YouTube Expands Access to Audience Behavior Insights, Adds New Creative Tools for Community Posts

Good news for YouTube creators, with the platform throwing smaller channels a bone, by expanding access to its ‘Other Videos Your Audience Watched’ data.

As it sounds, ‘Other Videos Your Audience Watched’, which YouTube first launched in 2020, provides insight into the viewing habits of your audience, by showing you a listing of the videos that they watched in addition to your content over the previous seven-day period. That could help to identify key trends, and hone your strategy around rising interests.

Up till now, the feature has only been available to channels that met certain traffic thresholds, but now, YouTube is lowering those parameters to give more creators access to the data.

As explained by YouTube:

“We’ve talked to creators and we’ve heard that it can be frustrating when some YouTube analytics features are unavailable due to insufficient data, and we’re happy to announce that we’re bringing the ‘Other videos your audience watched’ feature to more creators who may not have hit previous data thresholds.”

It’s a handy measure of broader trends, which could better inform your strategy.

In addition to this, YouTube’s also looking to bring filtering by content type – Shorts, VOD or Live – to this feature as well. So, for those of you creating Shorts content in a specific niche, you may soon have more directly accessible insight into key trends in your category.

On another front, YouTube’s also testing some new elements for community posts, including text filters and stickers for your channel updates.

Which makes it look a lot like every other posting option in every other social app – which makes sense, given that such elements lead to habitual behaviors and expectations from users about how they communicate their ideas and updates.

But there may also be some unique elements in there to try out with your subscribers, including colorful, YouTube-specific stickers which point to key features.

YouTube says that a group of randomly selected creators who have access to the ‘Community’ tab are now able to test these new tools on Android, with iOS coming soon.

Finally, YouTube’s also adding another way to boost Shorts engagement, with a new chip in the mobile app that will enable users to search within Shorts clips only.

As you can see here, the new ‘Shorts’ chip in YouTube Search, which is now available on iOS and Android, will enable users to narrow down their search to Shorts specifically. And with 75% of YouTube users now engaging with Shorts, that could be a popular option for those searching for specific DIY or product clips, or just for that one clip that they want to show their friends, but can’t recall the account name.

Really, Shorts creators are probably the biggest beneficiaries of these new updates, with the added trend insight and search capacity providing new ways to utilize Shorts in your process.

And again, with short-form video being the trend of the moment, it should be a consideration for all YouTube creators – maybe not as the key focus, but as a supplemental channel to promote your main YouTube presence.