Official Blog
What's happening on YouTube
Subscribe, vote and win! Over 50 top music artists participate in MyYouTube Contest
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Are you Rihanna’s biggest fan? Do you just love Justin Bieber? Well now’s your chance to show these artists just how devoted you really are. The MyYouTube contest launches today and the participating music artists need your help to win.
Over the next two months, the music artists will compete to score the most points on the MyYouTube Channel. But they only score points when YOU subscribe to their channels and share with your friends.
So what’s in it for you?
By subscribing to your favorite artists’ channels, you’ll get their latest videos delivered straight to your YouTube homepage. It’s a quick and easy way for you to stay up-to-date on their music videos and behind-the-scenes news.
On the MyYouTube Channel, you can flip through all the participating artist profiles, watch their exclusive videos, and even find out what YouTube channels they, themselves, like to watch.
And did we mention all the prizes?
Every artist is giving out five prizes to users who score points for them in the contest. That’s over 250 prizes, ranging from t-shirts and CD’s to fully-loaded ipod shuffles and concert tickets.
How to score points:
You can earn an artist up to 7 points by doing the following from the
MyYouTube Channel
:
Subscribe to the artist’s YouTube channel. (1 point)
Subscribe to any of the artist’s four recommended channels. (1 point for each recommended channel)
Share to your Facebook and/or Twitter accounts. (1 point each)
You can view the points you have scored for an artist, as well as that artist’s total points to date, next to the artist’s thumbnail on the left side of the page.
These artists can’t win without your help, so head on over to
youtube.com/myyoutube
and start subscribing now!
Becky Chappell, YouTube Product Marketing, recently watched “
YouTube Subscriptions
.”
1 billion subscriptions and counting
Thursday, October 28, 2010
UPDATE 7/29/13
: We've released a new version of this widget that replaces the ones described below. You can read about it
here
or dive into the technical details
here
.
Early on (we're talking '06 here, people!), the yellow subscribe button made its debut so the latest videos from your favorite channels could make a beeline to your YouTube homepage/eager eyes. Today, the button that’s been
immortalized as a throw cushion
hits an important landmark: it’s been clicked over one billion times. And who was the lucky channel to get that billionth hit? It was
MachinimaSports
, who are, not coincidentally, on our homepage on Friday.
In fact, there is so much subscription activity that over a billion subscription updates are sent to our users' homepages every week, and 15 YouTube channels have crossed the one million subscriber mark:
fred
,
nigahiga
,
kassemg
,
shanedawsonTV
,
shanedawsonTV2
,
smosh
,
universalmusicgroup
,
machinima
,
sxephil
,
mysteryguitarman
,
davedays
,
kevjumba
,
realannoyingorange
,
raywilliamjohnson
,
collegehumor
and
failblog
.
So what’s next for subscriptions? Turns out, we’ve got a spankin’ new widget that any video-maker can embed on his/her website or blog. It lets people subscribe to your YouTube channel with a single click, without having to leave your site to log into YouTube or to confirm their subscription. The entire process happens in the widget.
Give it a try! All you need to do is embed the code below into the source code of your website or blog, in the same way you embed a YouTube video.
Update: See the latest documentation
here
.
And if all this is new to you, let us suggest you check out this video, in which dear Cuddles tells you all you need to know about subscriptions:
Georges Haddad, Product Marketing Manager, recently watched “
Annoying Orange: The Exploding Orange
.”
Message your subscribers with bulletins
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Bulletins
are a great way to communicate with your subscribers on YouTube. Just go to your channel, type an update, paste a video link, and click "Post Bulletin." Your bulletin will show up on your subscribers' homepage, in their Recent Activity feed.
Think of the possibilities: Want to tell your subscribers about a new musician you just discovered on YouTube? Send a bulletin that describes her music and attach her latest video. Or maybe you just watched a vlog you really liked and want to send it out to your subscribers with a note. You can even send a video link to your other YouTube channel to let your subscribers know about it. Bulletins allow you to put context around any video or simply send your subscribers a written note.
You can send bulletins from the new “Post Bulletins” form on your channel. As you type the update to your subscribers, you’ll see a preview of the bulletin appear to the right of the text field:
After you click "Post Bulletin," subscribers will see your messages in their Recent Activity feed:
If you send a link to one of your own videos, you can see the impact your bulletins have in
Insight
, our analytics tool. Go to the video, then to “Discovery=>YouTube subscription modules=>Subscriber bulletins” to see how many people clicked the video links in bulletins you sent.
Josh Ross, Product Manager, recently watched “
The Muppets: Beaker's Ballad
.”
Release notes: Facebook Connect, real-time sharing, subscriber stats
Saturday, March 27, 2010
In addition to some changes to our new video
page
, which we reported in a separate post, here are some things that have launched recently:
Invitation to Facebook Connect:
You've been able to
connect
your YouTube account to your Facebook account for a while now in order to
AutoShare
or to find friends to subscribe to. Less known is that the YouTube homepage can show you the YouTube videos your friends are sharing on Facebook; we've kept this under the radar while we've ramped up support. But now, when you log in to your YouTube account, you'll get a prominent invitation in the Recent Activity module (see below) to connect to Facebook, which we highly recommend that you do. In fact, we hope to integrate more social networks with YouTube going forward: knowing which videos your friends are sharing on social platforms is one of the best ways to discover those clips that you, in turn, just might feel compelled to pass along. That's how we found this
gem
, a lovely virtual choir.
Real-time sharing:
AutoShare lets you effortlessly share videos from YouTube to Twitter, Facebook or Google Reader. What you might not have known is that until recently, it took about 10 minutes for those items to get pushed out from YouTube to these platforms. Now these actions happen instantly, in real time.
Partner Program expands again:
Exciting! Users in Israel and
Mexico
can now become members of the YouTube Partner Program (YPP). To sign up, click
here
.
Subscribers tab in Insight:
The number of subscribers you have is an important metric for many YouTube users, as it indicates how many people love your videos
so much
that they want to be sure never to miss one. (Speaking of which, we commend
Nigahiga
, who recently hit
2 million subscribers
to become YouTube's No. 1 most subscribed channel of all time. But, we digress.) Insight, YouTube's analytics tool, recently added data about the evolution of your subscriber numbers over time, broken down into new subscriptions and unsubscriptions per day. Head over to your account's
Insight area
to check it out.
Planning our April Fool's Day joke:
What joke? :) We just wanted to see if you were reading this far.
The YouTube Team
YouTube 101: Educational Series for New Users Launches
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
If you subscribe to the
YouTube channel
, you may have noticed a slew of new videos uploaded recently. They're part of an initiative called "YouTube 101," a series that explains basic features to new users. With hundreds of thousands of people creating new YouTube channels every day, there are a lot of folks out there who may not know that they can
share a video privately
,
customize their channel
or even
how to upload a video
-- in
full HD
, no less.
Each video has a unique flavor and you may even recognize some familiar faces helping us out (
Happy Tree Friends
, anyone?):
These tutorials will be embedded in our
Help Center
, the
Creator's Corner
, and other places where you're most likely to need quick, entertaining tutorials on how to use YouTube.
Let us know what you think in the comments below, particularly if there's a feature you find mysterious and think deserves the 101 treatment.
Mia Quagliarello, Community Manager, recently watched "
A Pluto Song
."
Release Notes: Subscription News, Product Ideas Page, youtu.be Links for One-Off Sharing...
Friday, January 15, 2010
Happy new year! Our holiday "less-atorium" is long over -- we put a freeze on all but essential site pushes during Christmas and New Year -- and we're back in the business of enhancing the site and launching new features. There's lots in store for 2010, including these things which went live this week:
More subscription news:
Last week, we made
multiple subscription-related announcements
and we have another to add to the list: now, shortly after you subscribe to someone, their older videos will start showing up in your subscriptions feed. (Previously, you had to wait until they started uploading videos after you subscribed to them.) Conversely, when you unsubscribe from a channel, the person's videos will promptly disappear from your subscription feed, making more room for the clips you actually want to watch.
Product Ideas for YouTube:
A YouTube mantra is "launch and iterate." What this means is that we push out new features, see how the marketplace (you!) responds to them, and then make adjustments as necessary. None of this would be possible without your feedback, which we gather from how you use the site as well as from what you say in places like this blog, the forums, and Twitter. In order to help streamline the feedback-gathering process a bit (if that's possible!), we just launched a
"Product Ideas" page
where you can share your thoughts about how to make the site better and vote on ideas others have had. Right now, we're especially interested in learning what you think should be removed from the site in our fit of
pre-spring cleaning
. Click
here
to participate.
youtu.be links for one-off sharing:
We
announced youtu.be links
before the holidays, and people who've connected their YouTube account to their Twitter, Facebook or other social media profiles via Autoshare have already been disseminating these shortened links around the Web. What is new is that now, any video distributed using the "Share to Twitter" link on the playback page will contain this shortened link. Here's what it looks like when syndicated to Twitter:
YouTube Partner Program opens to users in the Netherlands and Italy:
Our partnership program, which recently
celebrated its second birthday
, just launched in the Netherlands and Italy, so if you are a talented videomaker living in those countries, we encourage you to apply to become a partner and turn your hobby into a full-fledged career. Click
here
for more info.
The YouTube Team
Subscriptions Enhanced With Bulletins, Progress Bar & Ability to Remove Videos
Friday, January 8, 2010
The subscription system delivers videos from content creators to eager viewers and has become such an essential part of YouTube that that "subscribe" button is clicked over 1 million times every day. That's a lot -- which is why we're especially focused on improving the reliability, usefulness and transparency of subscriptions.
First off, you've told us that you want ways to message your subscribers. Now, the bulletins you write on your channel will appear on your subscribers' homepages, in their "Recent Activity" module. If you go to your channel -- let's say it's
celebrityplaylists
-- you should see an area to write a bulletin and attach a video:
...which looks like this when your subscribers see it in their homepage feed:
Note that these bulletins will only show up for people who subscribed to you after September 2009. If you subscribed to someone before September and want to receive their bulletins, simply visit their channel, click the "Edit subscription" link, and choose "Subscribe to all videos uploaded, rated, favorited, and commented on."
We've also heard from many of you that after you upload a video, you'd like to feel more confident that it's actually made its way to your subscribers' homepages. Recently, we rolled out a new indicator that shows the syndication status of your video after it's been uploaded; once it reaches 100% you can rest assured that all your subscribers have received your video. Here's an example of what this looks like:
Please keep in mind that after your upload finishes processing, it starts getting sent out to the
people subscribed to you, though it can take up to an hour to reach everyone. (In rare cases, it might take longer than an hour.) This short delay helps us fight spam and preserve the overall integrity of the system.
Finally, you can now delete individual items from your subscription feed. Click "edit" options for the subscriptions module and check "Exclude videos I've already watched" (see below). Once you've done this, hover over videos in the module to see a small "x" that will allow you to remove it from the module, making way for more videos from the people you follow.
We'd love to read comments below about other subscription system improvements you'd like to see.
Brian Glick, Product Manager, recently subscribed to
73368's channel.
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