YouTube’s big news week
Plus: TikTok wants to be in the subscription business
Good morning.
Let’s get right to it today.
Last week, several stories ran that covered a few new product announcements from YouTube. Because YouTube has quietly come to dominate streaming, I always find these stories interesting.
The Hollywood Reporter covered the design changes YouTube is making to its connected TV (CTV) app.
Those changes include the ability for creators to better curate their videos into series and seasons so that they can mimic the “traditional” streaming platforms, a new “immersive” preview video on a creator page (think Netflix autoplay), and easier subscribe functionality from your connected TV remote.
Meanwhile, The Verge covered the updates YouTube is making that allow creators to set up Communities around their videos.
As I understand it, this means that you can allow people who are subscribed to your channel to post their own content and also more directly interact with other people who are fans of your work. As The Verge piece points out, this is going to open up a lot of content moderation work.
On this latter point, as I’ve covered before, everyone is in a race to figure out “community.” Substack has their Chat feature (which is the best form of “community” building I’ve seen), Reddit is Reddit, Instagram has put more focus on Broadcast channels, the New York Times is investing in comment engagement, and Puck is starting their Conversations offering. This is just YouTube figuring out their own way into the game. Everyone wants people to spend more time on their surfaces watching things and talking to people.
In terms of the design changes: YouTube is the main competitor to Netflix in the current stage of the streaming wars. Why wouldn’t they start to make their product look similar to what people expect from a streaming platform?
Especially when so many people are watching YouTube in the same setting that they’re watching Netflix—on their couch.
One creator quote
“TikTok’s Subscription offering is its answer to Patreon, a creator platform that allows people to share exclusive content with paying subscribers. TikTok’s feature also competes with Instagram Subscriptions and YouTube’s channel memberships, both of which allow creators to grow their earnings by giving users access to additional content and perks.”
This one is from a TechCrunch news hit about the launch of TikTok’s new “Subscription Expansion.” That means that not only is almost every single person on Substack in the subscription marketplace, but soon the people on TikTok will be too. We’ll see, though. Instagram has been trying to figure these features out for a long time and it hasn’t gone anywhere (at least as far as I can tell). But maybe TikTok will do better.
More links for creators and non-creators alike
Engadget covered Substack’s live video rollout. I’m probably too naive and lazy to think about what this means but people on Substack are already mad about this latest move Substack is making toward being a passive entertainment platform. I dunno, I feel like live video doesn’t really work outside of China.
This piece about how Forbes Marketplace perfected “parasite SEO” is a must-read. Google isn’t going away but the Google Game is increasingly worth less time.
Casey Newton wrote about what he learned after moving Platformer off Substack and over to Ghost.
The guys at People vs. Algorithms had a meandering conversation that at one point touched on the future of the article page and also how to better segment your audience by interest to create more advertising space surface as audience scale decreases. These guys are smart and it was a good discussion but none of these ideas are really that new. I’d like to hear them talk about how these ideas come up in meetings all the time but that the time and resources needed by Product and Data teams to do this kind of complex work is limited.
This AdWeek story from Mark Stenberg about the rise and fall and current state of Food52 was a big conversation topic in my neck of the woods last week.
I found this Variety breakdown of the most watched shows that Netflix is syndicating from other companies to be very interesting.
I’m light on actual media links this week (not covering Olivia Nuzzi stuff) so here are some general good reads: