude actually giving people free islands, or is he full of it?
If you don’t know who MrBeast is, that’s fine. That just means you probably aren’t on YouTube that often, or that you’ve never wondered what happens if you put 100 million Orbeez in your friend’s backyard. But let me ask you this: Have you heard of Cribl, Snapdocs, Sayo Bank or fabric? I haven’t either, those are just some names of companies worth more than $1 billion that I pulled off Crunchbase.
According to Axios‘ sources, MrBeast — the 24-year-old whose name is Jimmy Donaldson — is trying to raise $150 million for his business, valuing it at $1.5 billion. It might seem hard to imagine how a content creator’s business can be worth that much, but the North Carolina resident has built an impressive empire. With 109 million YouTube subscribers, MrBeast runs the fifth most subscribed channel on the platform, and he’s the top earner among U.S. YouTubers. Across his five other channels, he’s amassed another 82 million subscribers — and that’s not even counting his three Spanish language channels, which have about 33 million subscribers combined.
YouTube is one of the most profitable platforms for creators, because you can earn 55% of ad revenue as a member of YouTube’s partner program. But MrBeast has expanded his business beyond the realm of social media — he has leveraged his brand to open up MrBeast Burger, a ghost kitchen food chain, and a snack company called Feastables, which raised $5 million this year at a $50 million valuation from 776, Shrug Capital and Sugar Capital.
But MrBeast’s business model isn’t as straightforward as making videos and raking in ad revenue. His uploads, which center on extreme stunts and competitions for cash prizes, cost an obscene amount of money to make. Last year, his 25-minute “Real Life Squid Game” video required a whopping $3.5 million to produce, including more than $456,000 in prize money. For comparison, the nine-episode “Squid Game” series cost Netflix a total of $21.4 million, averaging out to about $2.4 million per hour-long installment.
A few weeks ago, MrBeast said that he spends $8 million per month on his businesses. Just last September, MrBeast told the creator-focused YouTube channel Colin and Samir that he spent $4 million every month. That’s a big jump.
Some companies reach unicorn status (a valuation above $1 billion) before even turning a profit. Yet Forbes estimates that MrBeast made $54 million in 2021, so he’s already proven to VCs that they can bet on him to return their investment.
“The videos get views even if I don’t upload, so if I really wanted to, I could just live off of the money that the views made,” MrBeast told Insider. But if the 24-year-old wants to grow even more quickly and turn a larger profit, then venture capital funding might actually make sense.
MrBeast has already taken funding on a smaller scale from companies like Jellysmack and Spotter. Jellysmack uses AI to maximize top creators’ cross-platform growth in exchange for a revenue cut; Spotter gives YouTubers large sums of upfront capital in exchange for revenue from their back catalog. But as one of the most successful content creators in the world, MrBeast can go even bigger with venture capital.
But is going bigger always better? MrBeast’s business model is like a snake eating its own tail — no one is making money like he is, but no one is spending it like him either. He described his margins as “razor-thin” in a conversation with Logan Paul, since he reinvests most of his profits back into his content. His viewers expect that each video will be more impressive than the last, and from the outside looking in, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before MrBeast can no longer up the ante (and for other creators, this has led to disaster). So, if MrBeast’s business really is a unicorn — I’d wager it is — then he has two choices. Will he use the cushion of $150 million to make his business more sustainable, so he doesn’t have to keep burying himself alive? Or will he keep pushing for more until nothing is left?

MrBeast explains YouTube’s algorithm

MrBeast’s ‘Real Life Squid Game’ and the price of viral stunts

Is MrBeast actually worth $1.5 billion? by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch
Is MrBeast actually worth $1.5 billion?

Google, YouTube outline plans for the US midterm elections

Google and its video sharing app YouTube outlined plans for handling the 2022 U.S. midterm elections this week, highlighting tools at its disposal to limit the effort to limit the spread of political misinformation.
When users search for election content on either Google or YouTube, recommendation systems are in place to highlight journalism or video content from authoritative national and local news sources such as The Wall Street Journal, Univision, PBS NewsHour and local ABC, CBS and NBC affiliates.
In today’s blog post, YouTube noted that it has removed “a number of videos” about the U.S. midterms that violate its policies, including videos that make false claims about the 2020 election. YouTube’s rules also prohibit inaccurate videos on how to vote, videos inciting violence and any other content that it determines interferes with the democratic process. The platform adds that it has issued strikes to YouTube channels that violate policies related to the midterms and have temporarily suspended some channels from posting new videos.
Image Credits: Google
Google Search will now make it easier for users to look up election coverage by local and regional news from different states. The company is also rolling out a tool on Google Search that it has used before, which directs voters to accurate information about voter registration and how to vote. Google will be working with The Associated Press again this year to offer users authoritative election results in search.
YouTube will also direct voters to an information panel on voting and a link to Google’s “how to vote” and “how to register to vote” features. Other election-related features YouTube announced today include reminders on voter registration and election resources, information panels beneath videos, recommended authoritative videos within its “watch next” panels and an educational media literacy campaign with tips about misinformation tactics.
On Election Day, YouTube will share a link to Google’s election results tracker, highlight livestreams of election night and include election results below videos. The platform will also launch a tool in the coming weeks that gives people searching for federal candidates a panel that highlights essential information, such as which office they’re running for and what their political party is.
Image Credits: YouTube
With two months left until Election Day, Google’s announcement marks the latest attempt by a tech giant to prepare for the pivotal moment in U.S. history. Meta, TikTok and Twitter have also recently addressed how they will approach the 2022 U.S. midterm elections.
YouTube faced scrutiny over how it handled the 2020 presidential election, waiting until December 2020 to announce a policy that would apply to misinformation swirling around the previous month’s election.
Before the policy was initiated, the platform didn’t remove videos with misleading election-related claims, allowing speculation and false information to flourish. That included a video from One America News Network (OAN) posted on the day after the 2020 election falsely claiming that Trump had won the election. The video was viewed more than 340,000 times, but YouTube didn’t immediately remove it, stating the video didn’t violate its rules.

YouTube declares war on US election misinformation… a month late

In a new study, researchers from New York University found that YouTube’s recommendation system had a part in spreading misinformation about the 2020 presidential election. From October 29 to December 8, 2020, the researchers analyzed the YouTube usage of 361 people to determine if YouTube’s recommendation system steered users toward false claims regarding the election in the immediate aftermath of the election. The researchers concluded that participants who were very skeptical about the election’s legitimacy were recommended significantly more election fraud-related claims than participants who weren’t unsure about the election results.
YouTube pushed back against the study in a conversation with TechCrunch, arguing that its small sample size undermined its potential conclusions. “While we welcome more research, this report doesn’t accurately represent how our systems work,” YouTube spokesperson Ivy Choi told TechCrunch. “We’ve found that the most viewed and recommended videos and channels related to elections are from authoritative sources, like news channels.”
The researchers acknowledged that the number of fraud-related videos in the study was low overall and that the data doesn’t consider what channels the participants were subscribed to. Nonetheless, YouTube is clearly a key vector of potential political misinformation — and one to watch as the U.S. heads into its midterm elections this fall.

Facebook will disable new political ads a week before US midterm elections

Google, YouTube outline plans for the US midterm elections

Kids and teens now spend more time watching TikTok than YouTube, new data shows

Kids and teens are now spending more time watching videos on TikTok than on YouTube.
In fact, that’s been the case since June 2020 — the month when TikTok began to outrank YouTube in terms of the average minutes per day people ages 4 through 18 spent accessing these two competitive video platforms. That month, TikTok overtook YouTube for the first time, as this younger demographic began averaging 82 minutes per day on TikTok versus an average of 75 minutes per day on YouTube.
In the years since, TikTok has continued to dominate with younger users. By the end of 2021, kids and teens were watching an average of 91 minutes of TikTok per day compared with just 56 minutes per day spent watching YouTube, on a global basis.
This new data is based on kids’ and teens’ use of TikTok and YouTube across platforms, which was compiled for TechCrunch by parental control software maker Qustodio using an analysis of 400,000 families who have accounts with its service for parental monitoring. The data represents their real-world usage of apps and websites, not an estimate.
And to be clear, these figures are averages. That means kids aren’t necessarily sitting down to watch an hour and a half of TikTok and an hour of YouTube every day. Instead, the data shows how viewing trends have changed over time, where some days kids will watch more online video than others, and will switch between their favorite apps.
However, the broader picture this data paints is one where the world’s largest video platform may be losing its grip on the next generation of web users — specifically, Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Gen Z is typically thought to include people born between the mid- to late-1990s and the 2010s. Meanwhile, Gen Alpha — a generation whose childhood was put on pause by Covid, then driven online — includes those born after the early to mid-2010s.
In a prior annual report, Qustodio had analyzed kids’ app usage and found that TikTok was nearing YouTube in terms of average time spent. However, that report examined the data in a somewhat clunky fashion. It had included early 2020 app usage in a report largely focused on 2019 trends — a decision the firm had made at the time in order to highlight the increased connectivity taking place at the beginning of the pandemic. The report also focused on a handful of top markets, rather than global trends.

Kids now spend nearly as much time watching TikTok as YouTube in US, UK and Spain

The new data, compiled upon TechCrunch’s request, has been cleaned up to provide a clearer picture of the year-over-year shift in video viewing trends among the web’s youngest users.
According to the firm’s findings, YouTube was still ahead in 2019 as kids and teens were spending an average of 48 minutes on the platform on a global basis, compared with 38 minutes on TikTok. But with the shift in usage that took place in June 2020, TikTok came out on top for 2020 as a whole, with an average of 75 minutes per day, compared with 64 minutes for YouTube.
This past year, the averages grew even further apart. In 2021, this younger demographic spent an average of 91 minutes per day on TikTok versus just 56 minutes on YouTube.
Image Credits: Qustodio data
Image Credits: Qustodio data
The firm also broke out metrics for leading countries like the U.S., the U.K. and Spain, which demonstrate an even more incredible shift on a regional basis, compared with the global trends. For example, U.S. kids and teens last year spent an average of 99 minutes per day on TikTok versus 61 minutes on YouTube. In the U.K., TikTok usage was up to a whopping 102 minutes per day, versus just 53 minutes on YouTube. These figures include both website and app usage, we should note.
YouTube, no doubt, is well aware of this shift in consumer behavior as are all other social app makers, including Meta and Snap. That’s why YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat have all now copied TikTok’s short-form vertical video feed with their own products.
In YouTube’s case, that’s YouTube Shorts, a short video platform the company believes will prove to be a discovery engine that will drive users to its long-form product. The company recently touted that YouTube Shorts had topped 1.5 billion logged-in monthly users, and suggested that channels producing videos of different lengths were seeing gains in watch time. It didn’t, however, share any specific figures on that front.
YouTube’s first-party data, of course, takes into account a broader global audience — not just kids and teens. And it includes cross-platform usage on phones, tablets, the web, smart TVs, game consoles, connected devices and more.
But despite Shorts’ growing adoption per YouTube’s data, Qustodio’s research seems to indicate younger people have simply been opting for the short-form content provided by TikTok. At the same time, TikTok has been slowly pushing its user base to consume longer videos. This year, for instance, TikTok expanded the max video length to 10 minutes, up from its earlier expansion to 3 minutes. And while most TikTok videos are not multiple minutes long, the “optimal” video length for a TikTok video has been growing.
In 2020, TikTok told creators that 11 to 17 seconds was the sweet spot to find traction. In November 2021, it amended that to 21 to 34 seconds.
Over time, this could also help to drive up the average watch time on TikTok as well.
Qustodio’s larger annual report on digital trends indicates YouTube isn’t the only app to feel the impact of TikTok’s rise and the unique interests of Gens Z and Alpha. Young people use a different mix of apps than the generations before — like Roblox, for instance, which has been used by 56% of kids, or Snapchat, used by 82%. On average, they are totaling 4 hours of screen time per day, which includes educational apps.
The good news for YouTube, however, is that it’s still ahead of other video streaming services in terms of time spent.
Globally, kids spent 56 minutes per day on YouTube last year, ahead of Disney+ (47 min), Netflix (45 min), Amazon Prime (40 min), Hulu (38 min) and Twitch (20 min)
Kids and teens now spend more time watching TikTok than YouTube, new data shows

YouTube and WhatsApp inch closer to half a billion users in India

Добавить комментарий

WhatsApp has enjoyed unrivaled reach in India for years. By mid-2019, the Facebook-owned app had amassed over 400 million users in the country. Its closest app rival at the time was YouTube, which, according to the company’s own statement and data from mobile insight firm App Annie, had about 260 million users in India then.
Things have changed dramatically since.
In the month of December, YouTube had 425 million monthly active users on Android phones and tablets in India, according to App Annie, the data of which an industry executive shared with TechCrunch. In comparison, WhatsApp had 422 million monthly active users on Android in India last month.

Factoring in the traction both these apps have garnered on iOS devices, WhatsApp still assumes a lead in India with 459 million active users1, but YouTube is not too far behind with 452 million users.
With China keeping its doors closed to U.S. tech giants, India emerged as the top market for Silicon Valley and Chinese companies looking to continue their growth in the last decade. India had about 50 million internet users in 2010, but it ended the decade with more than 600 million. Google and Facebook played their part to make this happen.
In the last four years, both Google and Facebook have invested in ways to bring the internet to people who are offline in India, a country of nearly 1.4 billion people. Google kickstarted a project to bring Wi-Fi to 400 railway stations in the country and planned to extend this program to other public places. Facebook launched Free Basics in India, and then — after the program was banned in the country — it launched Express Wi-Fi.
Both Google and Facebook, which identify India as their biggest market by users, have scaled down on their connectivity efforts in recent years after India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, took it upon himself to bring the country online. After he succeeded, both the companies bought multibillion-dollar stakes in his firm, Jio Platforms, which has amassed over 400 million subscribers.
Jio Platforms’ cut-rate mobile data tariff has allowed hundreds of millions of people in India, where much of the online user base was previously too conscious about how much data they spent on the internet, to consume, worry-free, hours of content on YouTube and other video platforms in recent years. This growth might explain why Google is doubling down on short-video apps.
The new figures shared with TechCrunch illustrate a number of other findings about the Indian market. Even as WhatsApp’s growth has slowed2 in India, it continues to enjoy an unprecedented loyalty among its users.
More than 95% of WhatsApp’s monthly active users in India use the app each day, and nearly its entire user base checks the app at least once a week. In comparison, three-fourths of YouTube’s monthly active users in India are also its daily active users.
The data also showed that Google’s eponymous app as well as Chrome — both of which, like YouTube, ship pre-installed3 on most Android smartphones — has also surpassed over 400 million monthly active users in India in recent months. Facebook’s app, in comparison, had about 325 million monthly active users in India last month.
When asked for comment, a Google spokesperson pointed TechCrunch to a report from Comscore last year, which estimated that YouTube had about 325 million monthly unique users in India in May 2020.
A separate report by research firm Media Partners Asia on Monday estimated that YouTube commanded 43% of the revenue generated in the online video market in India last year (about $1.4 billion). Disney+ Hotstar assumed 16% of the market, while Netflix had 14%.

Google invests in Indian startups Glance and DailyHunt

1 For simplicity, I have not factored in the traction WhatsApp Business and YouTube Kids apps have received in India. WhatsApp and YouTube also maintain apps on KaiOS, which powers JioPhone feature handsets in India. At last count — which was a long time ago — more than 40 million JioPhone handsets had shipped in India. TechCrunch could not determine the inroads any app has made on this platform. Additionally, the figures of YouTube on Android (phones and tablets) and iOS (iPhone and iPad) will likely have an overlap. The same is not true of WhatsApp, which restricts one phone number to one account. So if I have WhatsApp installed on an iPhone with my primary phone number, I can’t use WhatsApp with the same number on an Android phone — at least not concurrently.
2 WhatsApp Business appears to be growing fine, having amassed over 50 million users in India. And some caveats from No. 1 also apply here.
3 Users still have to engage with the app for App Annie and other mobile insight firms to count them as active. So while pre-installing the app provides Google an unprecedented distribution, their apps still have to win over users.

YouTube and WhatsApp inch closer to half a billion users in India