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

Welcome to another episode in our exciting new series that focuses in on some of the most successful Youtube creators around today. We're taking a look at their creator journey, and the often surprising story behind their success on YouTube.

, a family vlogging channel which has to date generated 2.6 million subscribers, and 680 million views. You can read the full transcript of The Ohana Adventure's story below:

The Ohana Adventure: Journey to 680 Million YouTube Views

Hello, my name is Jase. But you may know me better as the dad from my family's YouTube channel of the Ohana Adventure. Ohana means family and our family is always an adventure. Together with my wife Rachel and our six children, Klailea, Rykel, Shae, Wyatt, Evie and Cora, we get to share our lives through our daily vlog channel that now has almost half a billion views. But how did we get here? Well this is our creator's journey.

Before creating the Ohana Adventure, I owned a skate company. I was making skateboard videos to gain awareness and to use as a promotion for my entrepreneurial company. Through those videos I learned how to shoot, painstakingly edit and tell a story. These were useful skills that would help with creating our own family channel in the future.

But during the skate video days, I didn't know that there was an algorithm controlling the visibility of our videos. But I strived to test and better understand the inner workings of YouTube with every video. I wanted to create positive controversy in my videos to get conversations going. So I decided to film the thing that does not go together in my industry which was skateboarding underwater. The video went viral and got millions of views in just a short period of time. The video now has 20 million plus views but that all happened from my thoughts which was from the comments section which added up so quickly due to the conversation going on the validity of actually being able to skateboard underwater.

I then created videos of cars running over my boards, and those took off as well. After the 20 million mark and the success of the others videos in 2016, my wife and I sat down and decided to use what we learned to start a family vlog. We decided to post daily and we haven't missed a day in over two years.

Now getting the kids on board was very interesting. They loved YouTube, they watched YouTube, and they wanted to be a part of it, but then figuring out the dynamic of a family of eight being on camera was hilarious. Now creating those videos were a little bit daunting at first and it was harder than I had expected to gain traction, but we focused on making more original and shareable content and so our first Ohana Adventure video to really take off was how to family videos.

We decided lots of families wondered about having kids, there was always new moms, families wanting to wonder about having lots of kids and what to do about it, and so we started these how to videos, the first one that actually took off was 

And then we ran with that style of content for another year, videos based on those moments that were happening in our family life, like Klailea’s broken wrist and videos sharing advice with other families, like how to travel with six kids and a bunch of other how to videos, how to pack bug out bags, how to pack a car for a road trip, lots of stuff like that that really started to take off for us.

Then I've had a background in music and writing music since I was a teenager, and I really wanted to try that. So we tried something new. I was watching and waiting for the new music videos coming up from the top pop artists and Taylor Swift came out with, I don't even remember the title of her's now. You'll have to cut this part out! Taylor Swift then came out with Look What You Made Me Do, and my daughter at the same time was talking about this crush that she had at school. So I decided to create a parody called My Teen Crush Is At School. But our channel was doing so well on teen crush for keywords that we just called the video Teen Crush. And it crushed it. A million views overnight, 30 million views within the month and it kept going. To date it has over 83 million views.

We then filmed about ten other parody videos using that same algorithm and that same style for our family that worked with our family, we wanted to film and they crushed it. In early 2018 we added family challenge videos because we do that anyways. I run away from the children in grocery stores all the time just for fun. Then we started mystery door challenges and blindfold hide and seek challenges that we still play to this day.

The family games and challenges were so fun and something we did naturally as a family, these were videos we could bulk film and then wrap them in a vlog. That's very helpful for marketing content every day. I mean, every day is an adventure but some days you're just exhausted or things go wrong, or they're a little less adventurous than other days. With the challenges, we can make new and ambitious content that seamlessly adds to the vlogs and propelled our channel forward.

As creators, we're much more focused and specific when filming and editing our videos than we were at the start. But we still film our family having fun and being adventurous. As a family, we're so blessed by all of our success. Our family has always loved traveling and playing together. Now we're able to do that full-time. It's so inspiring when fans send us their stories and tell us how our content helps them in their family situations. It's that kind of love that keeps us making videos.

In the future, we're planning on making lots and lots more of exactly this style content, because it's natural to us, it works with our channel, and we have so much fun doing it. When you're making your own videos it's okay to be specific and still have fun making your content. Whether you're a creator who's just getting started or a seasoned pro, remember to be consistent, keep filming, keep uploading and always have fun with it. That translates through your content.

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

Family vloggers The Ohana Adventure have generated 2.6M subscribers and over 680M views on YouTube. Take a deep dive into their creator journey with us

How to Get 2.6 Million YouTube Subscribers - The Ohana Adventure Story

When you are logged in to YouTube you should see your profile logo in the top right hand corner. Click this and then go to settings. From here, you need to click on the "view additional features" link which will then show you all of the YouTube features that are available and whether or not you have access to them.

As we can see, currently this test channel does not have access to features such as custom thumbnails. But fear not because there are no views, subscriber, or watchtime requirements to use this tool. All you need to do is verify your YouTube account. And, you can do that from this very screen.

Next to your profile logo and channel name at the top, you will find a blue "Verify" button. Click that to start the process. To verify your YouTube account, Google will send you a verification code to a phone number either through an automated voice or text message which you can choose on this screen. Do note that you can only verify two YouTube accounts per phone number per year.

Once you've put your phone number in, click "Submit" and you should see this screen that asks you for that verification code. Whichever solution you decide to use, you should almost instantly get a ping on your phone. In this example, I requested a text message which sent me the verification code. Now, all you need to do is go back to your computer, input the 6-digit verification code, click "Submit" and that will verify your account which instantly gives you access to YouTube tools such as adding custom thumbnails to your videos.

 are not the only feature you will unlock when you verify your YouTube account. You'll also be able to upload videos of longer than 15 minutes and on a desktop computer, live stream from your account. In order to do that on a mobile device, you will need 1,000 subscribers.

There are, of course, many more YouTube features you can unlock such as custom URLs, monetization, and merchandising. Click on the video below which will tell you everything you need to know. But, the features that you unlock when you verify your account are the bedrock of any successful channel, especially custom thumbnails. So, there's no reason not to do that right now.

If you've just started a new YouTube channel you'll need to get it verified so you can unlock some core features. We show you how.

How to Verify Your YouTube Channel & Unlock Basic Features

What matters the most to us, is what matters the most to the audience - the thumbnail and the title. So do video tags on YouTube matter anymore? We get asked this all the time, but why stop there? What metadata does count on YouTube?

What is a video tag? Well you have a title, you have a description. How else could you help categorize your content for maybe a piece of software, that wants to place it in a certain area, to help people search and find your content. That's where video tags come in. YouTube gives you 500 characters worth of space for each video to create these video tags. These could be single words, or small phrases, because there's more than one way to explain to a person, what soccer is, or what an iPhone is, or who Donald Trump is. And when you've spent time doing keyword research on a particular topic and then using all of those phrases in your tags and seeing the video rank for them getting thousands of views, you feel like you've accomplished something. And then YouTube tells you that tags mean absolutely nothing.

Descriptions, like titles, are a valuable piece of information. They help viewers decide if they want to watch a video, but they also let YouTube's algorithms know what your video's all about. YouTube has stated in the past that Instead of adding tags in the description, add them to the tags field when you upload a video. And while there are lots and lots of theories around tags and how to use them, they're actually quite simple. Just use the words that make the most sense for your video and YouTube's algorithms will use these, alongside your description and title and other information, to determine when to show your video to viewers.

YouTube is telling us that tags help YouTube's algorithm, to understand what our content is about? But they also say that “we do look at tags a little bit, but not as much as creators think we do.”

Testing the YouTube Algorithm with Keyword Tags

This is not the only source of information from YouTube either on this new stance on tags. In a recent Q & A session, on the Google support forums, a member of a YouTube search and discovery team, told all of his video creators, to focus on the thumbnail, title and description, and don't worry too much about the tags. But you know what, I think we spent enough time trying to work out what the YouTube team wants us to do with video tags. Let's ask the YouTube platform itself, what it does with video tags.

While YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, if you put in enough gibberish, it's not going to give you any results. Put in a highly searched term, on the other hand, such as ‘vidIQ’ and you'll get results from, not only our channel, our videos, but all of those video creators who have mentioned vidiq in their content.

So here's the idea I'm proposing to you. Let's create a unique, digital tracker, and see if YouTube can find it. And the way we're going to do that, is through a brand new search term called, ‘

’. All right, it is just vidiq spelled backwards, but I'm always leaving Easter eggs in our content. But in all seriousness, we needed a unique phrase, that only we were going to create on YouTube, so that we could track it ourselves. We weren't just talking about video tags, we want to put this phrase in all sorts of metadata, including title, descriptions, translated titles, comments, even in channel tags. Yeah, you remember those? Basically, wherever we think YouTube may index a search term, we want to insert it there and see if it appears on YouTube search.

To give YouTube a fair chance of finding 

, I inserted it into our channel and onto our videos a month ago and analyzed the results and this is what I discovered.

Without doubt, the bullet proof solution to making a phrase appear in a YouTube search, is to stick it in your video title.

, the video would appear in search within 10 minutes, if not less. It's also important to note that if you remove a phrase, from a title, implications are almost instant as well. That video may no longer appear, if someone searches for that keyword. So if a video is getting a lot of views, particularly through search traffic, that does support the time honored advice which is to not tinker with a video that is performing well, especially its title.

I should also mention that I tried putting the phrase at the end of a title to see if that would make any difference, but the result was always the same. It instantly appeared in search results. Inserting a phrase into a video description, also produced a very similar outcome. Searching for it on YouTube would bring up a result, although it would sometimes take up to 24 hours to appear. Also, something interesting to note here, is that while a video is listed as new and has more views in the top results in this search term, a video with the phrase in the video title, will take priority in search results over a video with a phrase just using the video description.

I also want to draw your attention to this video too. The reason it appears in search results, is because I translated the video title and description, into Turkish, but only inserted the phrase 

 into the Turkish translated description. Yeah, let me just repeat that one for you:

Even if you set your language on YouTube to English, when you search for a phrase, and YouTube finds that phrase in a translated language, it will show it to an English user of YouTube!

I don't even know if I can get my head around that one. All right, then let's get on to one that everybody wants to know about. Video tags that don't show up in search. Now of course, I wasn't going to check this once by putting the tag at the top of a video. I'll double check it by putting the tag in the middle of a video, or triple check it by putting a tag at the bottom of a video, or quadruple checking it just to make sure. I had to quintuple check it for my own sanity, but the result was the same every single time.

If I put the phrase 'quidiv54321' in the video tags only, that was not enough to make it appear in a YouTube search.

Now of course, this is very interesting. We'll explore this more a little later, but first of all, let's go through the rest of the YouTube metadata and whether or not it appears in search. There are two metadata opportunities when it comes to playlists, the title and the very infrequently used playlist description. You can filter YouTube searches by a playlist type only, but to my surprise, when I inserted 

 into a playlist title, or playlist description, no results were ever found. Now on to the channel itself. As keen as I was to test the channel name, I didn't fancy renaming ourselves 

 for an entire month. But I think we can safely assume that it would appear in search results, because when we added the phrase to the very end of the about section of the channel, that was enough to prompt a search result.

However, when it comes to channel keywords, which astonishingly, you can edit in a new Creator Studio, even though with time of recording, other features such as playlists, live streaming and translations are still unavailable, inserting a channel keyword does not make your channel searchable through that keyword.

On to comments. I thought I would give this one a try. Inserting a phrase into one of the comments on a video, with little to no expectation. And I was right. Comments do not add to a video's metadata, when it comes to YouTube searches.

What Does This YouTube Keyword Tag Test Prove?

I admit that this is not a highly scientific way of testing the YouTube algorithm for how it treats metadata. I'm testing this in a very binary way. An exact search term, which you won't find anywhere else and it appears on one channel and maybe a couple of videos. YouTube is usually trying to deal with very common words, or very common phrases that can be matched in many different ways across millions, if not billions of videos. But I think in isolation, this test does reveal some interesting results:

The first being that YouTube is always checking the titles and descriptions of videos because whenever you change them, they appear in search results almost instantly. And secondly, in isolation, video tags do not seem to affect search results.

 into five videos on our channel and not a single one of them appears in search for that term is very telling. So I would say, in very basic terms, YouTube appears to be telling the truth when they tell us that tags don't matter as much as they used to. And if that is the case, that leaves me with two questions for YouTube. The first one being, video tags used to be a lot more important didn't they? But if video tags aren't that important anymore, then please tell us exactly what video tags do these days?

YouTube has stated that sometimes tags can be useful if “the content of your video or your channel name is commonly misspelled, and we haven't yet made that connection based on people searching for that and finding your video.”

OK but if tags are used solely to establish the correct spelling of words, then please don't put a huge box on the page and give us an excessive 500 characters to play with and call it something other than tags, because video creators are being conditioned to think of tags as something far more important over the last decade.

Tags have been important to a lot of people for a long time, including ourselves. After all, we have tools that help you put tags into your videos, but you've always got to remember this with tags. It always comes into the wider umbrella of keyword research and that is still critical. Even if you didn't do any keyword research, you probably have some good instinct of what your title should be and what might be in the description.

And once vidIQ has even a sniff of what you might be trying to say we'll suggest a hundred more ways to say something similar. If you look at almost all video creators who create YouTube advice videos, through force of habit, they do the keyword research and they do add those phrases into the video tag section of their videos.

I personally will always maintain this philosophy. If YouTube is going to provide us with a box, I'm going to fill it to the best of my ability, because if that gives me even a percentage of an advantage over my competition, it's worth putting in the hard work.

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

YouTube Keyword Tags. Do they matter? Should you use them? Will they make your videos rank better in search? We take a deep-dive into the answers.

Will Using YouTube Keyword Tags Help You Rank in Search? [Case Study]

We will start with the simplest way to change your YouTube channel name, but not the most ideal way.

 On YouTube, click on your profile picture in the top right hand corner of the screen and select ‘Settings’. On this screen, you will see your YouTube channel with your profile picture and name.

 Click ‘Edit on Google’ and you should see a pop-up. Now, as strange as this may sound, your YouTube channel name consists of your first and last names, so if you want to change it you can do so here. Your nickname does not represent your YouTube channel name.

 Once you've saved the changes, that should update your YouTube channel name.

 If you are serious about YouTube, now might be the time to create a brand account. I'll explain what that it later, but to do it you need to go back to the same settings screen as before, only this time click on ‘See all my Channels’ or create a new channel.

 Now on this screen, something new and wonderful is going to happen. If you click on ‘Create new Channel, you'll be taken to another screen.

 Here is where you can create a brand account which will use the name of the account as your channel name rather than the first and last name of your Google account. But that may not solve your problem because now you have two channels, your personal YouTube channel and this brand account channel. The idea is that you merge the two together.

 To do this, go back to the Account Settings page and this time click on ‘Advanced Settings’.

 Make sure you are signed in to the account with your current channel and you should see an option to move that channel to your brand account. When you click on that, you'll be asked to reconfirm your password.

 In the act of creating a brand account, you may have also created a YouTube channel in that brand account. So when you click on the brand account box, a warning may appear to tell you that the YouTube channel currently in the brand account will be deleted.

 You should be able to confirm this as it will have zero subscribers and zero videos. Once you click delete, the next screen will confirm again that you are moving your personal YouTube channel account to the brand account, click ‘Move Channel’ in the bottom right hand corner.

 Now, to be clear, this does have some channel implications. Not all of your data can be carried across. While you will still have the same videos, views, subscribers and channel URL, comments will not be carried over, the verification badge on your channel, community filter settings, or your custom URL if you have one. So yes, if you've already built up your channel this could be a big decision you have to make.

Why have YouTube done it this way? I think the answer might be linked back to how Google+ used to be integrated into YouTube. As long as you've read everything and understand 100% what you're about to do and of course you do so at your own risk, click the final ‘Move Channel’ button and that will move your personal YouTube channel to your brand account.

 And now what you should be able to do is go to ‘Settings’ from your YouTube profile picture as you did before, click the ‘Edit on Google’ link, and now you can change just the name of your channel, your brand account, not the first and last name of your personal Google account.

And you may be thinking is it really worth going through all of this potential heartache? But there are other benefits to having a brand account as your YouTube channel. As well as being able to change your channel name and not your personal name on Google, having a brand account allows you to add other people to your YouTube channel, such as community managers, people who upload videos on your behalf.

Basically if you're a part of a company or a larger channel, then you're going to need other people to help you along the way. So if you are serious about YouTube, then you probably do need a brand account.

Want to change your YouTube Channel name? Our step by step will guide you through the process.

A Step by Step Guide on How To Change Your YouTube Channel Name

You’re probably reading this blog post (and watching the above video) because you want to grow your YouTube channel. And in order to do that, you need to know what's happening at YouTube. So we decided to ask them for the latest information on the updates.

Tom Leung is the Director of Product Management at YouTube. He's one of the top people responsible for many of the things that we use as video creators, such as the upload process, YouTube analytics, the mobile application, and many more. On top of all of this, Tom is one of the hosts of 

, the YouTube channel run by YouTube employees, and a fantastic resource for us video creators. The channel releases news about what tools are coming out, and takes a deep dive into existing tools to help us learn and understand how the YouTube universe works. If you haven't already subscribed to that channel, I recommend you do so now.

YouTube is going through a huge transition, changing from the Classic Studio to the Beta Studio. Some of you love it, some of you hate it. But ultimately, we'll all be using it by the end of 2019. At least, we think so. And that was one of the many questions I put to Tom, during our livestream interview. If you want to watch the full livestream, which was about an hour, check out the video link here.

What YouTube Creators Can Expect from the New Creator Studio

 Can you tell us more about the new beta upload flow? (you can see the new process in my ‘

How To Upload a Video to YouTube in the New Creator Studio

 The new flow process is only available to a small percentage of users right but it will be available to more in the coming weeks. I feel like it's a much cleaner, more organized flow. The Classic uploads flow was built in a very different time for YouTube. The new uploads flow now represents the YouTube of now and where we envision us going. It should support best practices, so they're not like, little tricks of the trade, but it's just part of how it works.

 Is it still one screen? Or is it, would it be more like a wizard?

 It'll probably be more of a step-step experience. We want to have a really good upload flow, that does everything that the old one did, and maybe a little bit more. And then, over time, But the good news is, because the new uploads flow is built on the new tech stack, it will allow us to add extra features way faster. With the old uploads flow, we wouldn't be able to do any of that stuff.

 A/B thumbnail testing. Is it happening, and when?

 Short answer is it is in active exploration. But the caveat is, a lot of things are in active exploration. And maybe only a third of those things make it to you know, broad production. But I personally would love to see it.

 Impressions and click-through rate. Is it coming to the mobile app?

 We have been very focused on making the studio beta as good as we can. That's the same organization that also is responsible for the mobile app. I do anticipate that towards the end of this year, you'll start to see us be able to spend more of our resources on the mobile app. And certainly next year. I think it's only a matter of time before impressions, and that kind of stuff comes to mobile. It's just a question of when.

 Will there ever be a way to insert cards and end screens in the mobile app?

 I wouldn't rule it out. I would also say that, when it comes to the mobile app, I think we're going to prioritize things that we imagine creators have to do on the go. And you could argue, maybe they would add end screens on the go. They would definitely want to check their analytics on the go. They would most likely want to maybe engage more productively with comments on the go. And they may also want to be alerted, and know about any issues with their channel, on the go. And I would probably prioritize those types of things before mobile end screen insertion.

 One here about comments. Why can't we simply, with one click, delete all comments held for review? So I think that's almost like trying to remove spam, and everything, in one click.

 I have asked for the same exact feature. Because on Creator Insider, there's so many negative comments, which are a pain to moderate so, I think that will happen. The challenge there is that the team that owns comments have a lot of other stuff going on. They want to improve the viewer experience for comments. They want to improve the quality of the spam filter. They want to make it more easy for people to find relevant comments. But I agree with you, that would be a great feature. And it does align with one of the Studio Beta's missions, which is to really make your critical user journeys as easy as possible.

 Some people say that it's not a unified experience for comments. So people are asking of a way to put all of these comments in one place to better manage them.

 I will tell you this. That the same organization that would do the comment unification, is also the one that would do the clear all experience, and filtering comments by subscribers? Same team, so the quick answer is yes.

 Has a target date been set for the end of the Classic Studio?

 Yes - I would be surprised if people were using Classic as their default experience you know, by the end of this year. The big milestone will be when we remove the escape hatch from Studio Beta into Classic. We will definitely be very clear when that is going away. That's not gonna happen in the next couple of months, for sure. But it will happen. And I would not be surprised if it happens you know, towards the end of this year.

Get Used to New YouTube Creator Studio Now

I think the most interesting points that I got from the interview is that the Classic Studio, as good as it has been, is on its last technological legs. Even if YouTube wanted to introduce new features, that technology just cannot support it. Yes, there is gonna be a difficult transition period, but to be fair to YouTube, they've given us now about a year's crossover time. And I think that's a fair amount for us video creators.

The mobile creator studio app, on the other hand, has taken a bit of a beating, because the same team works on both. So, if you want any more mobile apps, you may have to wait until the new Studio is fit and ready. And now that Tom works on his own YouTube channel, he can appreciate some of the creative struggles that we have, such as with the spam comments.

Even if you don't want to, start using the Creator Studio. There are some fantastic analytics on there, and I think the channel management is improving now that the upload workflow is available to some creators like us. If you don't do it now, in six months, you’re going to be caught out.

We spoke to YouTube about the new Creator Studio and other features that the platform may be rolling out over the coming months.

YouTube Update - What To Expect in the New Creator Studio!

VidCon 2019 is over and it was another spectacular success for the online video community - creators, brands, influencers, publishers, and the community alike. I've been lucky enough to attend VidCon in a professional capacity for the last 7 years and here are 3 insane lessons I've learned from speaking and auditing YouTube channels at the event:

#1 Most Big Creators Make the Same Mistakes as Small Creators

Let's say you have two channels one with 100 subscribers and one with 100,000 subscribers. How is it they can both be bad at titles, thumbnails and still only one does well? (keep reading for the answer).

#2 The Difference Between Most Small Creators and Big Creators is Focus, Consistency and Time

If you don't know what your channels about, how will YouTube know whom to send to your channel and why would someone subscribe?

If you're not uploading every week how will you grow?

And if you have not consistently known whom your viewers are and uploaded every week for years why would you expect to be a big channel?

Confidence and mindset is the biggest factor in YouTuber & video creator success I've seen over the years. If you believe you will have 1 million subscribers, you're doing the work and putting in the time and nothing can stop you then you might just reach your goal.

If your studying, learning and thinking about what you want to create then you are failing every second your not uploading.

VidCon 2019 is the biggest online video event to celebrate YouTube, and we've learned 3 invaluable lessons from auditing YouTube channels at the event.

3 Insane Lessons We've Learned from 7 Years of VidCon

More people watch YouTube on mobile than they do on desktop, and the way mobile works is becoming even more sophisticated. I'm sure you've seen this feature whereby it auto plays a video before you even tap on it. Now usually this is a good thing. I don't mind YouTube suggesting me new content because that's the way to discover new creators that you've never seen before on the platform.

However there are times when YouTube suggests something far too often, and there are times when they suggest something that's completely opposite to your preferences. And until now you've never been really able to tell YouTube, stop! I don't want to see this. Well YouTube has finally given you that sort of control. Here’s how:

As you browse through content on the Home Page of the YouTube Mobile App, tap the three dots button to the right, and you'll be presented with this new option, ‘Don't Recommend Channel.

If you change your mind, tap on the ‘Undo’ option

Now let's be clear what that means. YouTube say that once this option is selected that channel's video content will not be suggested to you. But it still means the channel and its contents will appear to you in the subscription feed, if you have subscribed to the channel. The channel's videos will also appear in search. You can still find the channel and watch the video content. And their content might still be visible if it is trending on YouTube.

So I think what this basically is, is a channel mute button. If you do say you're not interested in that channels content you're going to have to do the work to find it once again. Oh, and do me a favor, I know you like to test out these tutorials, just don't do it on our channel please. But, just in case you do tap the, Don't recommend channel option, by accident this can be rescued by immediately tapping the Undo option.

And while we're on the subject, YouTube has added more recommendation tools. As you browse through the app you may see at the top of the screen quick topic shortcuts. The options that you see here are based on your existing personalized suggestions and are meant to help you find what you are looking for faster.

That content could be, videos relating to the one your watching, videos published by the channel your watching, or other topics which may be of interest to you. And of course, as you browse through all of this weird and wonderful stuff you will always have the option to tell YouTube you're not interested in that channels content. Except for us. You're not allowed to tap this option when it comes to vidIQ. This is not reverse psychology. Don't press it, for us. I think, I think I got the message through, yeah?

You may also start to see information boxes appear under videos when YouTube is trying to suggest content to you that viewers with similar interest to you have watched. Yep, that is indeed how much YouTube knows about what you watch, and what they expect you to watch next.

Controlling YouTube Recommendations on Desktop

Now so far, we've exclusively looked at mobile, but what about desktop? Well you can click on the three dots next to a video and tell YouTube you're not interested in that video. But you can go even further by clicking on the ‘Tell us why?’, and from here you can say you're not interested in the channel itself. The chances are you will be using these tools a lot to tailor your YouTube preferences.

But what if you want to clear all of this and start all over again, without actually creating a new YouTube account? Well you can point your browser to myactivity.google.com/myactivity click on, Other Google activity, and scroll down to, YouTube 'Not interested' feedback, which you can reset.

What are your thoughts on the YouTube recommendation engine? Is it sending content you want to watch, or is it still as bad as it has been in the past?

Want to know how to control the content YouTube recommends to you? We have the complete guide for 2020!

How to Control YouTube Recommendations - Complete Guide!

Is this going to be another video about when PewDiePie reaches 100,000,000 subscribers? It's not, no. But he is getting close, and I'd thought I'd dust off the old cobwebs on this thing and get it up and running again. But what is interesting is the speed at which these subscribers are coming in to PewDiePie channel once again.

It's almost like that thing we were talking about for the first six months of the year. Just so happens we've got a cool VidIQ tool to show you what we mean. These are the weekly subscriber counts for PewDiePie's channel since he started the year, and during that 

 they were off the charts, pretty much a million subs per week.

Then PewDiePie himself asked the community to end the subscriber meme as he called it. T-Series overtook PewDiePie and he went back to his regular subscriber numbers. But in the last month, those subscriber number have risen once again. Going from around abut 25,000 subscribers a day to around 45,000 subscribers per day. But this time we're not just looking at subscribers, we're looking at something that's far more valuable to the video creator themselves. And that is views.

Our tool can show you that as well, the weekly number of views on PewDiePie's channel this year so far. And there is no consistency here, with the only spike representing PewDiePie's 

, which went viral. What's far more fascinating here, is the last month worth of views, that have accumulated into more than anything PewDiePie was getting during that great subscriber battle. Now, this sort of evidence leads me to two conclusions. Firstly, during the subscriber battle between T-Series and PewDiePie, people were just creating YouTube accounts and subscribing to PewDiePie, without watching any of his content. Almost as if they were sub-bots. Did I just say that out loud? And secondly, PewDiePie has more or less tripled his daily view count in a space of just two months. And that's what's got our attention. How can a YouTube channel that's already one of the biggest in the world, effectively double it's view count seemingly overnight.

PewDiePie & Minecraft: Generating New Wave of Subscribers

Yes, ladies and gentleman, boys and girls, children of all ages, especially nine year olds, PewDiePie has returned to his roots - the game that kick started his YouTube career. Minecraft. And this blast into the past has already proven to be very lucrative.

As we can see using another VidIQ tool. It shows the view performance of the PewDiePie video below verses the channel average. And after one day, the video performed worse than the average PewDiePie video. But it didn't take long to reverse that trend. By day seven it was performing above expectation, and after a month it was almost double what PewDiePie would usually expect from one of his videos on his channel.

And when you think about it, that makes total sense. Remember millions, potentially tens of millions of people subscribed to PewDiePie's channel for that original Minecraft content. And do you know what a lot of people still do on YouTube a decade later? They search for Minecraft. And who is at the top of that search term right now? Yeah, that's right. It's PewDiePie. And according to our VidIQ research tool, he is the top creator for the keyword right now. Meaning he has the most videos on the first page of Minecraft search for YouTube.

Now, PewDiePie isn't usually one to strategically go after keywords, or try to rank videos for certain topics. And that's not because he doesn't know how to, he just doesn't care and doesn't have to. These are the videos PewDiePie was making a month ago. Which are, well, whatever PewDiePie wants to make. And those videos range from anywhere between 4,000,000 views to 9,000,000 views. Yeah, exactly. Who cares about strategy when you're that successful with every single video that you make?

But, for the last month, PewDiePie has made nothing but Minecraft videos. And every single one of them is getting more than 10,000,000 views. Essentially PewDiePie has embraced the most basic principal in the YouTube playbook. Focus on a topic, and deliver that to your audience with every single video that you make. The double down concept. But again, I don't think PewDiePie is actively pursuing this strategy because he wants more subscribers, or more viewers, or indeed more money from the ad sales on the videos. I think he's just playing Minecraft because he wants to play Minecraft again.

PewDiePie has returned to making Minecraft videos on YouTube, and it’s having a dramatic effect on his channel as he nears the 100 million subscriber mark.

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