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What's happening on YouTube
A YouTube winner in Google’s top trending searches
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Each year here at
YouTube
, we take a look back at the videos that captured our attention and our imagination during the year. We’ll be releasing the top trending videos of 2012 next week, but today our friends over at Google are taking a look at the year through the eyes of search.
Google’s 12th annual
Zeitgeist Year-In-Review
, a.k.a. a “spirit of the times,” reviews the people, places, and topics that captured the world’s attention this year. YouTube favorite “Gangnam Style” came in as the #2 global trending search term this year, and topped dozens of country’s charts. PSY’s smash hit also left a lasting impression on search, with questions like “How to Gangnam” popping up in Malaysia, and “Gangnam Style costume” coming in as the #4 trending Halloween Costume search in the U.S.
For a quick ride through 2012, check out the Zeitgeist video:
Make sure to check out the
Google Zeitgeist site
to see the hottest trends, people, and topics that were top of mind this year.
Kevin Allocca, YouTube trends manager, recently watched "
Simon's Cat in 'Icecapade'
"
You and Leanback - This Time It’s Personal
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
When we
launched Leanback
in July we wanted to create a simple, easy-to-use YouTube interface for the big screen. Since then we’ve
graduated Leanback out of TestTube
, added the ability to place ads to bring in more partner videos, and launched a
YouTube Remote
that lets you control your YouTube Leanback experience from your Android mobile phone. In our latest iteration, we’re enhancing the video discovery experience in Leanback with a new feature called Personalized Channels.
Personalized Channels is built to tackle one of the big challenges for our users: what should I watch next? It's a bit like having your own personal video delivery butler, serving you relevant videos that reflect what you like, or find interesting. For instance, if you create a ‘fail’ channel, it will start out showing the best fail videos we can find, and then gradually start branching out to pranks, funny commercials and other related topics. It will also adjust itself based on how you interact with the videos shown and get better the more you watch and interact with them.
Here’s how it works. Start by signing in to your YouTube account and go to
YouTube.com/leanback
and select “Create Channels”. We’ll suggest personalized channels to you based on the videos you have watched in the past. To create a new personalized channel, choose from the suggested channels or just type in a topic, like “cooking.”
We’ve put together a short video introduction to Personalized Channels, below, to get you started.
Like all products we launch, we’re eager for you to try it out and then give us suggestions on how we can make it even better. This project is still in its early stages and your participation and feedback will help us improve it (you can let us know your thoughts in
the forum
). Have fun and share with us in the comments below the personalized channels that would reflect you the best.
Christina Ilvento, product manager, recently created a personalized channel around “meerkats”, and Ben Liebald, Software Engineer, recently created a personalized channel on “marathon training”.
Give YouTube Topics on Search a whirl
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
We know that sometimes people come to YouTube looking for a specific video, but at other times, they have only a rough idea of the kind of videos they want. We’ve been there too, and have been thinking for a while about this challenge of searching when you don’t yet know exactly what you’re looking for.
Here’s a glimpse inside how we are approaching this challenge:
In coming up with a solution, we wanted to help you specify your search even if you started with something as vague as “funny”. We also wanted to surface varied sets of videos and make it easy for you to explore them further.
To that end, we have a prototype we’d like you to try out. It’s called “YouTube Topics on Search” and you can get to it from
TestTube
. Here’s a video showing you how it works:
Put simply, we try to identify topics on YouTube and associate videos with them. We use many different sources to find these topics, including frequently used uploader keywords, common search queries, playlist names, and even sources outside of YouTube such as Wikipedia articles.
When you search -- for example, let’s say for “obama” -- we suggest other related topics tied to videos that you might want to explore, such as “michelle obama” or “john mccain.” You can click to get to videos on these topics or you can find videos that contain both topics by clicking on the (+) next to the topic. This is handy for refining. For instance, try searching for “turkey” and you’ll see “thanksgiving” as a refinement option further down the page. We hope topics become a fun way to explore new and interesting corners of YouTube’s video universe.
To start you exploring, we’ve planted topic “
Easter eggs
,” which we challenge you to find. Here are a couple of hints relating to just some of the topics out there:
“Whoa, man. Whoa. Whoa! Oh my God! Oh my God! Woohoo! Oh, wow!” What did this person just see?
They’ve boogied to
Beyonce
,
Brazilian samba
and
Sugar Hill Gang
. Who are they?
For more clues to other topic Easter eggs and for other questions you have, read
this article
in the Help Center.
Give Topics on Search
a test drive
and let us know what you think in the
YouTube forum
.
Palash Nandy, Software Engineer, recently discovered “cheese rolling," and Elizabeth Windram, UX Designer, recently discovered “big wave surfing.”
Release Notes: Seven new languages, four new countries get partner program, and lots more...
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Bits and bobs that’ve gone live since our
last Release Notes
...
YouTube is now available in...:
Arabic, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Slovenian, Ukrainian and Vietnamese!
Four new countries get YouTube Partner Program:
The Partner Program continued its expansion this quarter, with launches in Argentina, Sweden, New Zealand and the Czech Republic. That makes 21 countries in which people can make money from their videos. For more information about partnerships, click
here
.
Crossfades, wipes and slides:
The
video editor
lets you combine and trim your videos right on YouTube.com, without installing any software. Now you can add transitions, like crossfades and wipes, between video clips. Just select the transitions tab in the media picker, drag the transition and drop it between any two videos in the storyboard.
MySpace Autoshare:
Automatically share your YouTube activities on your MySpace account (you can already do this on your Facebook, Twitter, Buzz, Reader and Orkut accounts). To hook this up, go to Account >
ActivitySharing
and click “Connect accounts” next to the MySpace logo.
More filtering for charts:
YouTube Charts
can now be filtered by categories such as Comedy, Gaming and Pets & Animals, in addition to time and popularity "slices." We also show more results (20) per page.
Improved screen reader accessibility for YouTube player:
One of our engineering interns spent part of his summer improving video accessibility for visually impaired people. If you use a screen reader that supports Flash, we hope you'll find it easier to enjoy videos on YouTube now. We've also added some more captioning features to the
YouTube Data API
. You can list tracks, request auto-timing, and download the speech recognition captions for videos that you own.
Shows in France:
If you’re a YouTube viewer in France, now you can watch full-length TV shows, like
BFMTV: Bourdin Direct
and
Britain’s Got Talent
. Check out the page
here
.
HD and CC badges on search results page:
When you search for a video on YouTube, the search results now show HD and CC (Closed Caption) badges, in addition to the NEW, CHANNEL and PLAYLIST badges that already exist. If you click on the badge, it will filter out results that don’t fall under that category.
“Add-to playlist” widget:
The [+] button on video thumbnails in search results now includes a menu that allows you to add the video to any one of your playlists or start a new playlist. Additionally, the "save to" button below the video is being renamed "add to" and will have the same functionality.
Visited video styling on search results and video pages:
Browsers help people remember links they have previously clicked on by giving them a different color, the standard generally being that links are in blue and visited links are in purple. Many sites, including YouTube, opt to make all links blue regardless of visited state to give a more consistent look to the site and better reflect its dynamic nature. However, having a visited state is specifically useful when exhaustively exploring search results or related videos, and so we are launching a new style for thumbnails and links to videos in related and search results: the thumbnail for visited videos is slightly grayed, and the link color has changed. This should help you explore the site deeper without going in circles.
The YouTube Team
Release Notes: processing status, share to Buzz, and more
Friday, July 2, 2010
Before we head into the holiday weekend, wanted to update you on a couple of things that went down in sunny San Bruno recently:
Processing progress status:
Those of you who upload know that there's a short period of time between uploading a video and it being visible on the site. The new processing percentage under the video preview lets you know when your video is ready for the world to see.
AutoShare to Buzz:
Over four million people are already AutoSharing to Facebook, Twitter, Orkut or Google Reader, and now you can automatically share your YouTube likes, favorites, comments, subscriptions and uploads to your Buzz network, too. You can still keep YouTube as a connected site in Buzz if you hooked it up previously, but that only automatically posts your uploads for now. For more about AutoShare, click
here
.
Results badging:
Our search results page has had a light makeover. Instead of bold headers separating channels, videos and playlist results, we've introduced new, compact badges to more clearly indicate the content type, as so:
New captions feature:
The interactive captions viewer allows people to read ahead in the caption stream and jump to a specific segment within a video with captions.
Captions are a key part
of making YouTube accessible to all.
Have a great one!
The YouTube Team
Release notes: five new languages, email alerts, share to Buzz and Blogger
Friday, April 30, 2010
What better way to celebrate the weekend than with these recent adds and enhancements:
Language offering grows:
There are five new languages in which YouTube can be experienced: Greek, Hungarian, Finnish, Danish and Norwegian. Simply scroll to the bottom of any page, find where it says "Language" and click on your current language to access the full menu of options, including our five most recent additions:
Email alerts:
We're experimenting with a new form of subscription alerts. Now, when you subscribe to a channel (or edit your subscription to an existing channel), you can elect to receive an email the instant the person you're subscribed to uploads a new video. This will appeal to people who check their email more frequently than they log in to YouTube (though we've never heard of such people *wink*) but who also want to know immediately when their favorite content creators upload new work.
Refreshed look for search results page:
When you do a search, you'll see we tightened up the typography on the results page. We're using a consistent size and color to establish the basic look, and then we're adding a bit of color and bolding to bring more prominence to certain elements, such as view count.
New sharing options:
Click the "share" button underneath any video and you'll see two new platforms to effortlessly share videos to: Google Buzz and Blogger. Try it!
New upload interface:
When you click on the
Upload
button, you may notice that things look a little different. As with our
redesigned video page
and as part of our larger
"spring cleaning" effort
, a main goal was to streamline the look and functionality of the upload page. We toned down some of the colors and moved the Webcam option to a more prominent position next to the upload button. We also made it easier to find information about how to upload directly from your mobile phone.
Player changes:
As
many
of
you
have
noticed
, the video player is transforming, too. We've just fully released a new player design for all videos without ads. The goal is for the player to be as subtle as possible so that the video itself shines and doesn't have to compete with the stuff around it. We'll be following this roll-out with player upgrades for videos with ads and then for embedded videos.
Improvements to YouTube-on-iPad:
There's a great native YouTube app on the iPad, but we've also made some changes to how the YouTube website functions on the device. Among the improvements: we created a grid layout for the home screen, search results and other video lists, and devised a new layout for the video page, with the video playing right in the page.
The YouTube Team
What You Watched and Searched for on YouTube in 2009
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
This year has been the biggest yet for online video, and for the first time we're sharing our official Most Watched lists and some of the fastest-rising search terms on YouTube. Some moments were big (President Obama's inauguration), some small (a Minnesota wedding party erupts into dance), some expected ("New Moon"), some surprising (Susan Boyle) — but all of them inspired, entertained and connected millions of people around the world via YouTube.
For these lists, we looked at view counts of YouTube's most popular videos this year (in some instances we aggregated views across multiple versions of the same video):
Most Watched YouTube videos (Global):
1.
Susan Boyle - Britain's Got Talent
(120+ million views)
2.
David After Dentist
(37+ million views)
3.
JK Wedding Entrance Dance
(33+ million views)
4.
New Moon Movie Trailer
(31+ million views)
5.
Evian Roller Babies
(27+ million views)
Most Watched music videos on YouTube (Global)*:
1.
Pitbull "I Know You Want Me"
(82+ million views)
2.
Miley Cyrus "The Climb"
(64+ million views)
3.
Miley Cyrus "Party in the U.S.A."
(54+ million views)
4.
The Lonely Island "I'm On a Boat"
(48+ million views)
5.
Keri Hilson "Knock You Down
" (35+ million views)
Then, to determine the fastest rising search terms for each month, we examined the billions of queries that people searched for on YouTube (through December 15):
Fastest Rising YouTube search terms by month (Global):
January:
inauguration
February:
christian bale
March:
the climb
April:
susan boyle
May:
pacquiao vs hatton
June:
michael jackson thriller
July:
michael jackson
August:
usain bolt
September:
kanye west
October:
paranormal activity
November:
bad romance
December:
tiger woods
Fastest Rising YouTube search terms by month (U.S.):
January
: obama inauguration
February:
on a boat
March:
watchmen
April:
susan boyle
May:
pacquiao
June:
michael jackson thriller
July:
wedding
August:
send it on
September:
kanye west
October:
paranormal activity
November:
adam lambert
December:
tiger woods
There are a lot of interesting nuggets in here. The fastest rising U.S. search term in July was [wedding], clearly related to "
JK Wedding Entrance Dance
," the third Most Watched YouTube video of the year. And while [michael jackson] was
Google's
fastest rising search term in 2009, [michael jackson thriller] was the faster rising search on YouTube. Movie trailers ("New Moon," "Watchmen," "Paranormal Activity") and inspirational moments (Susan Boyle, Usain Bolt) were popular, as were sensational celebrity scandals (Christian Bale, Kanye West and, most recently, Tiger Woods).
We hope to expand these lists in the future, so if there are any "Most Watched" categories you'd like to see in 2010, let us know by leaving a comment below.
Jamie Davidson, Associate Product Manager, recently watched
"Top 10 quirky science tricks for Christmas parties."
*
Note: Some music videos may be unavailable in your country due to copyright restrictions.
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