YouTube’s looking to improve its channel display options to help creators maximize engagement, with a range of new sorting and categorization tools on the way to help channel visitors find more relevant content and info in-stream.
First off, YouTube’s adding a new shelf of personalized 'For you' recommendations for channel visitors, based on their viewing history.
As explained by YouTube:
“We’re building a section that will recommend content from your channel for each individual viewer. It will be personalized based on the videos they've already watched, their topic affinity, and so on. Personalization will be especially effective if your channel has multiple topics languages or content formats.”
That’ll ensure that each channel visitor gets a more customized display of your content aligned with what they are more likely to be interested in.
Channel managers will also be able to exclude content types, and set parameters around what gets displayed, if they choose.
It could be a more effective way to maximize engagement, by guiding users to the videos of yours that they haven’t seen, as opposed to leaving them to sort through the entire list themselves.
YouTube’s also bringing back ‘Sort by oldest’ as a channel filter, which it removed last year as a result of adding separate filters for Shorts and Live Streams.
With the separate content filters, ‘Sort by Oldest’ could no longer be supported, but now YouTube has re-built the system to provide this as a search option once again.
YouTube’s also looking to simplify its channel display, by hiding tabs where no content is present, or the information is accessible in another element.
“This year we will be hiding tabs if they are empty, like Playlists. They will automatically appear once you have content. We’re also removing tabs that are no longer needed. An example is the About tab. The information on the About tab will still be there, reachable through the channel description.”
The idea is that this will de-clutter Channel page display, while also making room for future additions.
On that front, YouTube’s also previewed some coming additions to your Channel display options, including a ‘Courses’ tab for channels that have courses enabled, a ‘Releases’ tab for musicians to showcase their latest tracks and albums, and the capacity to include links in your header overview.
YouTube also recently added a ‘Podcasts’ tab for channels with podcast content, providing more ways for visitors to filter and search for related content from your home presence.
These are handy updates, which could help drive improved discovery and interaction, by streamlining the process, and simplifying the channel display. They may not be game-changers, but they could cumulatively have a significant impact on performance.
