Ask any YouTuber and they will tell you that generating significant views and subscribers isn't easy. But with the right strategy and tools, any video creator can build an engaged subscriber base when they understand what those subscribers want to watch.

Appealing to an audience to watch content you are passionate about making is just the first step, you need to know how to reach them and get your videos discovered. Our guides to how to guide more views on YouTube will give you the best tips to succeed on the platform.

How To Get More Views on YouTube

Do you want to make money on YouTube? Millions of creators are earning a very good living from the platform by uploading content that drives huge views and engagements. Whether that income is from advertising revenue, merch sales, or brand deals, we keep you updated with best practises and ideas.

How To Make Money on YouTube

Do you know how to do keyword research so you understand what videos people are actually searching for on YouTube? Do you know how to create a custom YouTube thumbnail? Do you know how to create a Playlist on YouTube?

vidIQ has a ton of tips that will help every creator maximise their video content. We publish content every week to keep you up to date with all the best practices.

YouTube Tips & Tricks

If you’ve put off creating your own YouTube channel because you’re overwhelmed with the choices you need to make or are panicking because you feel you lack the right skills to succeed, worry no more and welcome to the only resource you’ll need to fulfill your video creator dreams.

If this is your first time here, we have a 

 that aims to educate you on your YouTube journey. And if it is your plan to grow your channel, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, and click on our notification bell so you don't miss any of our latest tips, tricks, advice, and news.

How to Start Your YouTube Channel: 10 Top Tips

We promised 20 tips to kickstart your YouTube channel, so let's start delivering on that promise with 10 tips in this post and 10 tips in the 

. All the tips are covered in this video too:

So amazingly, there are still some people out there who are thinking of starting a YouTube channel and have been for months, possibly even years. My advice to you is, ready or not, start now. And I'm not telling you this as a New Year's resolution. Every moment you hesitate or procrastinate, there are thousands of video creators starting their YouTube channel today, and gobbling up all your potential audience. You don't want that.

Feel the fear, do it anyway. Start, press record. Record whatever you want today. It doesn't matter if it doesn't end up on YouTube. You need to gain experience in getting in front of the camera, getting behind the camera, using your editing program. You need to start creating content to find out whether or not you enjoy making videos before you know whether or not you enjoy being a YouTuber.

Tip #2 Learn How YouTube Works, No Seriously:

The chances are, that the first video you make is going to absolutely suck. Fantastic, you've made a video. You've made the first step, and in six months’ time, you'll look back at that first video and think yeah, that really was terrible, but you've gotta start the journey somewhere. And with that, you've gotta start your YouTube channel somewhere as well, even if you're not ready. Create a YouTube account, upload a video to YouTube. You don't have to publish it, that's the important thing.

You need to gain experience going through the workflow of uploading videos. The last thing you want is having a brilliant video ready to upload, but you don't know how the YouTube system works. Again, experience is going to trump any advice any of us can give you, so record a video, upload it to YouTube. You don't have to publish it.

Tip #3 Develop a Strategy you Will Actually Follow:

While getting some practical experience behind you is obviously a good thing, you also want some form of strategy. So, answer these questions:

What do you want your channel to achieve on YouTube

, and when you're answering this, try and answer it from a viewer's perspective, not your perspective. So I don't want to hear about hitting 10,000 subscribers, a million views, or whatever. If your viewers know that you're in it for your own self-gain, they will see through it and immediately switch off. Viewers want to know what they can gain from the content, and you want to sell that as much as possible in your videos.

 Again, try and be as specific as possible. What age range? What gender, if you are going to a particular gender? What type of demographic? What are they interested in? You need to know who's going to watch your content.

 There are millions of gaming channels out there, hundreds of thousands of Fortnite channels out there. How are you going to distinguish your content from everybody else who's already on YouTube making content? You need to disrupt the status quo, not join it, because you'll never be seen.

how are you going to deliver this content?

 Is it going to be every day, once a week, at a particular time of the day? Think about when your audience is most likely to watch YouTube, and how much YouTube they can watch per week, and then tailor your content to those watching habits, and think about whether you're going to do video on demand, live streams, what's going to be best for you and your audience?

Tip #4 Find Your Niche and Build the Hell Out of It:

live streams, you'll know this one off by heart. Niche down. Let me give you a quick example. What's your channel about? If you're giving an answer such as, "My channel's about beauty, and it's about travel, "and it's about vlogging," then it's about too many things. 

. It should be about one specific topic, when you start your channel, because you need to appeal to a very specific audience.

Once you've grown your channel, and you've got millions of subscribers who fall in love with you, you can take them on a journey wherever you want, but to begin with, the audience is only interested in the content. They have no investment in you. Try and remember that. It's a cruel lesson to understand, but it will help you when you first start out on YouTube.

Once you've thought about and answered all of these questions, I want you to wrap it all up in a nice little present, called your value proposition. This is your elevator pitch. Try and tell your audience who you are, and why they should watch you, in around about six words.

. It tells you the who, YouTubers, video creators, and why they should watch, because they will learn how to grow their channels. But we've managed to do that in four words. Now it's your turn.

Tip #6 Invest in the Right Audio Equipment:

If you've just started out on YouTube, and you're wondering what your first tech upgrade should be, it is 100% audio, and here's why. Bad audio is so much more distracting than bad video, and everybody hates onboard microphones. 

So if you can, get yourself a dedicated microphone for your camera,

 and if you're recording from a computer, you can't go far wrong with a Blue Yeti.

Tip #7 Create a Formula with Template Videos:

Videos need structure, so when you make your next video, try to think of how you will develop a show formula, that you can use as a template for your future videos. Remember at the beginning of this video, I literally gave you a hook. An introduction, a teaser to what's going to be going on for the rest of this video. Then we have the branded intro, followed by an introduction to who we are for new viewers, a call to action to subscribe to our channel, and then we jumped into the meat of the content where we are right now, and at the end of this video, you'll see how we round this all up.

Your show formula will take time to structure, and it will evolve over the course of your YouTube journey. Try and keep an eye out for this when you watch your favorite YouTubers. As rough and as random as they might appear, there is always structure and story behind each video, and that's why you watch them.

Some people love analytics, others hate them, but there are a couple that are crucial to keep an eye on, whether or not you want to look at that analytics. The first is 

This represents how enticing your titles are, and how clickable your thumbnails are. Check the click-through rate for your channel as a whole, and on individual videos as you test. I'm not going to give you all of the same target to reach. Check what your current click-through rate is, and whether it's two, four, six, or eight percent. I want you to try and improve that by two to three percent this year. It will bring in so many more views.

The other metric, as it always has been, is 

. Generally speaking, the more watch time you get, the more YouTube is going to promote your content. But if you make shorter videos, that doesn't necessarily mean you must make longer videos, because your audience might not react very well to those longer videos.

What I will say is maximize the value of your watch time in the videos that you have. That's by looking at relative audience retention. How does your video stack up to similar videos, in terms of whether people are still watching or not, and try and improve the relative audience retention. Having said that, if your average view duration is 60, 70, 80%, you're doing really well, and it gives you a license to try testing longer videos.

Verify your YouTube account. That will give you access to the most important tool on YouTube, which is custom thumbnails. We've got a video here on how to do it.

Tip #10 Create an Engaging, Interesting Channel Banner:

If I see another generic cityscape, or rolling hills in the channel banner when we do channel audits, I'm going to rip out my hair.

10 more tips or creating and growing your YouTube channel

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

 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 

Members of the vidIQ family that have upgraded to our Boost and Pro packages get immediate access to the Academy 

 so you can kickstart your YouTube success today! Access to the exclusive vidIQ academy will give you a huge advantage over your competitors from the get-go. 

Kick off your YouTube dreams with the tools you need to launch YOUR channel. We've got the top tips just for you!

How to Start a YouTube Channel: 10 Brilliant Tips

YouTube creators were hit with a bombshell in November 2019 when YouTube announced 

ground-breaking changes to audience setting

"Regardless of your location, we'll require you to tell us whether or not your videos are made for kids. We are making these changes according to an agreement with the US Federal Trade Commission, FTC, to help you comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, COPPA, and/or the applicable laws. Failure to set your content appropriately may result in consequences on YouTube or have legal consequences under COPPA and other laws."

That paragraph has sent shivers down the spine of the YouTube community around the world. What does this mean for a YouTube channel that has an audience of under 13 as well as an audience that's over 13? What does this mean for family vlogs? What does this mean for gaming channels? What does any of it mean?

We want those answers just as much as you do, so on today's episode of Tube Talk let's unpack those questions with someone who understands not only the law but also the influencer network, so someone who understands the YouTuber mindset. That man is 

 who's an entertainment attorney representing influencers for the past three years. He's the co-founder of 

, an amazing event for creators and brands to network and learn from each other. In this podcast you will learn:

Why the pressure to comply with COPPA is on creators not YouTube

Why there is so much confusion around COPPA

How creators need to determine whether their content is 'made for kids'

Why YouTube probably won't offer creators a 'mixed audience' option

How COPPA is going to fundementally change the YouTube platform

Wh creators need to contact the FTC and comment on the changes

Why COPPA affects you even though you may live outside the US

Why adding a disclaimer to your YouTube discription is not enough

__Just a quick disclaimer before we get started. This is going to be a long episode and anything in this podcast should not be constituted as legal advice. __

Subscribe to TubeTalk: The Video Marketing Podcast!

TubeTalk has been informing video creators and marketers since 2014, and is one of the most respected and listened to podcasts in the online video industry. Subscribe today so you never miss an episode! You can find vidIQ's TubeTalk at:

The COPPA and FTC Info Every YouTuber Needs to Know: Full Transcript

Liron Segev:	Jonathan, welcome to TubeTalk.

Jonathan Katz:	Thank you. Thank you so much. It's great to be here.

Liron Segev:	Jonathan, we're about to embark on a discussion to deal with the FTC and COPPA and YouTube. We're just having a discussion around this very sensitive topic.

Jonathan Katz:	Absolutely. I think a lot of attorneys are nervous to speak casually about this topic for fear that it might be interpreted as legal advice. There's a lot of nuance here. There's a lot of subtlety, and so I'm happy to share what knowledge I have, but in the context that none of this is legal advice. Nobody listening to this is necessarily my client, so everybody's situation is personal and you really should consult an attorney rather than rely on what some guy said on a podcast.

Liron Segev:	And with that legalese out of the way, let's jump into it. So, Jonathan, you must be a pretty busy man at the moment with trying to unpack the mysteries of COPPA and the FTC. What's going on?

Jonathan Katz:	Sure, so the first thing I would do is recommend that they check out 

 raising the alarm about this. A number of weeks ago before people were really talking about it, another attorney who happens to be a YouTube creator named Jeremy Johnston and I, we've been sort of mulling this over and being really concerned about it for a while. And so he published a video about it on YouTube.

I published an article about it and started making calls and contacting all the creators that we knew. And the thing that we were concerned about, the thing that we were anxious about is that after the news about the settlement with YouTube came out, we realized that there wasn't a ton of information spreading about how the settlement was going to impact the YouTube platform.

And the one thing that we knew and that was clear from the settlement is that creators were going to be bearing the responsibility of being COPPA compliant or not COPPA compliant going forward. That YouTube was no longer taking responsibility for complying with COPPA on a channel that was "directed at kids" and that it was going to come down to the creators having to self-designate.

And that got scary really quickly because we realized that by self-designating, YouTube is going to have to change what your opportunities and abilities to interact with the platform are based on if you designate one way or the other. And we started contacting YouTube and started talking to the FTC directly about what is the picture of what comes next? And we found that information was not forthcoming by either side. There was a lot of ambiguity. There was a lot of vagueness, a lot of uncertainty on how creators could self-designate to avoid violations of the law.

Liron Segev:	Is that strange when it's something that large of a magnitude and has such an impact on so many people for them to be that vague, is that unusual?

Jonathan Katz:	So that's an interesting question. How unusual is it? I would say that one of the things that's really novel about the FTC, and I suppose there are a number of regulatory agencies that experience this, which is they create a piece of regulation. And then they start to enforce it. And when enforcement actions are performed by a regulatory agency like the FTC, the shape of the law and the clarity of the law often comes out in legal cases.

A judge writes an opinion at the end of a trial stating, "This interpretation is correct. This interpretation of the law is incorrect." What's particularly unusual and difficult about COPPA is that there has been very little judicial opinion on the subject that lawyers can use as references to interpret their child-directed 10-factor test.

And so it's all incredibly vague because the FTC wants to have the room to have as much flexibility to take enforcement actions as they want, and there isn't a judge who has had a case brought in front of him who can check that vagueness by forcing them or obliging them to create much more clearly defined criteria.

And the reason that there haven't been court cases like that is because it seems like everybody settles with the FTC. And so if there's a settlement, it never gets in front of a judge and therefore no opinions are written, and therefore we don't have insight as to how the law works.

Liron Segev:	Yeah, because they said in their 20-year history, they've had just over 30 cases have actually resulted directly with fines from COPPA or the FTC.

Jonathan Katz:	Exactly. And so there's just ... So six years ago, they amended this law in 2013 making huge changes to it, and it has taken until now for these changes to even apply to YouTube content creators. And so nobody's really poked or explored how the definitions of kid directed, not kid directed, mixed audience, how any of this stuff is applied. It's not like we have a big case history where we can look and see, "Well, it applied here in this case and not here in that case," if that all makes sense.

Liron Segev:	Yes, it does. But it does hit one word which was mixed audiences, and I think we just need to understand that a little bit because content on YouTube is made up of a variety of every niche, every industry, every vertical that you could think of. And a lot of them have, especially things like K-pop channels and WWE channels, gaming channels, they have an audience that's definitely under 13, but they have an adult audience as well. So what is this mixed audience that we keep hearing about because YouTube's only giving us two choices. Are you for kids, or is this video not for kids?

Jonathan Katz:	And god knows that a lot of creators have been making videos talking about this subject, and it's been interesting watching all of the speculation that's out there. So COPPA has a series of factors that it uses to determine whether you are kid directed or not.

Each of those factors constitutes a certain amount of risk. And as YouTube will tell you over and over again, you need a lawyer to review that criteria, review your content, and then provide you essentially with a risk assessment, what elements of your channel, what elements of your audience put you at risk for a COPPA violation? And that's what I basically spent the last three months doing is performing these COPPA channel review assessments.

And so frequently my clients have come back to me after I provide them with this risk assessment, especially in the past week, and they say, "Wait a second. Wait a second. You've been telling me whether I'm kid directed or not kid directed, but what's all this I hear about a mixed audience?" And so the mixed audience exception is designed for people who have an audience that is not primarily kid directed but they are aware that there is ... because there's the reality of what was your intent in producing your content and also the incidental audience that you attract to your content. And then there's general audience content that appeals to a broad range of people including kids.

And so you got to remember the core goal of COPPA. The core goal of it is that they want that if a kid is online, and they're interacting with a piece of content, that their personal information isn't getting sucked up into some advertising network or some website. They offer essentially three ways to do that or two ways to do that, I should really say.

One is that you have a fully COPPA-compliant ecosystem that any time a kid is interacting with it, no data is being collected at all. And then they have potentially a mixed audience system which could be created which basically is just constantly checking in with the user to make sure that only people over the age of 13 are consuming the content. And there's all kinds of restrictions and regulations around that.

To say, "YouTube should just give us the mixed audience option." Well, I'm sure that there are a lot of technical requirements that they would have to meet in order to provide that. I don't know what they are. I am not an engineer, and I don't know the technical elements that would be required to, for example, verify that a parent is selecting the age option and not a child who is just saying they're 21 years old. There's plenty of that.

And so I don't know what the burden would be for YouTube to implement a mixed audience exception that would allow creators to monetize the part of your audience that is over 13 and not monetize the part of their audience that is under 13.

Liron Segev:	And I think a lot of it is the fear that we're kind of relying on YouTube's systems and their learning algorithm, which admittedly is getting ridiculously good over the years, but they still flagging things incorrectly. Right now before even COPPA and the FTC and all of this even bubbled up, you're demonetizing videos that shouldn't have been, taking people off the platform that shouldn't have been, and then on the flip side, doing absolutely the right thing by identifying content that should not exist on YouTube.

Do you think that COPPA and the FTC have the ability to really monitor a hundred million video creators, 500 hours of content uploaded every minute, or is it going to boil down to YouTube offering some sort of system access, and they will flag content?

Jonathan Katz:	So I think this is as good a time as ever to remind everybody that nothing I'm saying should constitute legal advice. However, we can all do a fair amount of speculation and look at the resources that each body has available to it in order to assess what the future on the platform will look like. So YouTube's AI for whatever problems it has had, especially around demonetization, there are certain things it is really, really good at.

And I would say the number one thing is, it is incredible at detecting pornography. It is unbelievably good. YouTube's AI technology for spotting and removing porn off the platform is fantastic. I've never run into porn on the platform, and you think about the huge volume of people who are using it and the huge number of trolls that are on the platform who I'm sure think it's hilarious to slip porn into the middle of a video that they've re-uploaded. And yet, I never see it. And I would have to assume that that is in large part thanks to YouTube's very sophisticated AI that is able to detect that kind of thing the moment that it's uploaded.

And if we know that about YouTube, if we know that they have that level of competency, then I have to believe that there's a lot of content that their AI can spot and say, "This content is high risk for being targeted at kids." And it will have lots of false positives. It will also have lots of false negatives. But the capacity for YouTube to find kids' content being uploaded to the platform and not being designated correctly is, I'm confident, very impressive. And while I certainly see a lot of false positives and false negatives in my clients' channels right now, I am also confident that over time, this system will improve and improve and improve and improve and get to be very sophisticated.

Because identifying kids' content is a lot easier than identifying what might be brand safe because the definition of brand-safe or friendly for advertisers is just so ambiguous and confusing. Whereas a kid can spot kid content when they're watching it, and so presumably this AI can do a fairly good job too.

Now you compare that resource that YouTube has against the resources that the FTC has. The FTC doesn't have a ton of resources to put towards this. And in their settlement agreement with YouTube, it was not a requirement that they have an automated system that serves as an enforcement arm for the FTC. It's voluntarily chosen to do that, and what they do with that ultimately is up to them.

However, I imagine that given they just paid the FTC $170 million, they're very motivated right now to cooperate with the FTC and be a useful source of information gathering for the FTC and provide information that the FTC is looking for in order to pursue actions against content creators who are abusing the self-designated option on the platform.

Liron Segev:	Why didn't YouTube simply say to the rest of the world say, "Look, our terms are you've got to 13 and over to use our system." Why are you making this our problem? People know that they've accepted the terms and conditions. That's it. End of story. Why are you making us jump through all these hoops? You used pornography earlier as an example, you go the site, and it says, "Are you over 18? Are you over 21?" You click the yes button, and that's it.

Jonathan Katz:	It's a very good question, and I think that it's one that is particularly difficult for everybody to sort of navigate because on some fundamental level, I think there is a principle that companies should be able to trust their users, and in the case of kids, the parents of their users to monitor what their kids are doing online and make sure that they're only visiting websites that are age-appropriate. And that if they are visiting a site that isn't COPPA compliant and they know that and they know that the site says it's only intended for people over the age of 13+, that they are accepting the responsibility as parents to whatever data collection that happens incidentally on that site.

By the way, that data collection is typically of the account holder rather than just the person who happens to be passed the device to consume for a moment. So it's not like these websites are collecting social security numbers from children. Personal information is a very ambiguous sort of term. I think there's a lot of parents out there that accept the fact that YouTube is tracking the watch history of whoever is using the account at that particular time. I don't think that's even secret information given that you can go back and look at your own watch history. And so those parents are like, "You know what? It's okay for YouTube to do what YouTube's going to do."

Now the FTC has not taken that approach. They have not laid the responsibility at the feet of parents in saying that, "Okay, parents, you've clicked through that the site is 13+, and you've passed the iPad to your kids, therefore you are consenting to this information being collected by YouTube, and therefore YouTube has done nothing wrong."

I think there's a bit of an overreach by the FTC by saying that parents can't choose to allow their kids to watch YouTube despite the information that's being collected. And I think that a big part of that is that the law doesn't make it convenient or easy for parents to provide that consent. And I think that that's where clearly COPPA needs to be updated and the degree to which parents actually care about persistent identifiers and cookies on their machine being used to provide their kids with the entertainment they want that all of my clients produce for them, how much do parents really care about that? How sensitive are they to various kinds of data collection that are used for the purpose of making a better user experience on the platform?

Liron Segev:	It seems to be, for me as a parent, and I'm okay for my child to watch this movie on the big screen, I am making that as a parent. That's my responsibility. Why is that different when it comes to a YouTube platform, where I'm signing in with my account, and I understand?

Jonathan Katz:	Exactly, and I think that what's unfortunate about the FTC taking six years for the effect of this change that was made to COPPA only felt like in this moment is that in those six years, a healthy and wonderful and diverse content creator ecosystem of all these creators that I know and love who produce amazing and valuable content for their very diverse audiences. They're all in peril. Their platforms are going to be taken away from them because they will be demonetized.

I represent all kinds of diverse minority creators, mixed-race families, families with adopted children, families who create content in all varieties of different languages for all different kinds of audiences, for audiences who have disabilities. And it's all for kids, and that content only exists because of the democratization of content creators being able to build audiences on YouTube and monetize them through personalized ads.

What's unfortunate is, when you remove the personalized ads, all of those content creators suddenly lose their ability to produce this content. And then all you have left are billion-dollar corporations who are going to continue to flood the internet with their mainstream, middle of the road, Los Angeles and New York content and instead of the diverse array of content that clients enjoy, clients' audiences enjoy.

A perfect example of this is faith-based content. And regardless of what faith you are a part of and even if you're not part of any particular faith, you'll discover that on mainstream television, you don't see much conversation about faith or much content being produced about families of faith. And that's because of various economic and cultural decisions being made in those businesses.

But there are so many people of faith all around the world who would love to watch content that reflects their families. And if we allow these massive corporations to be the gatekeepers of what kind of content gets to be displayed and they say, "No, we're not going to have any queer families," or, "We're not going to have mixed-race families," or, "We're not going to have families with adopted kids in our content." Then they get to decide that for everyone else what content is available.

And what YouTube has done, to its credit, is allowed all kinds of families to create content about themselves and about their experiences so that those underserved audiences can see the content that is meaningful to them. And in making their actions, the FTC is annihilating all of those communities in one fell swoop, in large part because I fundamentally believe they don't understand the business that they are regulating.

Liron Segev:	And is this what you guys, the people who have access to both the legal and the YouTube community, is that what you're fighting for?

Jonathan Katz:	Absolutely. So if you go back and you read the article that I published in TubeFilter about the coming COPPA-colypse, we end the article with very clear calls to action. We say, number one, we said to everybody, "Go comment on the FTC. Let them know that you love family and kids content on YouTube, that you love content that is child attractive on YouTube, whether it's Minecraft or slime videos or any sort of toy collectibles, etc. because all of that content is at risk and the FTC needs to understand that whether you are a family who enjoys sharing that content with your kids and want it to be able to continue or whether you are an 18 year old who doesn't want the borderline content that you enjoy to be destroyed as a casualty of this regulation.

So the FTC comments really effective, and we're asking for them to clarify their rules and to offer creators a moratorium or an opportunity to adapt their content in order to survive in whatever the new ecosystem is going to be.

Liron Segev:	A collective voice is what we need here. We need lots of people from diverse walks of life around the world really jumping in on this because it does affect absolutely everyone and things going forward.

And we're talking about YouTube specific, but I'm assuming there's going to be ramifications of things off YouTube. Maybe Instagram, maybe TikTok, maybe LinkedIn and Twitch. It's got to have ramifications. We have to speak up and educate the lawmakers about how things are done today. And things will constantly change, but the law doesn't keep up to the way that we are kind of changing.

Okay, a quickfire round, fact or fiction. Because I don't live in the US and all of this is US done, therefore none of this affects me. Fact or fiction?

Jonathan Katz:	So again, none of this constitutes legal advice. YouTube is based in the US and it is governed under US law. And YouTube is going to be taking action to protect its platform from further violations or further regulations, and so even if you're not based in the US, you are held to YouTube standards.

So I think if you are based outside of the US and you run a nursery rhyme channel, the FTC might have a hard time prosecuting you, but ultimately YouTube will not allow you to put YouTube at risk for violating COPPA. So it's a blurry question. Jurisdiction is a thing, but that doesn't mean that this doesn't apply to you at all.

Liron Segev:	Okay, so definitely keep abreast of the situation. A ramification, it might not be the FTC themselves, but there will be ramifications. Right now, we've been seeing this a lot. If I add a disclaimer to my video description that this is not for kids under 13, surely that simply protects me from COPPA.

Jonathan Katz:	I mean, there's a big logic gap in that one. If you're making nursery rhyme videos, and the kids can't read, how could they read your disclaimer? Ultimately, YouTube has been very clear that their compliance is limited to you notifying them that you need to comply because you're creating kid-directed content. I saw, what's his name, Stuckman posted a disclaimer on his Frozen 2 review video. And I mean, that's kind of comical because a film review is not really, wouldn't really be kid directed. I think that's a pretty low risk in terms of an assessment. And I think he meant it tongue in cheek anyway.

I don't think that sort of a disclaimer would weigh in in any way as to whether or not you were kid directed and therefore whether or not you were appropriately self-designating on the platform.

Jonathan Katz:	The only thing that you can really do is get a risk assessment from an attorney, and then make informed choices about how you label your content after you have a full risk assessment.

Liron Segev:	Okay, so I just wanted to touch on that very quickly. Since a lot of the content creators are maybe not in a position to go out and seek legal advice, small channels don't have the money to do it, do you think maybe YouTube is being a bit tone-deaf by saying, "Seek your own advice?

Jonathan Katz:	Tone-deaf? YouTube? Never, never. Their PR is always nuanced and sensitive and thoughtful in every way, shape, or form. While this law has existed for six years, you could also think of it as if it was passed today, as if Congress just passed a new law and that law is creating a regulatory burden on content creators that didn't exist before. And if you think of it from that context, YouTube doesn't have a lot of options in terms of informing its audience as to what kind of risk that their content is at.

And one of the things that's really tricky about it, and sometimes I emphasize with YouTube in this and sometimes I'm infuriated with them. And I think one of the things that I keep getting stuck on is I don't expect that YouTube could provide a meaningful assessment without creating more liability for themselves.

And the entire reason they've set up these systems is to eliminate the responsibility that could imperil the platform. It is tone-deaf, but it speaks to the poverty of imagination that YouTube is exercising in responding to this settle. That this is a solution that seems practical at scale for them without avoiding massive problems for a significant portion of the creator base.

Liron Segev:	It just feels very almost passing the buck situation. And $42,530, it's the magic number. Everybody seems to be focused on it. Are we really going to see that as soon as somebody uploads the wrong video, expect a letter in the mail saying, "This is your fine?"

Jonathan Katz:	So I do not believe that the FTC will rush to start issuing fines, especially given the incredible amount of pushback in the FTC comments that we've been encouraging creators to raise their voices. That they've received communicating that that is not the will of the people for the FTC to start issuing gigantic fines that bankrupt creators.

They've made statements, unofficial statements, saying, "Hey, we're not here to bankrupt creators." Although, unfortunately, Commissioner Wilson did make his, "We're going to shoot them like fish in a barrel," sort of comment. Which I think was incredibly destructive and personally, I would like him to apologize to the creator community for that, especially if now they're saying that that is not what they intend.

On the other hand, I don't think the creators are immune to fines. And I've seen some people making comments saying, "Oh, the FTC isn't going after individual creators." Because I think one of the things that people forget is that the FTC's commissioners can change with one administration to another. We have a revolving door in this country. potentially every four years, we have a new president of the US. And that new person could be ... And the turnover of who make up the commission could change at any time, and the choice of what they choose to enforce and what they don't choose to enforce could be very ambiguous and it could change.

And so to suggest that given the huge number of US families that consume YouTube on a regular basis, I think that it's very reasonable to believe that the content creators could grow to be sufficiently famous or could be making content that is sufficiently egregious that the FTC decides to take action.

It's all at the mercy of public opinion and political will, which is why it's so important for the audiences and the creators to communicate to the FTC, to communicate to their congress people, to communicate to their senators that this is a massive overreach by the FTC and that it is damaging an entertainment ecosystem that's very delicate and that we value and want to preserve. And they need to take that into account when they think about how they're going to enforce in the future. I'm sorry that's not much of a quickfire answer, but I hope it covered our basis.

Liron Segev:	Jonathan, if you could have a message out there to the content creator community, something that everybody will see, be it a tweet or Instagram post, a billboard in Times Square. What would that message be?

Jonathan Katz:	It would be two things. It would be to communicate to the FTC, whether through a comment on their feedback page, which we'll have linked in the comments or in the description, or by signing Jeremy Johnson's Change.org petition. Make your voice heard. That would be number one. And number two would be get a COPPA compliance channel review or channel assessment. Make sure it's from an attorney who is really well-informed about the YouTube ecosystem and about COPPA, has read the settlement, the commissioner's statements, the case history about all of this.

It is, I think really important, and I'll tell you why. I think the reason that it's really important to do is that over the past six years as kids content became more and more popular on YouTube and more and more kids were watching YouTube, what has happened over time is that creators have acquired kid audiences without even being aware of it. They don't see that five or 10 year olds are watching their content, but they notice that when their thumbnails include more bright colors, they get more click through.

When they notice that they use simpler language or when they speak in a higher-pitched voice or when they have more extreme reactions to things, all kinds of behaviors that make their videos perform better. But maybe the reason they're performing better is because they're attracting more kids to them and therefore more kids are engaged and watching for long periods of time. And therefore their videos are performing better.

And I think that this is a real blind spot for a lot of creators, particularly in the gaming community who think to themselves, "I'm playing Fortnite. It's a teen game. So I'm going to have a teen audience," without realizing that such a massive part of that user base is eight years old. And so all of a sudden, their videos are performing better and better and better as the eight-year-old audience is growing and finding their content.

And so we don't know exactly what is going to happen in January, but if you're labeling your content "not for kids" and all of a sudden, you're losing all of that audience, you may not lose monetization, but you might discover that your audience disappeared overnight. And that's why I think having these assessments by people who are super familiar with this ecosystem and how the algorithm functions is so important because you want to know now rather than be surprised later on how things are going to shake out algorithmically in the new year.

Liron Segev:	Right. And to that point, if I mark my video as "not for kids" and then I find that I lose my audience because it was kids, have I got a way to then quickly go, "Oopsie!," re-market it for kids and try to get some of that audience back? Or is it, once it's done, it's done?

Jonathan Katz:	So there's a ton of mystery. And I know that everybody wants to speculate about this stuff as to how the algorithm is going to function in the new year. My understanding is that you do have the option to turn on and off whether or not your content is kid directed. And you can make those changes.

And if we assume that users who are watching made-for-kids content will only have made-for-kids content recommended to them, like the experience in the YouTube Kids app is, then if you have a large kids audience, and you would rather keep the audience and lose the monetization, come the new year, if your content is market "not made for kids" and you flip it over to being made for kids, you may discover that the views start returning to you because through rate and watch time with the audience that is now seeing your content will pass through.

I think one of the questions that's really interesting is, once this new ecosystem is established, how is borderline content that is also marked as "made for kids" going to perform? So if I have a channel that is made for kids but is about martial arts or if I have a video that's marked as "made for kids" but it's about girls' gymnastics, which has a lot of that content people have said has gotten suppressed this year.

Maybe if I mark it as "made for kids" that will actually do more to suppress the viewership than if I had left it as "not made for kids." So there's so much subtlety and nuance and all of this. And honestly, I'm just an attorney who's I think very familiar with the ecosystem. But the algorithm is still a black box. Nobody really knows.

On this week's episode of TubeTalk, we cut through the confusion to bring you the info around COPPA and FTC that every YouTuber needs to know.

COPPA and FTC: What Every YouTuber Needs to Know: TubeTalk 191 with Jonathan Katz

Making content around video games on YouTube has to be some of the most fun you can have on the platform, but getting discovered, maybe not so much.

It's not going to be as easy as hitting record on your next Minecraft building session or wiping the floor with everybody in Fortnite. So the purpose of this post is to help you get discovered on YouTube playing games in 2020.

6 Tips for Starting a Gaming Channel on YouTube

But even if you don't have a gaming channel, don't fret because a lot of this advice I can be applied to several different genres of video on YouTube!

#1 Gaming Channels on YouTube: Find YOUR Niche

Let's first discuss the types of gaming content getting discovered in gaming in 2020. In order to figure that out, we have to ask ourselves, well, what is YouTube? Ultimately, YouTube is a search engine. Now, that may seem obvious, but have you ever made a video titled Bob plays Minecraft episode 12? That's what I'm talking about. Nobody is going to search for the words Bob plays Minecraft episode 12, and the next thing we have to ask ourselves is, well, what are we doing with search engines?

And the answer is answering questions. Whenever we think of something we need to know, we type it into YouTube and try and find a video that's going to answer that question or cover that need. Perhaps it's just to find something funny to watch to get you through your lunch break. With that in mind, the types of content that I want you to be focused on when trying to get discovered in gaming on YouTube would be tips and tricks, reviews, tutorials. Like this one:

Cover a glitch that you found in a game or an Easter egg that you found. Maybe nobody else has found it. The next time the game you're playing has some DLC that drops, pick it up right away, review it, and let people know if they should spend their money on it. Maybe you bought it and it was a terrible mistake, but that's a great video right there.

If you're struggling to come up with ideas on what you could be covering around your game, check out 

. Type a search in for the game you're playing, and see what people are watching in real-time. What videos are getting the most views right now?

Not only will this help you figure out what your competition's doing, but it'll also help you figure out what questions people may be asking about your game which brings me to the second topic we need to cover, and that is focusing your channel on just one game.

The best thing you can do for your channel is to become an authority on the game you're playing. If you like to play Call of Duty, then you need to be making Call of Duty videos so YouTube views you as the Call of Duty authority. The more videos you make on one game, the more data YouTube has to focus on when it's trying to figure out what videos to recommend to people when they type in Call of Duty.

Now, for a lot of gaming channels, that's a huge ask. Hey, one game per channel, that's it. If you don't want to make a new channel every time you play a new game I totally understand, and there are plenty of examples of people who didn't have to make a new channel whenever they played a game that they don't normally play. However, I want to stress two things:

One, play a game through and through. Make sure that game is the primary game on your channel at least for a time.

Secondly, when you do finally pivot be sure that the next game you're playing is at least similar to what you were playing before. If you're a Minecraft channel, it'd probably be best if you played another survival, building, crafting game. If you're a Call of Duty channel, it'd be best if you played another first-person shooter. These changes will help you keep your current audience from going and finding somebody else because they already like games similar to the one you're playing.

If you're playing a game that's relatively popular and you're just having some trouble coming up with ideas, maybe check out 

Type in specific channels and see how other people are covering the games that you're covering. Based on how your competitors' videos are doing, you're probably gonna get some good insights into what you should be doing next.

#5 Don’t Upload a Single Gaming Video Without Doing the Work

The next thing we need to address is upload frequency. It is tempting, especially in gaming, to record hours on end of content and break it up into several videos so you have something every single day, and I understand that temptation. However, don't do that.

Since we already have you thinking about making tutorials and reviews, those videos are going to take time, and I would highly recommend spending that time crafting each video to perfection.

, make sure your titles are researched as are your tags and your description. Do the work because that's going to pay off.

Every new video that you post is going to be a new opportunity for somebody new to discover you, so make sure every video is helpful to that end. If you would like to play a game through, make a long-term let's play series, that's okay, but I want you to do that knowing that what you're doing is helping your current audience stay engaged, which there's nothing wrong with doing that, but it does take time away from crafting those more discoverable, searchable videos.

#6 Become an Active Part of the Gaming Community

So, I've told you to stick to one game. Do tutorials, do reviews, and try not to upload ‘Let's Plays’ every single day, but how do we expand and how do we discover different types of content we can make to not only keep our audience engaged, but keep us engaged with the game as well?

And that's where the community comes in around a game. When covering games on YouTube, try to immerse yourself in the community around it. If the game has a modding community, that's great. You can make a video that just kind of showcases different mods every week. If it's a building game like Minecraft, try and find servers that feature amazing builds. Tour them, show people new things they've never seen before.

You'll find once you're discovering different communities within a game that people are creating challenges and playing the game in ways that no one ever imagined. Try to do one of those challenges on your channel or better yet, come up with a way to play your game that no one's thought of before and you make the challenge for someone else to do.

The easiest way to grow any channel on YouTube is to provide value. Although it's tempting to record four hours of gameplay footage and break it up into eight 30-minute videos, that's not going to get you discovered.

Become an expert in your game and answer the questions that people are searching for around it.

And if you’re really serious about growing your YouTube views and subscribers, sign up for exclusive access to the 

 and learn how to launch a successful YouTube Channel in just 30 days.

Ready to start your gaming channel on YouTube? Here are 6 tips to give you a heads up on the competition.

How to Start a Gaming Channel on YouTube

Ah, "The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening", a blast from the past, one of the best games I've played all year, and a million times better than the rubbish that is "Breath of the Wild". Anyway, you're probably not interested in that. You want to know how I got this game into the video description. Let's find out.

5 Easy Steps to Add a Video Game in the YouTube Description Box

To do this for any video you have already uploaded to YouTube, on any YouTube page, click on your profile image in the top right-hand corner of the screen and go to the YouTube Studio.

From here, you want to go to the Video section from the navigation panel down the left-hand side.

Next, click on the video you want to edit, and then click on the Advanced tab at the top of the screen.

Halfway down this screen, you will see a ‘Categories’ option, click on this to list all of the available categories and select gaming.

When you do this, a new field will appear to the right and this is where you can type in your game title. The field will auto-complete if the game is in the database, so type it out, click on the correct title, and don't forget to save.

Anyway, if all things have gone right with your video description, it should look something like this.

The title and box artwork of the game will be displayed at the bottom of the viewable description. If you click it, you will be taken to the auto-generated YouTube channel where you can view more videos from channels who are making content on the game.

When viewing a video through the mobile YouTube app, it does work a little differently in that you have to expand the description before you can see the game title and artwork.

Setting Up a Video Game Title When Uploading to YouTube

If you want to set the game title when you are uploading a video, in the new YouTube upload workflow, you will find YouTube categories on page two in the Advanced settings and it works in exactly the same way. Choose Gaming as your category and search for your video game.

With all that said and done, is this guaranteed to get you more views? Let's be clear about one thing, this is not a cheat or a hack or a game unlock, forgive the pun. It's not going to immediately give your video more exposure, more views, more subscribers, and that type of thing.

But it certainly is not going to harm your video. If you give YouTube as much SEO as possible, it will help identify your content and potentially serve it up to the right audience. The fact that it goes into the auto-generated YouTube channel is enough of a reason to do it, as it only takes a couple of seconds.

Oh, and if YouTube's biggest gaming channel does it, that would be PewDiePie, you should probably follow suit. And if you want a lot more help pointing you in the right YouTube direction when it comes to keyword research, video analytics and channel improvement tools, make sure to grab vidIQ. It is free to download (see link below).

Want to add a video game title to your YouTube description? We show you how in 5 easy steps.

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