At the ‘Made on YouTube’ 2024 event, YouTube rolled out a series of new updates aimed at empowering creators and enhancing their content creation process. One such feature is the new YouTube Hype, introduced to help smaller creators grow their audience.
With YouTube Hype, creators no longer rely solely on the recommendation algorithm, search results, or collaborations to attract more viewers. Viewers can also directly support their favourite creators and promote their videos to wider audiences.
Besides YouTube Hype, YouTube announcements ranged from advanced AI tools to features designed to promote smaller creators, signalling YouTube’s commitment to fostering creativity, community, and growth for creators of all sizes.
What Is YouTube Hype?
To summarise, the YouTube Hype feature allows viewers to promote a video by clicking a new “Hype” button, which will be placed next to the existing “Like” button on videos. This feature is exclusively available for creators with fewer than 500,000 subscribers. As more viewers hype a video, it climbs up a leaderboard of the top 100 hyped videos for that week in a specific country. The idea is to highlight new and up-and-coming creators by amplifying their content to a larger audience.
However, to prevent the feature from being abused, Viewers will be limited to three “hypes” per week. Fortunately, YouTube plans to allow fans to purchase additional hype soon, creating a new revenue stream for creators. Though YouTube hasn’t shared how much it will take from these transactions, it’s likely to follow the 70/30 revenue split used for other fan purchases like Super Thanks.
For context, for every hype a creator receives, they earn points, contributing to their ranking on the weekly leaderboard. To ensure smaller creators have a fair chance, YouTube will add a “small creator bonus,” which multiplies the points earned for creators with fewer subscribers. This mechanism prevents larger channels from monopolising the leaderboard. The most-hyped videos will also receive a special badge to signify their popularity within the community.
YouTube Hype’s Tested Success
At the event, YouTube revealed that its YouTube hype feature has already been tested in Turkey, Taiwan, and Brazil, where over 5 million hypes were made across more than 50,000 channels in just four weeks. The largest number of users participating in the beta tests were 18 to 24-year-olds, who made up more than 30% of all beta users.
Bangaly Kaba, YouTube’s Director of Product Management, explained that the Hype feature stems from a desire to give fans a more active role in a creator’s success. “Some of the research told us that viewers want to influence the creative process. They want to contribute to the conversation and help their favourite creators get discovered.”
Listed are the benefits creators will receive from the YouTube Hype feature:
- Increased Visibility: Climbing the leaderboard means potentially reaching a much wider audience, as videos rise to the top based on fan engagement.
- Engagement and Feedback: Hype lets creators see which videos resonate most with their audience, fostering deeper interaction.
- Monetary Bonus: As videos are hyped, creators receive an automatic monetary bonus, with plans to allow fans to purchase extra hypes.
Other Notable Features Announced at Made on YouTube 2024
Google Veo
Other than YouTube Hype, one of the standout announcements was the integration of Google’s Veo AI video generation tool into YouTube Shorts. The feature enables creators to generate dynamic backgrounds and standalone six-second video clips for their Shorts. As YouTube described it:
“Imagine a BookTuber stepping into the pages of The Secret Garden, or a fashion designer instantly visualising imaginative design concepts to share with their audience.”
This tool provides creators with the ability to either stitch existing footage together or create entirely new short clips using AI, adding a new dimension of creativity to YouTube Shorts. While short at only six seconds, these clips are expected to introduce unique and visually appealing content.
This move aligns with the broader trend in the social media space, where platforms like Snapchat, Meta, and TikTok are developing their own generative AI video tools. However, YouTube’s implementation could bring these innovations to a larger audience of creators, offering a mix of realism and creativity for a wider variety of content.
Inspiration and Communities
YouTube also introduced updates to its “Inspiration” Tab in YouTube Studio, incorporating AI to provide content ideas and concepts based on your channel’s niche. This feature, originally introduced as the “Research” tab, helps creators:
- Get Video Concepts: The AI analyses your content and provides tailored suggestions for video topics and creative directions.
- Generate Ideas Based on Queries: Input a query, and the AI will return personalised inspiration to kickstart your creative process.
This tool is an exciting development for creators looking for fresh ideas and guidance, making it easier to maintain a consistent content output.
Furthermore, YouTube is expanding access to Channel Communities, a feature that allows creators to build more direct connections with their fans. Communities provide a space for:
- Text Updates and Posts: Creators can share non-video content, such as text posts, images, or polls, which helps keep audiences engaged between video releases.
- Fan Interaction: Fans can also share content, fostering deeper interaction between creators and viewers.
The feature strengthens the relationship between creators and their audience and will roll out more broadly in early 2025. It’s designed to help creators understand their fanbase and engage with them beyond video content.
Auto-Dubbing and AI-Enhance Comment Replies
In addition, YouTube is testing Auto Dubbing, which uses AI to generate translated audio tracks for videos, making content more accessible to global audiences. For example, instead of manually dubbing or subtitling videos, creators can use this AI tool to streamline the process of creating multilingual content.
Lastly, To improve interaction between creators and their audiences, YouTube is introducing AI-enhanced features for:
- Reply Suggestions: AI will offer comment reply suggestions that match the creator’s communication style, helping them engage more efficiently with their audience.
- Live-Stream Gifts: Expanding on the Super Chat feature, YouTube is introducing new interactive gifts, such as “jewels,” to enhance live-stream interactions and allow viewers to support creators financially.
Closing Thoughts
The updates announced at the Made on YouTube event indicate YouTube’s commitment to supporting creators with innovative tools. AI-powered video generation, community-building features, and tools like YouTube Hype showcase the platform’s focus on empowering smaller creators and fostering direct fan engagement. According to Kristen Stewart, the interaction designer for YouTube Hype: “There’s a signal here: this is the stuff that matters to people, that they want to advocate for.”
With AI at the centre of many of these updates, YouTube is also mindful of balancing technology with human creativity, positioning its AI features as complementary to creator-generated content rather than replacements. The question is how creators and audiences will embrace these changes and leverage the tools to shape the future of content creation on the platform.
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