Five Improvements to YouTube for Website Owners

Having a YouTube channel has become an important feature to attract, engage and retain web traffic. To enhance user experience and ease content creators tasks, YouTube has been developing and launching some new technical features. As of late, the attention of channel owners has shifted from the number of videos uploaded to the rate of content sharing. This is gaining more attention from web content creators, and brand marketers, who see YouTube as the next advertising platform. From a website owner’s perspective, some of these new features can greatly assist them in their online exercises. Some of the most popular are outlined below.

1. In-Video Programming

This feature allows content creators to brand their channel by including their own logo, or thumbnail link across all their videos. In detail, this new addition comes in two features – feature a video and feature a channel. Feature a channel allows you to add a customized logo to your videos, whereas the feature a video allows you to include a thumbnail of one video across all your content. The latter is good for cross-promotion of new or important content.

2. Subscription Feed

To give its home page a cleaner and friendlier look, a bit of rearranging has been recently introduced. The subscription feed has been given center stage and is now located in the middle of the page. This is more in line with YouTube’s goal to transform the site as a social networking site.
The subscription feed is intended to give videos more exposure and impact. This is because viewers’ video comments, rate and number of views will be shared to all subscribers and followers of each of your video viewer via the YouTube Feed; in the end creating a viral effect.

3. New Channel Page

The new layout offers some important features that can benefit webmasters who use YouTube to redirect traffic to their site. Take for instance, it easily allows users to add blog, website, and social media links. However, as YouTube transforms to be more ‘channel-focused,’ it is important that your content is activated, consistently updated and optimized for your channel to move up the search engine rankings.

4. YouTube Analytics

This feature, previously called YouTube Insight, has been revamped to offer more detailed and informative reports that allow content creators to learn more about their audience, video reception and to easily monitor activity on their channel. Some of the features that have been upgraded include audience retention that allows one to monitor how engaging their videos are, and playback locations allowing one to see the exact geographic locations where their videos are being watched. In addition, it enables you to monitor who is embedding your videos and which websites/blogs are giving you views.

5. Content ID

Although launched a few years ago, this feature has been continuously undergoing improvements to help users manage their YouTube content. Some of its new features include an appeal process to give eligible content creators an alternative to dispute rejected content. Other improvements are centered in enhancing matching of YouTube channel content hence increasing chances of site viewers to view your other content.