Here’s What You Need to Know This Week: YouTube Edition
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In the creator space, changes and updates happen constantly. So, we thought we’d help you digest what’s important each week.
Let’s start with YouTube updates.
TLDR
Here are the If-You-Retain-Anything-From-This-Article-Remember-This takeaways:
- You can now include mid-roll ads into your videos as short as eight minutes long. For creators that typically film shorter videos, this is a great chance to increase your revenue.
- Blue badges for emerging creators are helping expose smaller creators to new audiences. Increasing your watch time and posting consistently are tactics to help you get highlighted by YouTube.
- There’s a new monetization metric Revenue per 1,000 views/millieu (RPM) to pay attention to. This is important for creators because it shows how your video performance is driving revenue.
Read on for more details, and let us know what you think! What are you hoping to see next from YouTube or any other creator platform? Comment down below or connect with us on Instagram or Twitter.
The Really Interesting Stuff: Monetization
We’ve talked about memberships before in our article: “How to Make Money as a Creator.” Memberships are a great way to turn casual viewers into more a dedicated audience because you’re able to build a community.
YouTube is testing out its own membership feature in the U.S., India, France, Germany, and Spain for up to three months — starting this week. Viewers will be able to purchase a three or six month channel membership.
The update most creators are excited about: the video length threshold for mid-roll (middle of video) ads has been reduced to eight minutes. Previously, only videos longer than 10 minutes could include a mid-roll ad. This change could increase revenue for some creators who typically film shorter videos.
Blue Badge: Creators on the Rise
YouTube is highlighting emerging creators. “Creators on the Rise” are for non-music creators.
“Artist on the Rise” is for up-and-coming music creators who are putting out new music videos.
“Gaming Creator on the Rise” is for the creators who are gaming on either computer or mobile devices.
Here are the countries where this feature is currently supported:
Artist on the Rise: United States (3 per week)
Creator on the Rise: Canada, France, India, United States (3 per week); Australia, Brazil, Germany, Great Britain, Indonesia, Japan, Latin America, Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam (2 per week); Malaysia, Mexico, Middle East, North Africa, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand (1 per week)
Gaming Creator on the Rise: Japan, United States, (1 per week)
To increase your chances of getting featured with the blue badge, start improving your view count, watch time growth, and frequency of uploads! Check out some of our tips on how to improve your watch time.
Community is KEY 🔑
YouTube’s Community feature is getting a few updates to improve the experience, so creators: don’t sleep on the Community section. It’s a great additional touchpoint to your audience.
This week’s update is with Stories. The “Watch Later” sticker is being replaced with a “Watch Now” sticker, so you can direct your audience straight to a video! Connect with your audience and drive them to your videos in a more casual way.
YouTube Studio & You
There are three changes to be aware of in YouTube Studio:
- Hello Editor (Limited) role. This role will allow someone else to manage your channel without giving them access to revenue data.
- Goodbye Community contributions. “Community contributions allowed viewers to add closed captions, subtitles, and title/descriptions to videos.” Because of its lack of use and potential for spam, it will be discontinued after September 28, 2020.
- Cards make your videos more interactive, and now the experience of adding them is better: “You can now add cards directly from the video details page and while uploading a video in YouTube Studio.”
Last, but Not Least… Analytics
There’s a new monetization metric: Revenue per 1,000 views/millieu (RPM). This shows your revenue from multiple sources like Ads, Channel Memberships, YouTube Premium revenue, Super Chat, and Super Stickers.
Why is this important? CPMs (cost-per-millieu) tells you the price that advertisers are paying for ad views on your videos. RPM, on the other hand, is so much more valuable to you as a creator business because it shows you how your performance is driving money in your pocket.
Diversify your alternative revenue streams (find some ideas in our other article here). And make sure you’re paying attention to what makes you the most money, so you stay focused on generating more income. Find other tools to help make the most use of your income, like Creator Cash! Download it from the App Store or Google Play Store. 😉
Channel pages will display a default channel layout: Uploads, Created playlists, and Subscriptions. Don’t worry, creators are still able to customize their page with up to 10 sections.
That’s all for this week! We can’t wait to see what other updates we’ll see from these platforms. Let us know what you think about these updates or what you’d like to see next from YouTube! Comment down below or connect with us on Instagram or Twitter.
And don’t forget to download Creator Cash in the App Store and the Google Play Store to help you get paid.
