First off, let’s confirm how you access the ‘Notifications’ feature on YouTube:

When you are logged into YouTube, you should see your channel logo in the top right hand corner of most YouTube screens, if you click on that, you have the option to go to YouTube Studio.

Click on the ‘Videos’ tab, this will show you the video details.

Click on ‘Advanced’. Scroll down to the bottom of this screen, and you'll see the following option: ‘Publish to the Subscription feed and allow notifications to subscribers’. To clarify what that means, your subscribers will see this video in their Subscription feed and will receive notifications if eligible. This is always defaulted on, as you would expect, so if you want to stop this from happening when the video goes public, untick this box, and save the change.

Notifications have already been sent out for public videos, so for a private or unlisted videos.

The Difference Between Unlisted & Public Video YouTube Notifications

I know you've got a burning question you want to ask. What's the difference between a unlisted video and a public video that doesn't send out notifications? Good question.

Unlisted videos are those that are only designed to be found through a shared link, they don't appear in search results, and they don't appear on your channel page either. Public videos, on the other hand, are totally transparent and visible, they can be found through search and appear on your channel.

Some rare reasons why you might need to do this is for your channel trailer. You want it to be discoverable on YouTube, but you don't want to notify your subscribers because it's not required. Or, you might have some sort of Easter egg or secret game you're playing with your audience which they need to find, but obviously you don't want to notify them that the video exists.

And now let's go back to our question, what is the maximum number of notifications a viewer will see from a single channel in 24 hours?

So if you intend to upload multiple videos, maybe five or 10 a day, for whatever reason, and you only want to make sure that the most important videos reach your audience, then you can use that checkbox to untick the ones which you don't think are as valuable.

If you want to take your YouTube channel to the next level and 

 then make sure to download vidIQ. It will help you research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps 

Did you know there is a limit to the number of video uploads and livestream notifications a viewer can receive from a single YouTube channel in a 24-hour period? Find out more.

How to Control YouTube Notifications YOU Send to Subscribers

There used to be a time where you could only make money through YouTube from AdSense, and you would have to generate any other income, such as affiliate links, brand deals, and merchandising, off-platform.

But YouTube has got a lot more sophisticated in the last couple of years, now giving you several options to make money officially through them. On top of that, YouTube have recently announced some upgrades, as well as some facts and figures about how you can make money on YouTube.

Now, just before we go into the details, there is something that you video creators do need to bear in mind. All of these tools are part of the 

, which means you need 1,000 subscribers, 4,000 hours of Watch Time, and have applied and been accepted into the program. If you haven't yet got there, please watch the following video which is full of tips, tricks, and advice to help you get there.

How to Make Money on YouTube through the Partner Program

If you have reached that target and you have been accepted into the YouTube Partner Program and you have monetized your content, congratulations, but at this point, you're probably feeling a little bit like this. Oh, is that all I get?

Now, don't get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with earning money from the adverts on your videos, but you don't earn that much compared to what you could potentially be earning from other income sources, and of all of the income sources you have control over, AdSense is probably the least reliable.

With changes in CPM, changes in season, and the demonetization of videos from YouTube, you have almost zero control over any of this, so by all means, have AdSense running in the background as a nice bit of extra cash, but start to think bigger with these YouTube tools.

Super chats allow viewers to make a financial donation to a channel and then have their message prioritized in their livestream chats and during YouTube Premier chats. The best thing about this feature is that it's pretty much available to all monetized channels as long as it's available in your country. To find out whether you're eligible for Super Chats and to turn them on:

Click on the Monetization link on the left hand navigation bar in the new Creator Studio

Click on the Live Chat tab at the top on the page

On this screen, if eligible, you should see a simple Super Chat toggle to turn this feature on.

Now, we here at vidIQ do live-streams every single week, and we occasionally get Super Chats from you, the awesome community. Thank you very much for that. And YouTube recently said this about Super Chats, and the numbers, to be honest, are mind-boggling:

There are now over 90,000 channels who have received Super Chats with some streams earning more than $400 per minute.

Super Chat is now the number one revenue stream on YouTube for nearly 20,000 channels - an increase of over 65% over last year!

The simplest way to explain this is that Super Chats come from your biggest fans because they feel involved in your journey. They are part of your community. They feel invested in you, and through the medium of the livestreams that they're watching, they want to give something back to you.

Now, live-streams may get a fraction of the views that your video on-demand content might get, but those people watching your live-streams are your most dedicated followers, and if I, the video creator, make sure that these livestreams are all about the audience, that's where Super Chats can really work.

And the funny thing is, here at vidIQ, we do live-streams every Tuesday where we audit your channels. It's all about you, but we actively discourage people from sending us Super Chats, because we don't want to favor people who have sent us money and audit their channels. We wanna do it for free, but people still send us Super Chats as a way of saying thank you. That's the power of the Super Chat.

Now, of course, there is a personal/content barrier to entry. In order to get Super Chats, you need to do livestreams. Now, if you're a gaming channel, this is very easy to do. You just start screen recording a game that you're playing on and livestream to your audience and talk to them as you're doing it, but if you're new to livestreaming and you're not a gamer, just be honest with your audience.

Post in your Community tab that you're gonna do a hangout session or a Q&A or you're gonna look at important questions that have been asked on your videos and try and answer them. Make sure that, when you go live, you're talking to your audience, so being a little unplanned is not a bad thing, and just enjoy the experience. Live-streams can be crazy things, but once you get used to them, they are fantastic, and at the end of that journey, you have Super Chats to financially support you. Incredible stuff, do try it.

With the Super Chat tool already highly successful, YouTube announced a new feature called Super Stickers. This will allow fans to purchase animated stickers during livestreams and Premiers to show their favorite creators just how much they enjoy their content.

Stickers will come in a variety of designs across different languages and categories, such as gaming, fashion, beauty, sports, music, food, and more.

Generate Revenue on YouTube by Selling Merchandise

I'm sure you've seen the merch carousel that's now directly baked into YouTube channels that allows you to buy merch directly from the video watch page. The requirements for offering this feature are a little stiffer. Being in the YouTube Partner Program is the prerequisite, of course, and for this, you will need more than 10,000 YouTube subscribers and have zero Community Guidelines Strikes. To set this functionality up:

Go to the Monetization screen in the new Creator Studio

Click on the Merchandise tab and then toggle on the Display Merchandise option.

Set up merch items from the merch store you intend to use.

There are many YouTube channels that have built entire financial empires out of merchandising, and as you grow your channel and build your community, you will start to develop brands and slogans and characters that people might want to get a piece of in terms of merchandise. Being able to sell your stuff officially through the YouTube platform is pretty awesome. However, the drawback to date has been only one available merch provider, Tee Spring, but the good news is YouTube recently announced five new supported vendors, and those are Crowdmade, Don't Forget To Be Awesome, Fanjoy, Represent, and Rooster Teeth. We recently featured Crowdmade on TubeTalk and you can read more about them and 

how to make money from selling merchandise on YouTube

How to Make Money from YouTube Channel Memberships

YouTube Channel Memberships allow viewers to join your channel through monthly recurring payments. In return they get membership-only perks like badges, emojis, and other goods you offer, like exclusive live-streams, extra videos, and even discounts on merch. The eligibility requirements are pretty strict for this one.

You need 30,000 subscribers, be over the age of 18, be located in a country where channel membership tools are available, agree to the terms of service of the feature, and have zero strikes on your channel. Even then, you might not be eligible, as it's still rolling out.

Now, of all of the monetization roots you can go down, memberships probably requires the most effort from you. Super Chats are pretty much taken care of by YouTube. You don't have to do anything for them. In terms of merchandising, you can pick one image and create dozens of items from it and have a shop set up within the hour, but with channel membership, you are making a commitment to your audience to create exclusive content for them. So, think about the creative juices and the time, energy, and resources you're going to have to put into your channel members.

Think back to when you were first starting your channel and you were committing to a video schedule, whether it be once a week or once a day. Well, channel memberships is like that, but on an entirely new scale. You need to make a commitment to those channel members to provide what you're promising, because they're paying for it.

With all that being said, recently, YouTube have massively upgraded this tool with one of the most requested features, membership levels. With levels, creators can now set up five different price points for channel membership, each with varying perks. This is how the Fine Brothers are using membership levels on their React channel, going all the way up to $30 a month. According to YouTube, this has increased revenue from their channel memberships by 600%!

 And to access our full suite of tools to elevate your YouTube channel to new heights, 

YouTube recently announced even more ways that creators can generate revenue from their video content. Find out if you can take advantage of the new features via the YouTube Partner Program.

How to Make Money on YouTube! [New Updates]

I'm going to let you in on a little YouTube secret today. One that's been earning our channel hundreds of thousands of views per month, and will likely earn us millions of views in the future. Thought you'd be interested in this one. Let's do this!

Have you ever had a video that just keeps churning out views, months, even years, after you've made it? The reason I ask is because those are the types of videos you can build entire channels around. And that's exactly what we've been doing here at vidIQ over the course of 2019. And the best news is this has nothing to do with 

The story starts back in July 2018 when YouTube introduced a new hashtag feature, and the moment we heard about this, we decided to make a tutorial video on the topic. Now it turns out that a lot of people wanted to know what these hashtags were and how to use them, so much so that this video a year later has over a quarter of million video views. Now that's pretty cool isn't it.

A simple tutorial on something that turned out to be a bit of a bust, but here is the craziest thing. A year after that video was made, it is still generating between five and six hundred views every single day, that's more than 3000 views per week, 15 thousand views per month. And it's been like this pretty much all year.

Yes the daily views have dropped maybe 25 percent - but most YouTube videos do not do this. They sink without a trace after the first month. So, obviously there's a question here, why is this video still being served up to viewers a year after it was made?

Well first of all it's a fantastic thumbnail, wouldn't you agree? For once I'm not actually joking, the click through rate on this video is ten percent, which is at the top end of the typical average. And one of the reasons why this is happening is because from the moment we launched this video it has sat on the top of the search page for YouTube hashtags. And we know just how important being at the top of these search rankings is, because we have a second video all about hashtags which we launched a few weeks after the first one which has a fraction of the views and click through rate to match.

And how did we immediately find ourselves at the top the search rankings? Well it was because we were the first channel to make a video on YouTube hashtags on the platform and get it out there before anyone else. Obviously it goes without saying, if there's anything new in your topic of interest, if your the first onto YouTube and video content you have a distinct advantage. And if there's a lot less competition, like there was with YouTube hashtags, which is a relatively minor news story, then you can dominate the search rankings and be the authority.

And now here's where there's a really important distinction between two different types of content. On the one hand we have trending news, that's here today, gone tomorrow. It's all about shock and awe, aiming to be in the right place at the right time for a viral video. And on the other hand we have brand new information, not trending news per say but something to add to a knowledge base that people may need to learn about for weeks, months, even years to come.

Evergreen Content on YouTube: The Key to Success

We've got a word for that, it's called evergreen content. Evergreen content is content that is always relevant or at least relevant for a very long period of time. We often joke that the gold standard of evergreen content would be to rank a video number one for how to change a car tire, or how to unblock a toilet. It doesn't matter how old that information is it's still relevant today. And yes, if you are brave enough to do a search for this term, and yes I have blurred out some of the thumbnails, you will find videos made over ten years ago with millions of views, that still get 70 views per hour today.

So ranking on YouTube for evergreen content could potentially be your superpower. The problem is, and forgive the very intentional pun, it is very difficult to unclog existing evergreen content. Unless of course that existing evergreen content suddenly becomes obsolete and is replaced by something new. You can see where we're going with this one folks.

Over the past decade this screen has become part of the daily fabric of my life, and it helped transform my career path. But it's time is coming to an end, if not already, replaced by YouTube's new creator studio. This is a monumental change, hundreds of screens, analytics, channel setup and video management all changing from something we're all very used to, to something new, arguably improved but quite different, and unfamiliar. And this isn't just affecting me, it's affecting every single one of you watching this video, and reading this post, and millions more besides.

It’s a bit like saying, I know we've been learning about the Marvel universe for the last ten years, but going forward we're going to learn about the DC universe, it's kind of the same but everything is different. So if everybody on the platform needs to learn something new, who's going to teach it to them?

Let me give you a very simple example. How to delete a YouTube video, a basic function you might need to know, and the top video on this search result has one million views, nicely done. But sitting in the number two slot right now is a video we made in the beginning of 2019, which shows you how to do it in the new creator's studio.

Now doing keyword research for this was pretty simple, it was the first thing that came into my head. How to delete a YouTube video. Everybody's searching for that term if they want to know how to do it. The thumbnail is pretty straightforward as you can see, my key concern was to make sure that it stood out against the rest of the thumbnails and looked different in some way. And no text certainly helps that.

Now that is all standard YouTube practice, but here are where things get a little more complicated when it comes to evergreen content. Evergreen content is often solution based in its nature, answering questions to commonly asked questions. And more often than not those asking the question just want the answer as quick as possible, nothing else. And that can lead to a counterintuitive YouTube video strategy.

On purpose I made the video relatively short, under three minutes and showed viewers how to delete a video in the first 30 seconds of this video, all the value was up front, the rest was saved for detail and a bit of bonding with the vidIQ community. Of course the common mantra is that watch time is the most important metric on YouTube. But what YouTube is also telling all of us more and more is to stop making videos for an algorithm and make videos for your audience.

Time is one of the most valuable currencies in the world and when a viewer spends it with you they want value from it. I can't and will not try to fool a viewer into a ten minute video on how to delete a YouTube video. And in this particular scenario YouTube completely agrees with me.

The second thing you need to appreciate with this strategy is your video will almost definitely perform worse to begin with, you just need to have unshakeable faith in the system. Through the vidIQ video comparison tool we can see that the blue line that represents this video on how to delete a YouTube video underperformed against channel expectation which is the pink line, at least to begin with, given time as the video grinded it's way through the algorithm, more people searched for it, clicked on it, and got value from it. By the end of its first 28 days this video was performing well above expectation from the channel. That's what a cumulative view kind of looks like, but the daily view count graph looks even more impressive.

It is not uncommon for evergreen content to tank very quickly after it's launch. It's usually not a sexy topic, a small number of people may be searching for the keyword, but the power of evergreen content is that the same number of people will likely be searching for the term tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, and if your video delivers the value the expectant audience wants this is what can happen. Almost as many view per day as the day the video was launched. Already that video's doing pretty well, but if I'm honest with you I expect it to do even better in the future.

At the moment YouTube are currently running both the classic studio and the beta studio, but at some point they're going to turn off that classic studio, which means all of those videos on the old method of how to delete a video will be obsolete and whose video is be there waiting in second place to take the top spot? Yep, it makes perfect sense now doesn't it? So that's one evergreen piece of content up and running.

But hang on I just said that the entire YouTube creators studio is changing, that gives me an idea. This has been our side project throughout 2019, creating simple tutorials to do important things in the new YouTube creator studio. As you can see some videos have been more successful than others, but each and every one of them is still getting views today and fingers crossed, those should be guaranteed views for years to come.

To date these new creator studio beginner guide videos have collectively brought in over a million views and we still have dozens more videos on the list we need to make. Admittedly this is a rare occurrence, for absolutely everything in a topic, YouTube analytics and channel maintenance completely change and that has given us a rare opportunity to dominate a huge topic as if it was starting all over again. But this type of thing in smaller doses is happening all the time.

When a new season starts in a sport, such as basketball, baseball, NFL, there's always potential evergreen content that could last you 6 to twelve months. When a new version of a phone or a new operating system for a program is released, again there is evergreen content potential. It could last you 12 months even two years. New games, beauty products, back to school, these all have potential evergreen content.

And when you do identify these evergreen opportunities in your topic, if you apply some of these basic principles you could be onto thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands even millions of views, over the course of a very long time. Something to build your entire channel on.

The right evergreen video content can earn your YouTube channel an incredible amount of views per month. Find out how.

Why Evergreen Content is the Key to More Views on YouTube

You're here because you want to change your YouTube channel name. Well I've got a couple of questions I want to ask you first. What are you changing your name from and to, and why are you changing it? Whether you are on Android or iOS the method is the same.

Simply tap on your channel logo in the top right, and then tap on your channel.

Next to your channel name you will see a settings icon. Tap on that and then you should see a pencil icon next to your channel name.

Tap that and you should now be able to change your channel name.

Now before you go anywhere I did mention a couple of caveats and this is the first one. You can only change your YouTube channel name three times every 90 days. And secondly, do you have a brand account? If you have no idea what I'm talking about you need to bear this in mind as well.

When you change your name on YouTube you're not only doing it for your channel you're doing it across all of your Google services for that account, which isn't ideal if you want to keep the two things separate. Now why it's like this I don't fully understand. I think it's something to do with the legacy of Google+. However there is some good news. There is a slightly complicated way to fix all this.

If you want to separate your YouTube channel from your Google account what you need is a brand account. A brand account has several benefits, the first being able to use a custom channel name without affecting your personal Google account. It also allows you to manage multiple channels from one Google account, and you can add managers and owners to your brand account who can help you manage those YouTube channels.

The process involves creating a brand account and then moving your YouTube channel to that brand account, which does require several steps. You could probably do it on a mobile phone if you want to, and the place to start would be www.youtube.com/account_advanced. But it's going to be much easier and safer to do it from a computer.

Want to change your YouTube channel name directly from your phone? We show you how to do it whether you use Android or iOS.

How to Change Your YouTube Channel Name on a Phone (Android and iOS)

If you do want to take advantage of a tool I'm about to show, then make sure to 

, as it will help you research YouTube, analyze any video on the platform (which is what we're about to do), audit your own channel, and suggest actual steps that will help grow your own YouTube channel. It is free to download.

All right, just before we jump into this tool, I need to explain a little bit of jargon, and that is freebase topics. To keep this as simple as possible, freebase topics is a way of assigning a common topic to places, people, songs, and so on. What's important about all of this is YouTube automatically tries to do this with your video and every single video on the platform. And that data is made available through the YouTube API.

, with it's 6.3 billion views, these are the tags that were fed into YouTube, but these are the topics YouTube automatically decided were associated with the video.

And a question you might be asking at this point is, "Does a video need a lot of views "to be assigned into a YouTube topic?" Put simply, the answer is no. A video can be published very recently, have less than 100 views, and different tags, and yet, the video still has these topics. So, this is all to do with metadata, right?

If I include certain keywords in the title, description, and the tag, YouTube's gonna be able to put my video in the right topic and serve it to the right audience. Well, PewDiePie is notorious for not caring too much about metadata. 

 only mentions Minecraft once in the title, description, and tags, and yet, YouTube still classifies the video within the video game culture topic.

On the other hand, when PewDiePie mentions Minecraft in the title 

, along with an action verb, "raiding", YouTube seems to have more information to work with and adds two more topics, action game and role-playing game.

Now, that all seems relatively straight forward. But what happens when the video content gets a little blurred? Say we have a video creator such as MrBeast. Well, this video titled "

" has YouTube clutching at straws a little bit, suggesting the topics of lifestyle and technology. If MrBeast buys a homeless man a Lamborghini, then swap out technology for vehicle, as a topic. But if MrBeast challenges people to stay in a Tesla, that's purely for entertainment value and nothing else, according to YouTube's topics.

Can you directly control these YouTube topics? Clearly not. Can you influence these YouTube topics? Yes, with metadata, but is more going besides? Although there is no hard data on this at the moment, YouTube is likely looking at captions, if you've included them, maybe even comments on your video, and watching the video in an artificial intelligence type of way. But ultimately, what does this all mean for you, the individual video creator? That's where we need to do some big data research.

We handed over our numbers on video topics to data expert and CEO of Little Monster Media, Matt Gielen, to come up with some answers. Matt was able to define the super topics and how competitive they are, as well as identifying topics with few videos, but high average views, presenting possible windows of opportunity.

I don't want to steal Matt's thunder on this one, as his videos are always a fascinating insight into the inner working of YouTube. So, do check it out over here.

So you've crafted the perfect title, description, and tags, and metadata is on point. But what does YouTube really think about the topic of your video? Well, it just so happens we got a brand new, free tool to tell you just that.

What Topic Does YouTube Think Your Video is About? (And Why That Matters)

I've got a question for you. What are all of the unique things you create for every single video, whether it be thumbnails, titles, descriptions, and tags? And the reason I ask you that is because some things you probably never change when you upload your videos and are always working in the background. But are they working smartly for you?

YouTube Default Uploads: Check Your Settings!

When you are logged into YouTube, you should see your channel logo in the top right-hand corner of most YouTube screens. We're going to start with something you should all review every couple of months and those are your upload defaults. Click on Settings in the left hand navigation bar and then, choose Upload defaults. When you begin the process of uploading a video to YouTube, elements of that upload will be pre-populated with what's currently in your Uploads default fields.

Starting with a title, it's probably best to leave this one blank as each title should be keyword specific and emotionally relevant to the video you upload. But if you are an educational or how-to channel, there may be specific phrases you want to include here.

On the other hand, you're description is where you want to pre-populate some stuff. Firstly, we have a top paragraph here that indicates the viewable description preview when people are scrolling through YouTube. It's a second opportunity to include keywords and grab the viewer’s attention. Imagine you are writing an old school tweet with 140 characters. Make it as compelling as possible.

Now, underneath all of this stuff you write about each video upload, you should also include new viewer information, such as who you are, what you do on YouTube, answers to common questions about your channel, links to whatever is important to you, and hashtags at the very bottom of the video description if you intend to use them.

A question you may be asking is, how do I use hashtags and should I be using hashtags on YouTube? Well, we do have a useful video that covers that topic and you can 

. And of course, always set you videos to ‘Private’ or at the very least, ‘Unlisted’, so that YouTube has a chance to process it properly, including giving warnings about monetization and so that you can set it to ‘Public’ at the exact time you want it to go live.

There are three tabs at the top of the Upload defaults screen, the second one being Extras and featuring tags and ad placement. Much like the title and description, your tags should be very specific to each uploaded video. We've got a couple of very broad default ones here and we usually delete as appropriate per video. And of course, once you have 

, you will be offered hundreds of tag and keyword suggestions to help optimize your videos along with loads of other tools, too!

if your channel is monetized, you’ll want to make sure you are serving up ads on your content that maximize your potential earnings. Imagine if you've uploaded 50 videos with default settings that haven't been set correctly - that's a lot of potential revenue down the drain.

Now, I'm not suggesting you stick as many adverts as possible on your videos, but, consider this. If you make longer videos, of say, 15 to 30 minutes or more and you have high audience retention, say, 70 to 80%, I think that gives you permission to put adverts in the middle of your videos. After all, you deserve that little bit of extra income.

YouTube Advanced Settings: What to Update

One more tab to look at now and that's the Advanced section. Unless you're happy for people to use your content for free, make sure your videos are set to the Standard YouTube License.

The ‘Category’ drop down can help you to advertise as much of your content to the correct target audience. And it just so happens we've got a dedicated video on YouTube categories you can check out for more information:

The ‘Video Language’ option helps YouTube to share the correct language captions to the right viewers.

Caption certification only applies to videos that have been broadcast on U.S. television, and community contributions allows viewers to submit captions for your videos.

Finally, you can manage how comments are posted on your channel, whether you want to allow all comments, review each one, or disable them. If you are a channel that includes children in your content or appeals to a very young audience, you may want to check this every week to make sure YouTube haven't disabled this, although they should tell you in an email if they do.

How to Change the YouTube Settings of Published Videos

Making changes to your Upload default settings will affect all the videos you upload in the future. But what about those that are already on YouTube? Well, you can make changes to them on an individual basis.

From the new Studio Dashboard, click on the Videos link in the left-hand navigation bar to list all of your videos. Next, click on the video you want to adjust and on the first page, you will see the title, description, and tags you can change, along with many of our vidIQ tools. At the top of this screen, there is an Advanced tab where you can adjust all the other settings found in the default upload page, along with additional options, such as video location, age restriction, and even more monetization options.

Next on the list are channel keywords. To get to those, go to settings once again in the new studio and click on Channel. On the first tab labeled Basic, you will find channel keywords that apply to your whole channel, not just individual videos. Historically, channel keywords helps YouTube to understand the content and audience of your entire channel. Now, I say historically because if you were to ask me today how important channel tags are, I'm gonna be upfront with you. I have no idea. YouTube themselves have been stressing for a long time that video tags are no longer as important as they used to be and we did some tests 

And if video tags aren't very important anymore, I would imagine channel tags are even less important. Take this as an example. We inserted this rather strange and unique tag into our channel keywords to see if we would be able to search and find our channel through that tag. We couldn't. The end result we did come up with was this channel. And I've gotta be honest, that kinda leaves me feeling a little woozy.

Next up is your YouTube branding watermark. To change this in the new studio, go to Settings and this time, click on Channel, and go to the final Branding tab. By setting this correctly with the right image, you can increase subscribers you get from this feature by over 500%. Yeah, you heard me right, 500%.

Going into Settings and then, Community will allow you to review a few things, including the management of your moderators for live streams. Blocking people from commenting on your videos and creating a list of words that, if picked up in comments, automatically send them to your held for review section.

When it comes to blocking words, obviously, you can use it for inappropriate language. But what you can also use it for is those damn annoying comments when people say, "Sub for sub. "Subscribe to my channel. "Hey, check out my channel."

 then make sure to download vidIQ. Join over 1 million other users and use vidIQ to help you research YouTube, analyze videos, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps 

When you upload your videos to YouTube, there may be a few settings that you're taking for granted that could have a huge impact on the success of your video. So, let's take a look at them.

YouTube Settings You NEED to Know

Congratulations everybody. You've all subscribed to PewDiePie and he has hit 100 million YouTube subscribers. And this is exactly when he finally did it.

Now, I've got to be honest with you. I didn't think we were going to be able to capture this landmark event because YouTube are supposed to abbreviate all subscriber counts over a thousand. Att the time of the announcement, PewDiePie's subscriber count was slugging along in the mid-ninety millions, and it didn't look as if he would hit 100 million until the end of the year.

That is, until he started playing Minecraft. Almost over night, PewDiePie doubled both his daily view, and daily sub count. He has now pumped half a billion views into the revitalized Minecraft topic on YouTube, which is currently more popular than Fortnite. That particular story deserves a video in it's own right, which we've already done, and you can watch it here.

But the good news is, for real-time subscriber counts, PewDiePie has made it before abbreviations have kicked in. All of which brings us back to the early hours of Sunday, August the 25th 2019. The day PewDiePie reached 100 million YouTube subscribers.

Let's slow things down to real time, and watch the very moment PewDiePie hit 100 million subscribers. Yep, you saw that right? A jump of 70 subscribers in a single second. No doubt caused by thousands of people clicking the subscribe button at exactly the same time, to try and be the 100 millionth PewDiePie subscriber. Though how anyone is ever going to prove that, is beyond me. Anyway, that is your official date and time recorded in history for all to see. But of course, no subscriber count ever stays static for long. Now, the actual relationship between PewDiePie and YouTube has been somewhat strained over the past couple of years, due to controversies on PewDiePie's channel. But credit where credit is due for YouTube, who tweeted out this 

More good news for you PewDiePie fans. While T-Series may have been the first YouTube channel to 100 million subscribers, PewDiePie is the fastest channel to 100 million subscribers. PewDiePie, Felix, 100 million congratulations on your success, on what must be the single greatest week of your entire life. You directly, or indirectly, have influenced a generation. Tens of millions of video creators, to pick up their camera, and share their message on YouTube. And this, in the last decade, has impacted the world in a way we've never seen before. You have led the way to this, so that we all know it's possible.

PewDiePie just smashed through the 100 million mark to become the most-subscribed-to individual creator on YouTube ever! Read about the moment it happened.

PewDiePie: The Moment He Hit 100,000,000 YouTube Subscribers

Nobody likes nor wants to read sub4sub comments so here is how to block them from your channel.

Click on your YouTube profile picture in the top right hand corner of your screen

Click on ‘Settings’ in the left hand column

On the screen that pops up click on ‘Community’

You’ll see a screen that shows your channel moderators, people you've hidden from your channel, and a section at the bottom called ‘Blocked Words’

Add the list of keywords you want to block here

The Blocked words box works very much like video tags. You type in a word or phrase, press enter, and that will create the blocked word. You can use spaces as well to write complete phrases, such as, "Subscribe to me." You can remove blocked words by either clicking on the cross next to the phrase or by pressing the backspace key.

To help you get started, this is the list of blocked sub for sub words we use at vidIQ

You can also automatically place comments with sub4sub content, or other hashtags and links in them to be held for review. To view and review these comments, go to the ‘Comments’ page in the Creative Studio and you will see three tabs at the top.

 is YouTube's automated attempt to filter out comments such as, "Sub 4 sub?" Which sometimes it gets right, while other times it filters out completely legitimate comments.

 is where you will find those comments that have been weeded out from your blocked words list. Oh, and if you're wondering why some of our comments are blurred out, it's because they contain foul and abusive language, so feel free to add such words and phrases to your blocked list too.

You have several options on how you can deal with these comments, you can:

Permanently hide the user from your channel, so you never see any of their comments again

Now, while we're on the subject of comments, vidIQ has a cool little tool that allows you to create comment templates, so instead of typing the same response out many times, to the same question or the same comment, you can do a couple of clicks and it automatically places it in there for you. Saves me tons of time, every single day. And if you're wondering what that one tool is, it's all part of the vidIQ Chrome extension ⬇️

Sub4Sub comments on YouTube are beyond annoying so here's a way to block them completely - for good!

How to Block & Remove Sub4Sub Comments on YouTube [Block List Included!]

As you may or may not know, PewDiePie smashed 100 million subscribers earlier this month and we were fortunate enough to capture the moment live. However, had this happened in September, that would not be possible as YouTube has confirmed it is shuttering public-facing exact subscriber counts for good.

I want you to search for your favorite channel on YouTube and tell me exactly how many subscribers they have right now. Depending on when you watch the video or read this post, you're going to get this answer or you're going to get this answer and that's called an abbreviated subcount.

To the shock of the whole YouTube community, YouTube announced these changes three months ago and now they have updated us all on how exactly they are going to work. To summarize; with the exception of channels under 1,000 subscribers whose subscriber count will always be displayed to the single digits, all channel subscriber counts will be rounded down, depending on how many subscribers the channel has.

For example, 1,234 subscribers becomes 1.23K subs. 123,456 subscribers becomes 123K subscribers. And yes, in the case of PewDiePie, even if he had 99,999,999 subscribers, it would show his counts as 99.9 million subscribers until he surpassed 100 million subscribers. Or at least something similar. YouTube have not yet made those changes, but they intend to make them over the month of September.

What You Need to Know About New YouTube Subscriber Counts

Now, those are the basics, but there are some really important questions that need to be answered. The first question is what about my channel? Am I never going to be able to see exactly how many subscribers I have? Well, that's actually a tricky one to answer, because yes, you will be able to see a subscriber count to the last digit in your Creator Studio dashboard.

But this count is usually delayed by at least 24 hours because, as you can see, it doesn't match up to the subcount we get for vidIQ on YouTube search pages. Those are, however, changes are going to impact YouTube users and video creators. For those changes also impact us. As part of these changes, third parties use YouTube's API Service, and that includes vidIQ, will also access these same public facing counts you see on YouTube. As of the time of recording, none of this has happened yet. So we can only make an educated guess, but it may be some of our tools begin showing some abbreviations, like this. But right now this a chicken and the egg situation until YouTube make the changes, our developers can't start their work on giving you the best data that's available to us.

And of course, subscriber counts represent a tiny part of the vidIQ Chrome extension, that will help you research YouTube, analyze any video on the platform, audit your own channel, and take actionable steps that will help grow your YouTube channel to even higher abbreviated subcounts. It is free to download and 

But on the other hand, some third party vendors live on real time subscriber counts. And they're going to be impacted massively. Abbreviated subcounts will kill the real time subscriber count cottage industry that FlareTV began almost a year to the day when they started following PewDiePie and T-Series' subcounts. It's still running today and has helped the channel grow by over two and half million subscribers. Going forward, no one will ever know quite how close these channels are to their next subscriber milestones.

So, why have YouTube done this? Well, they say that beyond creating more consistency, this addresses creator concerns about stress and wellbeing, specifically around tracking public subscriber counts in real time. Now my guess is that the majority of you are going to disagree with what YouTube is saying here. Subscriber counts have been around forever. It wasn't broken. Why are you fixing it? I love the gamification of hitting those targets.

And these are all valid points and when we did polls on this earlier in the year, around about 85% to 90% of you disagreed with what YouTube was planning to do with abbreviated subcounts. And YouTube know this is not a popular decision. In the same update, YouTube said, "While we know not everyone will agree with this update, we hope it's a positive step for the community, both those viewing and creating content."

We've not heard many voices in support of it, so anybody who does think it's a great idea, we'd love to start a constructive debate in the comments of the video above. As for my own personal opinion, I've got to be honest. I don't really like the change. I think the consistency argument doesn't really fly, because view counts can still be inconsistent throughout YouTube. And we're not seeing YouTube try to change them. And as an analytics geek myself, I think it's a shame that we're going to lose some purity in the data. These numbers have been accurately tracked to the single digit for years now. And we're going to lose those pages of history to these abbreviated counts.

And nobody's really going to know when the channels are hitting these huge landmarks until they've happened. Except for the video creator themselves and I think they're going to find it hard to share that data. Because they only get it from the channel analytics, which is delayed anyway.

However, I do understand the wellness argument of this change. This is the trend that social media platforms are going towards these days, with Instagram hiding likes. And I have to be honest, I personally haven't been negatively affected by real time subscriber counts. And there are those video creators who potentially have been. You think about the Tati Westbrook versus James Charles real time subscriber count and what happened there. There are real serious considerations of how this affects the mental wellbeing of video creators.

We knew it was coming but now YouTube has definitely confirmed that public-facing exact subscriber count numbers will shutter in September 2019.

YouTube Will Kill Exact Public Facing Subscriber Counts in September

YouTube descriptions, what have they ever done for your video? Well, they could be doing a lot more, if you actually wrote something worthwhile in them, but the truth is most YouTubers don’t, so here are a couple of tips and tricks to help you write better YouTube video descriptions. First, let's go through the hierarchy of importance:

The most important hook you have to pull in the viewer, is the 

. That's going to stop them from swiping or scrolling through the videos that are suggested to them.

, which provides some clarity for the video,

 to find out just how important tags are)

So when it comes to marketing your video, make sure you put most of your time, energy and resources into the thumbnail and the title. But the description does have its uses, and we'll start with the beginning of your description.

7 Ways to Optimise Your YouTube Description Right Now

There’s something that I want to stress at this point. If you see huge channels not paying any attention to video descriptions and not writing anything in them, that doesn't mean that you should do exactly the same thing. Those super-channels have already made it on YouTube, and they can do whatever they like. But when you're a smaller channel, trying to grow, making a good description is one of those marginal gains that gives you one or two percent more reasons to click on your video, as opposed to another, similar video of a channel of a similar size.

1. Use the Right Keywords to be Found in Search

There are two reasons why the beginning of your description is important. First of all, YouTube scrapes those descriptions for keywords, and it may help your video appear in Search. The higher those keywords are in the description, the more likely they are to be found by YouTube.

Second of all, when people are searching through video content, they will see a snippet of your description, roughly the first 140 characters, so think of your description as a Tweet when you first start to write it. If you're not sure how to start your description, a good idea is to more or less repeat your title.

You've no doubt put in a lot of effort into your title, and included as many keywords in there as possible, so if you put that in your description, and then maybe riff on the title a little bit, add a question in there, or a few more keywords, that's a good starting point for your video description.

The next thing you want to do is to include a subscribe link to your channel somewhere near the top of the description. Think of it as a point of sale. Your viewer could be on the edge of subscribing to your channel, and they just need a little bit of encouragement, and seeing a subscribe link in your video description may persuade them to do just that.

And you can make it even easier for them with this little subscriber hack. Simply copy and paste your channel home page, and then add this bit of code to the end of it - ?sub_confirmation=1. When people click on it, it will give them an automatic pop-up to subscribe to your channel. This does only work on desktop computers, but on a mobile it will still tune in to your channel page, where your viewer may subscribe to you.

Next comes a paragraph where you can go into more detail about your video content. Again, this is where you want to be using as many keywords as possible, so that YouTube can identify your content with as many associated terms as possible, which helps you in Search.

This doesn't mean keyword stuffing, where you're simply adding tags to your video description, that's against Terms of Service. But it may mean you're writing natural sentences, with a bit of repetition of those keywords. If you want a good example of this, check out the video description of the video at the top of the post.

The next thing you can do which can be really helpful to viewers, especially on longer videos, is to use time stamps. Time stamps are very easy to create and work on both YouTube descriptions and YouTube comments. All you need to do is create a time with a colon, for example, if you put in 1:53, that creates a link that when you click or tap on it, it takes you to one minute 53 in the video.

Now, as I say, if you've got longer videos, then this can be a great way to break up the video, and it gives you another opportunity to include keywords in your video description. And, once again, if you look in the above video description, you'll see some examples of this.

Next, there's nothing wrong with earning a little bit of extra cash from your YouTube videos, from non-YouTube tools, and that includes affiliate links in your video description. As long as you follow the rules. To quickly explain affiliate links, these are links to products and services that you create, that if the viewer clicks on them and buys something from those sites, you will earn a little bit of commission.

A simple example of this might be including an affiliate's gear guide so you're telling all of your viewers the type of camera, lighting, and other things that you use in your videos, and it gives them the opportunity to buy exactly what you use, and you earn a little bit from that. But as a disclaimer, let me stress this. Make sure you check out all of the YouTube Community Guidelines on how to use affiliate links and sell products and services on your videos, because you don't want to get in trouble, and have a strike put against your channel.

Now it is likely that you'll want to include these affiliate links among many other things in all of your videos, and so that's where you can start to use upload defaults. You'll find this under Settings in the new Creator Studio, and there is a section called Upload defaults.

Essentially, Upload defaults is all of the stuff that you want to include in every single video, so it will appear below everything else that we've already talked about. As a good example, if you go to the bottom of our video description and work your way up, you will see lots of things that come from our upload defaults.

For us, it's a case of answering commonly-asked questions, such as who vidIQ are, whether we support multiple languages, how can we download vidIQ, and videos that may help you understand how to use our tools. We also include social media links in there, so that we can communicate with our audience, whether they're on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and tell them when we have new content on any of those platforms. Head on over to Upload defaults and start to amend yours.

If you want to include hashtags in your video above your title, you need to add those hashtags to your video description. You can use a maximum of three, and they will appear as blue words above your videos. Find out more about YouTube hashtags here:.

Something else to remember about video descriptions. If you change one of your video descriptions, it's not going to transform your channel overnight. This is a long-term game plan, you're trying to stack the deck in your favor. Constantly reinforcing the keywords that you use, including links to other videos in your description, and other playlists that send your viewers on a feedback loop throughout all of your content. You want to make it as easy as possible for your viewers to find your content, and then stay in your own little corner of YouTube, and that's helped through not only video descriptions, but cards and also endscreens.

Attention YouTubers - how much value are you getting out of your descriptions? It could be a whole lot more if you follow our tips, tricks and hacks!

Posts Written By Rob Wilson