New YouTube Features for Viral Shorts — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:01] it easier than ever before for you to go viral on YouTube, especially if you're a small channel that's been struggling recently. In fact, I just helped this creator go viral, this creator go viral, and this creator go viral, and all they

[00:14] to share with you in this video because YouTube silently released all these advantage of them, it's why you're not getting the views you want. Change number one is YouTube finally released the ability for you to be able to add

[00:27] you need to make sure that you're doing this because the more people that click correlated with what kind of thumbnail you have, the more views you're going to get. Let me explain. So, before I show you how to actually change or how to add

[00:39] wanted to show you why this is so important. I just loaded up my YouTube home page for the first time today, and we could see this right here is an ad. We have two videos right here, and then if we scroll down, we get tons of

[00:52] different Shorts. And guess what? If these Shorts have a good thumbnail, this one right here. I bet that this video has gotten a ton of views, and we could see, yep, 2.6 million views because this says right here, Jadakiss

[01:05] exposes what really happened with 50 Cent. Guess what? That's going to crush it. This right here, Drake featuring Lil Baby wants and needs and some random girl here. Again, these types of things actually get people's attention. Or like

[01:19] turned 20K into 2 million, then it's just a random picture of him. The people that actually go through and add custom thumbnails here are going to be the we can see, just from these right here, the first two I pointed out are the ones

[01:33] that actually have gone viral of this bunch. I'm telling you, it's because of add one of these thumbnails, what you want to do is you want to come over here into your YouTube Shorts. You want to click on this little pencil icon, and if

[01:45] to see that we can actually click on this, and we can either one upload a custom YouTube Short by adding the file, or we could click on reselect right here, which actually gives us a bunch of different frames from the video that we

[01:58] if you want to make a really good custom thumbnail, I would make sure that you're doing two things. One, you want to do what this video right here did, which is add text on here and then also actually have the subject, ideally a famous

[02:12] person, a famous brand, a famous thing, or a popular thing inside of the thumbnail, or you want to do what I do in most of my thumbnails. For example, we come over here and we type in something like YouTube settings, then we

[02:24] come under shorts. to show you that actually my thumbnail is the number one million views right here. And the reason that this works is it says turn on these settings to grow faster with a finger pointing. What that does is invokes

[02:37] we look at the other thumbnail under here, it's doing pretty good. This one's basically the same exact thing except they're using that red box. So, you want to invoke curiosity or have a super famous person, thing, or subject. Change

[02:52] number two is they've released a brand new claims feature. And for 99% of you, because whenever I look at your guys' channels, a lot of you are violating YouTube's rules and silently getting claims and having no ideas. But now this

[03:04] new feature can prevent that. Now, that new claims feature that I'm talking left-hand side right here. So, the same thing. You're going to click on that pencil icon. You're going to be able to pull this up directly for one individual

[03:16] and click on claims right here. And what this is going to allow us to see is So, we could see what has happened right here. Nothing has impacted me. So, this will tell you whether or not this video is impacting your channel in a negative

[03:29] it's impacting the video's reach and it will show you whether or not it's impacting earnings. In addition to that, the other thing that you could actually do is if we come out here into these filters right here, we can actually

[03:41] right here and we could go through and actually filter by this. I personally have never had one of these claims happen, but if you have something that's affecting your channel, that's affecting your videos reach, or that's affecting

[03:54] And I would strongly suggest that you go through and actually look at this. In when we're just on channel content, if we come over here and do content through and this will show a bunch of things. For example, who is stealing

[04:08] of people stealing my content, but I thousands of views on my content, so I'm going to let that rock. In addition to right here, which allows you to start protecting how you appear in videos. So,

[04:22] if you want to be able to review content where your likeness may be altered or started with this and I would strongly suggest that you do this if you're one of these people that's going to actually be, like, "Hey, I don't want other

[04:35] people to make my content." Me personally, I take the mindset of, "Hey, want to promote me, I'll let them. I don't really care." But I understand if you're not one of those people, but I would show you this before you make that

[04:48] decision. actually come over here and look at my remix count right here, we could see I've had 2,200 people basically remix my content or use my likeness and it's gotten me an extra 600,000 views. So, before you decide,

[05:01] might want to re-evaluate that just based off of this. I got 600,000 extra views literally for doing no work at all. Change number three is you need to make sure that you're using AI the right way so that it can actually go through

[05:15] your entire channel and suggest to you all the changes that you should make and the future content that you should be making. And this literally takes seconds that I love to do this is actually by using vidIQ because we could see right

[05:28] here that if I come over into my feed, vidIQ is literally feeding me things "Hey, you should change this thumbnail." We could click on apply and boom, it'll should change this title right here." Here are a bunch of comments that you

[05:42] should answer. Here are outliers in your trending. Here's another enhanced thumbnail, and what's pretty cool is we on optimize right here. Whether you want to do this for long-form or for shorts,

[05:56] optimize all of your content. Like this one right here, they don't like the click on this. This will then analyze the video. This is then going to suggest a bunch of different and new titles that we could use. In addition to that, it

[06:09] will actually allow us to change our SEO and improve it by offering us a better description, better tags. And if we actually come over here and review, this us feedback. It'll tell us what we should change about the hook, what we

[06:23] pacing, what we should change about the B-roll and the editing. And this is incredible, because this allows you to literally go through and optimize every In addition to that, when you're trying to create new content, you could come

[06:36] shorts if you're uploading shorts content, and we could find outlier videos. For example, maybe we're going to be uploading about ChatGPT, simply just type in ChatGPT. This will then show us all of the outlier videos for

[06:49] so that we know what we should actually to make something about the TikTok algorithm, we could come in here and everything that's trending for every topic on YouTube. In addition to that,

[07:04] we could actually search by long-form content right here. We could search by channels that post about this type of stuff. This tool is a must-have if you're trying to do research on what you should be posting about, or you're

[07:17] Whether it's optimizing your old content or researching for new content, I only use vidIQ in order to do this, because it gives you access to unfair analytics And the best part about vidIQ is you

[07:32] get started with it today for only $1. This tool is an absolute no-brainer. If are, and that's why they're growing faster than you. In fact, I would have never gained over 900,000 subscribers on this channel and almost 100,000

[07:45] subscribers on this channel had I not used vidIQ or found it earlier. So, I pinned comment below, get started with it today for only $1. You won't see this pricing anywhere else, literally only at that link. The change in my four is

[07:58] new analytics that you need to make sure you're paying attention to. And these are completely different and you're only going to find them inside of advanced talking about, the way that you're actually going to find them is you're

[08:10] From here, you're going to want to scroll down a little bit and we're going to be see able to see see more under key moments for audience right here. If we actually click into this, this now allows you to go through and filter this

[08:23] we could look at this based off of how people found our content like new or returning users and we could see that new users watch this piece of video less before. But basically, what you should be aiming to do is new viewers, you want

[08:39] returning viewers because what that means is that nobody needs to actually need to know who you are, the performance is going to be the same. You not subscribers. We could see right here, subscribers watch this content way

[08:54] more than non-subscribers. So, this is something that I would want to work on. In addition to that, under type, we can actually change this based on detailed activity so we could see exactly where people are actually dropping off. In

[09:06] addition to that, we could compare this to our other content In addition to audience retention right here. What I would strongly suggest that you do is for every single video that you upload on YouTube, you should be going through

[09:18] different segments. We could see that there are three under here and there are you're going through and you're looking at these because this is going to allow you to get more detailed insights into

[09:30] because if we come back over here, literally the only metrics YouTube cares to be these metrics right here. And guess what? All those things under see more actually allow you to go even deeper into what's affecting these

[09:43] you're doing right, what you're doing wrong, what you need to fix, and then just simply focus on fixing that for your next video, and boom, it's going to viral. Then that final change is they released brand new audience metrics that

[09:56] attention to. In fact, you could help use AI to actually say, "Hey, what does a great job of this. Check this out. Now, those features that I'm found under here, because what we can actually see right here is which videos

[10:12] actually see what's working right here. And what we could do is actually take a screenshot of this right here. Then we could upload this into ChatGPT, and we could say something like, "Based on this, can you let me know what is

[10:27] working best for growing my subscribers?" And then what this will actually do is analyze this photo, it's going to inspect the screenshot, and it says, "This is one of the most valuable subscriber growth reports inside of

[10:39] and actually highlights this by video theme and all the different takeaways. For example, weekly update videos are my number one subscriber engine, updates outperform agents, ChatGPT and Gemini are carrying my channel, broad news

[10:53] beats niche tutorials, and then what it would actually double down on right that you need to pay attention to. You could also see what's popular with could actually do is take a screenshot

[11:06] this, and we could take a screenshot of this in order to see what the overlap is or what we might want to ignore. And then what we can actually do is upload all three of these screenshots here and say we want to focus on new / returning

[11:22] say we want to focus on new / returning viewers and not casual viewers, what viewers and not casual viewers, what should we do based on these screenshots / reports? And then what this will actually do is analyze this right here

[11:34] and it shows what's consistently winning, what the biggest takeaways are, what casual viewers are watching, and it shows us that our channel positioning is becoming obvious right here. And it says I'd make 70 to 80% of your uploads look

[11:47] like this right here, which is incredible, instead of this. And it gives us a bunch of different words to actually do this, what it noticed inside of the thumbnails, what weekly schedule it would run, and what it would stop

[12:00] actually making. And again, this is incredibly valuable stuff that we could get just from these reports right here, uploading it into a ChatGPT called or incredible job at breaking it down, analyzing it, and giving us key

[12:14] inside of your channel. You could do the down right here for what your audience watches. If we take screenshots of this you enjoyed this video and you want to learn exactly how the YouTube Shorts

[12:27] algorithm works right now for 2026, and what you need to pay attention to, I this video right here that walks you through exactly how it works for August through exactly how it works for August 2026. I'll see you over there.