Commentary

The New, Improved YouTube Shows Some Love to Creators, Users

Just yesterday I paraphrased/riffed about/commented on/leaned on a TechRadar writer’s  list of “YouTube’s 10 Greatest Mistakes” and voila, it appears  that YouTube is feeling the un-love out there.

At VidCon yesterday, YouTube unveiled a pile of new projects and wrinkles that all seem aimed at creating some new relate-ability with its users, and to afford some TLC --and money-- to its creators.  It would seem YouTube is beginning to feel the heat, and maybe the sting, of criticism from regular rank-and-file users rather than just the  braying writers who have always seen an easy target in a Website built on the backs of pliant pussycats. (Really! What’s up with me?)

In what’s being described as a kind of techy tip jar, YouTube will soon begin letting viewers contribute actual cash money to the makers of videos they like.  This fan funding presumably is just a nice gesture but it also may tell contributors that they can stall that trip to Kickstarter to Indiegogo. (And what a retro throwback to the days of country farm stands where passersby picked their corn or eggs and left money in the lockbox.)

YouTube links to a bunch of YouTube creator who are first guinea pigs for this: Dulce Delight, Fitness Blender, The Healthcare Triage, The King of Random, Soul Pancake, Steve Spangler Science, The Young Turks, and Thug Notes.  And it’s soliciting sign-ups   (but only from a few countries at this point.)

YouTube will also expand its Creator Studio to the iOS platform. It allows creators can get a handle on the traffic and analytics surrounding their work, and also check to see how things are going when they are traveling. (It’s already there for Android users.)

It will also begin soliciting, vetting and using fan-submitted subtitles for videos, so for example, a German clip (Wie gehts!) will be understood by an English-speaking viewer.  (What’s happening, dude!)

Also, being the helpful monolith that it is YouTube will now provide a library of free-to-use sound effects for its creators, which should make many of them do something like this.

The list goes on.

YouTube will begin facilitating a way for creators to list and link their collaborators so they get some credit by the YouTube community, which I predict may be the sleeper best improvement of the lot because it sounds like there will also be a way for other users to link up with the formerly unheralded brains behind the videos. There’s a business in that.

YouTube is launching support for videos shot in 48 or 60 frames per second.  “Your video game footage with crazy high frame rates will soon look as awesome on YouTube as it does when you’re playing” the YouTube creators Website promises.  The improvement “should be perfect for video game footage that you've captured an uploaded  from your PlayStation 4 or Xbox One in addition to those 1080p60 game trailers that are quickly becoming the norm” writes EndGadget, which should know.

Finally, at least until you read the company blog about it, YouTube is teaming with Sirius/XM’s Hits1  to present “The YouTube 15,” a weekly show featuring music  stars and rising stars, hosted by Jenna Marbles, a kind of YouTube risen star herself, a veteran who has been around for something like four years now.

pj@mediapost.com

Next story loading loading..