Four new Indian languages on YouTube: Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu

YouTube opened its doors in India in May 2008, and since then we’ve been working to make YouTube accessible for the entire Indian population — and its 30 regional languages. Beyond Hindi and English, we’ve added Urdu, Marathi, Bengali, and Tamil over the years, and today we’re welcoming four more to YouTube.

Now you can navigate the site in Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu, which are spoken by almost 200 million Indians. This also brings the total of available languages on YouTube to 58.

For Telugu, we have more than 100 films of Tollywood cinema, as well as partners like vegetarian cooking channel Gayatrivantillu who make videos for the web and have a growing global audience. For Kannada, Shemaroo Kannada and Anand Audio bring you music, drama, comedy and more to your homepage guide. Fans of Malayalam cinema should check out channels like Metro Matinee Videos and Hungama Malayalam. When it comes to news, YouTube’s partners like TV 9 provide news in both Kannada and Gujarati, and TheTimesKerala offers clips in Malayalam.

Gujarati	Kannada
Malayalam	Telugu

We hope this helps even more of you enjoy channels on YouTube in your native language, as we work to make the site accessible around the world.

Aditi Rajwanshi, YouTube India partner manager, recently watched "Chutney for Idli, Dosa, Upma, Vada etc."

Game on: YouTube Creator Playbook Version 2 now available

When we first released the YouTube Creator Playbook with tips for succeeding on YouTube, things were a little different. You didn’t have all the new channel features, the homepage didn’t yet have a guide to help you find and follow to channels you like, and you were uploading 48 hours a minute.

As we work on the site, we want to make sure you’re the first to know every tip and trick to succeed on YouTube, so today we’re launching version two of the YouTube Creator Playbook. In addition to these updates, almost every page includes your feedback (thank you!). Here’s a few of the key things to look for in the new version:

New channel & homepage section
With the launch of our new channel pages and updated homepage, we’ve created a new section on how to organize your videos for different audiences, and how to program your channel to help you make the most of the feed on the YouTube homepage.

Go global
Your channel reaches a global audience, so we’ve added a new section to help creators create, program, and optimize for audiences around the world.

Updates to annotations, playlists, publishing and more
Your feedback and new features helped us update much of the playbook on topics like annotations, playlists & video responses and call to actions.

Glossary
If you’re new to YouTube or the Creator Playbook, we’ve included a glossary to help you quickly learn all the site’s features, and the strategies, terms, and topics used in the playbook.



We hope this update to the YouTube Creator Playbook is a helpful tool if you’re just coming to YouTube for the first time, as well as help YouTube pros quickly learn new features to keep expanding your audience. We’ll be talking more about the new playbook during our Partner Meet-Up Livestream on YouTube.com/youtube at 5pm PT today.

Ryan Nugent, audience development strategist, recently watched “Rodrigo y Gabriela and C.U.B.A. - Area 52 Album Trailer.”

From snowflakes to surfactants: meet the YouTube Space Lab regional winners

At the end of January, we invited you to choose your favorite YouTube Space Lab experiment ideas from sixty finalist teams, and today we have our winners! More than 100,000 of you cast your votes that combined with the scores from our panel of judges to decide the regional winners for the final stage of the competition. Find out who won below and you can meet them all on the Space Lab Channel.

14 - 16 year old regional winning teams

• Asia Pacific region: Is space too cold for life to exist? by Patrick Zeng & Derek Chan from New Zealand
• Europe, Middle East and Africa region: Could weightless liquids be the key to better gadgets? by Laura Calvo & María Vilas from Spain
• The Americas region: Could alien superbugs cure disease on Earth? by Dorothy Chen & Sara Ma from U.S.A.

17 - 18 year old regional winning teams:

• Asia Pacific region: Could liquid magnets take us deeper into space? by Sachin Kukke from India
• Europe, Middle East and Africa region: Can you teach an old spider new tricks? by Amr Mohamed from Egypt
• The Americas region: Could a snowflake unlock the mysteries of the universe? by Emerald Bresnahan from U.S.A

The six regional winning teams will travel to Washington, D.C., where we’ll announce the two global winners (one team from each age group). These two winners will have their experiments performed 250 miles above Earth aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and live streamed on YouTube as part of a global event celebrating science and space. While in Washington, all the teams will take part in a series of activities to honor their achievements, including the opportunity to experience weightlessness on a ZERO-G flight.

Space Lab invited budding scientists to submit a YouTube video describing an idea for an experiment that could be carried out aboard the ISS. The channel, which serves as a launch pad for discovering great space and science videos on YouTube, has received more than 50 million views worldwide throughout the course of the competition. This week we’re uploading interviews with the winners in their hometowns, so subscribe to the channel to keep up to date with all the latest from here on Earth!

Zahaan Bharmal, YouTube Space Lab lead, recently watched the “ESA Education (English)” playlist.

Christchurch Earthquake — One Year Later: live streaming the memorial service on YouTube

Cross posted from the Google New Zealand Blog.

On the one year anniversary of the Christchurch earthquake, the New Zealand Herald is providing full coverage of the city’s memorial services on YouTube, commemorating the lives that were lost and those who are still affected by the tragedy. The live-stream of the memorial services starts today on NZ Herald’s YouTube channel.

On February 22, 2011, Christchurch was rocked by a magnitude 6.3 earthquake, killing 185 people and devastating much of the historic city centre. The state broadcaster’s raw coverage of the immediate aftermath was one of the most-viewed videos on YouTube on that day, as millions of people around the world stopped to watch the tragedy unfold.

Christchurch, is New Zealand’s second-largest city, located on the South Island. The idyllic town is known for its friendly people, abundant gardens, and historic stone buildings. And its convenient location makes an easy gateway to mountains, beaches — and Hobbits.

Quakes have continued in Christchurch over the last year. Despite this hardship, we remain inspired by the great resilience of the city’s residents, who have worked hard toward rebuilding their hometown and keeping alive the memory of the tragedy.

Richard North, a YouTuber from Christchurch, recently watched "John Key on Christchurch anniversary."

And the YouTube Ad Blitz winners are...

While America’s feelings were divided on the outcome of the game, there’s one aspect of Super Bowl Sunday that crosses team loyalties and brings us together — the commercials. This year’s commercials had something for everyone, from cute dogs to talking babies to Adriana Lima. After a week of intense competition in the YouTube Ad Blitz contest, the votes are in and you voted M&M’S “Just My Shell” commercial as your favorite ad of the Super Bowl!



Rounding out the top five commercials of the big game are spots from Chrysler Group, Bud Light, Chevy Silverado and Doritos:

2. Chrysler Group “Halftime in America”
3. Bud Light “Rescue Dog”
4. Chevy Silverado “2012”
5. Doritos “Man's Best Friend”

Give me the stats!
In its fifth year running, YouTube Ad Blitz has already surpassed previous years with 133M views from fans worldwide, up 43 percent from last year (as of Sunday, 2/12)...and still counting! In fact, during game time roughly 6 percent of all U.S. YouTube traffic came from people watching Super Bowl commercials on Ad Blitz.

The days that saw the highest volume of views were Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, making up 82 percent of total views received over the week. And it wasn’t just fans in the states seeking out the commercials — nearly 18 percent of all views came from outside of the U.S. Other interesting stats include:

• The most popular ads drove the majority of views - 65 percent of video views came from the top ten commercials.
• Google searches related to [Super Bowl commercials] peaked on Monday, but continued through the rest of the week.
• More than 32 percent 
of all mobile votes occurred on Tablet devices, our first year running Ad Blitz on a tablet-optimized channel.

Tune into the YouTube homepage today to check out the top five spots!

Mike Yapp, director, YouTube Creative Content, recently watched “The Jeremy Lin Show at MSG!”

Whitney Houston tributes, Athens burns, Syria protests continue - News of the Week

Everyday on the CitizenTube channel (and @CitizenTube on Twitter), along with our curation partners @storyful, we look at how the top news stories are covered on YouTube. Each week we post a weekly recap of the top news stories of the week, as seen through the lens of both citizen-reported footage and professional news coverage.

• We paid tribute to the late Whitney Houston by compiling some of her all time classic performances.
• We observed Syrian towns such as Daraa, Homs and Hama receive heavy bombardment as fighting between military forces and rebels continued.
• We were saddened to hear of the death of New York Times Foreign Correspondent Anthony Shadid, who died this week while working in Syria.
• We saw parts of Athens burn as protests over austerity measures in Greece turned violent.
• We followed Mitt Romney as he got his campaign back on track by winning both the CPAC straw poll and the Maine caucuses.
• We witnessed anger in Israel as two of the country's envoys in India and Turkey were attacked with bombs.
• We viewed mourning in Honduras after a large fire claimed the lives of hundreds of inmates in a prison there.
• We saw North Korea hold extravagant celebrations to celebrate the 70th birthday of their late leader Kim Jong-il.
• We watched Bahrain police use tear gas to disperse large crowds marching towards a historic landmark.
• We monitored the progress of Madagascar-bound Cyclone Giovanni with the help of a schoolboy reporter named John.
• Finally, we gave into 'Linsanity' as NBA star Jeremy Lin's popularity exploded worldwide after he hit a last-second 3-pointer to win a game for the New York Knicks.

Come back next week to see the news unfold on YouTube.

Olivia Ma, YouTube News and Politics, recently watched "Kobe Bryant, meet Jeremy Lin -- Rough Cuts".

A ‘Next’ step for YouTube nonprofits

Last year we launched YouTube NextUp to accelerate the growth of the next big YouTube stars. Then in October, we announced YouTube Next Chef and YouTube Next Trainer to turbocharge up-and-coming cooking and fitness channels by great YouTube video creators. We’re excited to share the latest addition to the Next Creator family of programs: YouTube Next Cause for nonprofits.

YouTube Next Cause is designed to help organizations that are already changing the world better use online video to drive action. At a one-day summit in San Francisco on April 2, selected participants will get access to everything from training in YouTube fundamentals, to promotion and community engagement tips, to one-on-one consulting sessions to grow their YouTube presence.

We’ve always sought to make YouTube a platform for nonprofits to broadcast their messages. And we’ve seen amazing things happen when the YouTube community comes together in support of great causes. With 4 billion views a day, we want to make sure nonprofits have the tools they need to reach the global audience on YouTube and turn video views into donations, volunteerism and awareness.

Applications for YouTube Next Cause are due on February 27, 2012 at 11:59PM PT, and the selected nonprofits will be announced on March 5. This program is open to organizations that are part of the YouTube Nonprofit Program (full eligibility requirements). You can apply online at: http://goo.gl/ODbI6.

Check out what nonprofits are doing on YouTube at youtube.com/nonprofits. And tune in around March 5 to learn more about some of the great nonprofit organizations chosen and what they’re doing to change the world!

 

Hunter Walk, director of product management, recently watched “Using YouTube with a Purpose - Helping Kids in Bangladesh.”