Custom YouTube Thumbs Finally Roll Out, Mood-Based Video Recommendations, & More [The Reel Web #54]

On this week's look at The Reel Web we have an update for you guys who've been waiting a long time to have custom thumbnails come to your channel. Also, YouTube is experimenting with a new way to show related videos against the content you're watching. It has huge implications for how we tag and the Meta data we write for our stuff here in YouTube. All that, and way much more is coming up this week on The Reel Web.

Hey Guys! My name is Tim Schmoyer and welcome to another week of The Reel Web where every week we just highlight for you guys some of the online video news from the week before. And this week YouTube has a ton of stuff to talk about-starting with a little update about their custom thumbnails. I know a lot of you guys have been waiting for that for a long time and they are finally rolling it out. We know of several people who just have normal, monetized YouTube accounts, who do now have that custom thumbnail ability. And YouTube says now every single week they’re going to be expanding it to a larger group of partners on YouTube. So you can expect that probably over the next two months or so that that feature will finally be coming to your channel.

But while you’re waiting for that feature to come to you in the next couple of weeks, there’s a new feature that you can play with in the meantime, that lets you add different videos and text and different things between different videos in the playlist that you’re creating. So let’s say you make a playlist about something that’s really important to you, but you kind of want to introduce the next video that’s coming up. But you can’t change that video because it’s not your video. Let’s say you like one of our videos and you want to show your audience. You would tell them something before our video starts playing. Now you can easily go back and insert your own video, your text or whatever you want, just by using your webcam. Just right into that playlist there on YouTube, making it super simple for you to kind of introduce what’s coming up and talk about what your audience is about to see.

Another update that was announced last week is the ability for there finally to be ads on mobile views-mostly just for Android right now. And I think that’s part of what we talked about last week. While YouTube is probably okay with Apple saying, “We don’t want to make your app anymore for our devices,” and Google is saying “Hey, that’s great! Now we can make it and put ads on our stuff on Android and IOS devices and everywhere else.” So I’m really curious to see how this is going to influence revenue for those of us who are relying on our YouTube income. It’s too early to tell exactly how viewers will engage with mobile advertising and that how might influence the potential revenue that we could make. I would assume that overall our revenue must go up. However, it could be that people are much less tolerable of ads on mobile devices and much more likely to skip, which means that the amount of money we make from mobile views might not warrant the annoyance that we’re giving our mobile viewers on that platform. Or we could be making like tons more money because more people will be likely to engage because there’s less distraction around the video like there are here on the YouTube desktop page. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens. I’d love to hear from you guys-comment below. Do you think that the mobile views will be good for us in the long run and really definitely add to the revenue that we’re making? Or do you think it will become just more of an annoyance for our mobile viewers and the money we make from it might not be worth it in the long run considering ticking off our viewers?

Another update for YouTube channels is that the creator layout and the network layout have kind of been combined into the “Everything” layout. So now you can have both all your playlists displayed as well as other channels you like to feature, kind of just mashing those two together. And they’ve also added an overview template, which lets you kind of show like everything on your channel, including popular uploads, recent uploads, videos you’ve liked. And all the content is populated on the different shelves so that when a viewer sees something they want to see more of-like they want to see more of the videos that you like-they just click on that and it takes them to a full page showing them more videos that you have liked. So if you kind of want a best of everything type of feel on your YouTube channel, this new layout might be one worth considering.

A lot of people have noticed that YouTube seems to be experimenting with how they show you different related videos to the content you’re watching. It used to be that those results would kind of revolve around the search query that you looked for or maybe the person that you’re watching or the channel topic or niche. But it seems like rather than being based around like actual search queries and content, now they’re experimenting with a couple of people just privately on the site about what would look like if we showed videos based on the mood of the viewer?

So for example, if you’re one of the few that goes to YouTube, you start watching something and they randomly select you to show the different related videos that are based around the mood of the video that you’re currently watching-whether it be funny or epic or strange or gross or whatever it may be-then they will show different videos around that vibe along your video that you’re watching instead. It appears as if this experiment is being done on a very small scale right now, and there’s nothing that even indicates that this could be exactly where YouTube wants to go in the future or anything. It’s just something that we’ve seen that they’re playing with.

And I think that there are some major implications for those of us who are video creators and how we tag and title our stuff. You should already be using very generic tags with your video content. I mean always start with your kind of more specific ones, but after you tag it through those, make sure you include lots of generic ones, and this reinforces the fact that you should be using like, funny, gross, sad. Again, we have no idea if this experiment will ever come to anything, but it does serve as a good reminder for us to use very specific tags as well as generic tags, and generic tags that evoke mood and feeling of the video as well. I really want to hear from you guys. What do you think about YouTube showing related videos based on the vibe, based on the emotion, rather than on the search query-the content that is actually in the video. Obviously, there are a lot of pros and cons each way and I’d love to hear what you think they are. So comment below and let us know about what you think is going to happen with YouTube going all psychoanalytical on us here.

Some interesting new research just came out that has enormous implications for those of us who are online video creators. They went and they polled different consumers across 14 different countries and asked them about how they use their Smart TVs, their internet connected televisions. And 18% of them said that they watched online videos on their TVs at least daily. 25% of them said that they watch online video on their Smart TV at least several times a week. There’s more about that research linked up below-in the description below this video here on YouTube.

But there’s also another article linked up below that goes along with that, that says that people are very likely to watch advertising against online video on their televisions, which would make sense because that’s a very welcoming place. We’re used to watching ads on our televisions, not so much on our mobile devices as we’ve already talked about. So for those of us who are really wanting to make money, it might make sense to make sure that our content is geared more for television watching, either through consoles or through Smart TVs more so than through mobile. But we really don’t know what’s going to happen to mobile with online advertising, so we’ll just have to see what happens. But it’s interesting, so make sure you keep internet connected TVs in the back of your mind as you’re making your content.

Two more links for you guys, real quick-they’re both linked up below this video. Go check them out. The first one is for those of you guys who want to make YouTube your fulltime job, your career. There’s a panel discussion, a video down there about how people are doing that and what it looks like. How advertising model works here on YouTube and everything you basically needs to know about how that works. So go check that one out.

The second one is about a YouTube channel that YouTube has created that is dedicated specifically just to politics. The Presidential election here in the United States just keeps heating up and so they made YouTube.com/politics, which is kind of the hub of all the politics stuff on YouTube, from all different sides-different political parties, all the debates will be live streamed there. Everything that’s happening about politics around this election you can find it all there from all different perspectives and sides of the story. So go check it out, if that’s something you want to keep up with on YouTube, rather than trying to find it all on your television or news articles online or whatever it is. Some of us just prefer to watch it on video-like me. So go check that out.

And thank you guys for hanging out with me once again. For our Creator’s Tip video on Thursday, we’re going to talk with Megan O’Neill of the SocialTimes.com about how she keeps up with everything that’s happening in the online video world. I hear a lot of things from her before I hear it from the actual source that it came from. So we’ll talk with her a little bit about that and why that’s important for you guys as creators.

So if you want that video and all the other stuff, make sure you subscribe. Click that button there above this video here on YouTube so you can join us every single week for this stuff and more stuff that’s coming up. Lots of awesome things are going to be happening on this channel here in the near future, so guys subscribe-join us. And I will see you guys again on Thursday for our Creator’s Tip video. Bye.