YouTube Hype: Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:00] Growing on YouTube is brutal, difficult, and at times feels impossible. But YouTube as a platform does more for small traders than any other platform. For example, did you know they save three slots on every homepage to promote small traders with under a thousand subs?

[00:15] It's true, if you're small and upload a video, it's likely going to be shown on the homepage of YouTube to different people at some point. And if it's good, it can go viral incredibly early on a channel. But that's been around for two or three years now.

[00:28] Instead, what we're talking about is a new feature called Hype. A new feature that if you use correctly can help your small channel not just compete with massive channels, but actually perform better than them across the board,

[00:40] and most importantly, engage your audience better to become a community. What the heck is Hype? How does it work for you as a creator? Is YouTube going pay to win? How do you do it as a viewer? And at the very end, I'll explain the special secret technique I use to boost my retention and get Hype at the same time.

[00:56] But let's not get ahead of ourselves and instead start with what the heck is hype? As I said, hype is a new feature designed to help smaller channels for free. It's been rolled out for nearly every viewer and creator, and in short, it's a new button alongside the like button

[01:10] that if your audience chooses to click and hype your video enough as a collective, it will appear in a new hype leaderboard. The more hype you generate, the higher you appear on the leaderboard. But also, we've seen evidence that the engagement overall

[01:24] helps you be promoted in the general algorithm as well, even if you don't make it to the leaderboard. You're probably hearing this and immediately thinking, well, LJ, that sucks. Giant traders will just monopolize the hype leaderboard with their huge audiences.

[01:36] And the answer is no, not at all, really. While hype is open to all channels between 500 and 500,000 subscribers in the partner program, what it does differently is depending on the size of the channel,

[01:48] one user clicking hype generates a different amount of hype points. For example, on my channel with 16,000 subscribers, one hype equaled 930 hype points. But here on screen scheme, one hype was only about 80 hype points.

[02:02] Which tracks because YouTube's example is 500 subs getting 7500 hype per click, and a 500,000 sub channel getting 50 per click. As you can see, it does work to level the playing field. On the side here I show you a few videos on screen that pretty much any video I click is a smaller channel But from my personal research data my last video here on streamscans got 31 hype and only 2500 hype points

[02:26] but on my smaller channel 41 hype so only 10 more clicks got me 38,000 hype points. Side note, while this video was just shy of breaking into the top 100 leaderboards at 3800-800 hype points

[02:38] required, I did see that with big boosts or leaks in hype by my audience, I'd also get pushed into browse traffic more right after. This is either because A YouTube recognises the hype either way and pushes it more, or

[02:53] more likely B my community wanted to help and rallied around the video, watching it more or longer after hyping it because they felt engaged in the process, which led to a positive response from the algorithm.

[03:06] Now, important to note, hype only works for the first 7 days of a video's release. After that, you can't hype it anymore and it leaves the leaderboard. This allows videos in the leaderboard and overall hype ecosystem to stay fresh and keep

[03:18] cycling through. I'll show you how to promote your viewers to hype and where to find your hype analytics in a second, but first, how do you hype as a viewer? Can you guys hype this video right now? Well, every viewer can hype 3 times a week for free, either across 3 different videos

[03:33] or entirely on a single video. Obviously, the channel does have to meet the criteria I mentioned earlier. When that viewer does hype, they'll be told, A, how many points it will generate, and B, how close the top 100 to that video is.

[03:45] To see the hype button, other than the earlier criteria, the viewer also has to meet certain criteria themselves. Currently, the viewer does have to be using the latest mobile YouTube app, because it is still being rolled out to desktop.

[03:57] So, if you want to hype, update that app, close it, and reopen it. Number two, you also can't be on a brand account, because otherwise people can make brand new brand accounts, which are essentially dummy accounts or fake accounts,

[04:09] and they can use that to boost hype. You have to be a real person, sadly, to hype someone. But that's it. If you have those things, you can click hype and pump a video three times, and then you have to wait for it to reset to get that hype back.

[04:22] Which, interestingly, the reset is at the same time for everyone every week. Monday, 12am local time. Which has really got me thinking because that means channels that post on a Monday and ask for you to hype likely have a higher chance of getting it because it has just reset and you the viewer will have it ready So I pose the question to you if this feature continues to evolve and becomes more prominent

[04:48] will it also change how the platform users upload? Genuinely, let me know in the comments if you think this will change anything. But for now, what did I mean when I said YouTube is going pay to win? Well, it's a little bit worrying, but essentially, if you're on Android, there is a beta right

[05:03] now in a lot of different countries where you can pay to hype a video as much as you want which does raise concerns about pay to win monopolization granted it is a beta and youtube has said they're actively working to avoid it becoming pay to win and interestingly you'd expect creators to be

[05:19] really mad about this but the majority are saying they support a paid version of hype if it creates less hype than the free option and the money partly goes towards the creator what do you think that are you okay with there being a paid version if you are going to get a cut? Now from a viewer

[05:34] perspective YouTube culture is very set in stone and slow moving. Most people use YouTube the way they do and they don't like change. So at first likely this feature won't mean much but as you've

[05:46] seen it is already affecting the algorithm and if you're as old as me you also know that likes weren't liked at first. People preferred favorites and that little heart and then they also liked

[05:59] star ratings that you could give YouTube videos. That is what YouTube started as. But now we can't imagine videos without having likes. Again, we will have to wait and see. But now, how do you check your analytics to see how it's performing? Well, go to the new video, click analytics,

[06:14] engagement, and scroll down. How do you promote hype? How do you get viewers hyping? Well, it's not easy because not only does it suffer from the same thing as asking for likes and subscribe aka it breaks the flow of the video and lowers the retention so no matter how desperate

[06:30] you are you shouldn't take 10 seconds out to go please like and subscribe no seriously please but actually calling out for a hype is far harder because after seven days that call to action is useless for viewers they can't hype anymore which just creates dead air in the video from my personal

[06:46] experiments and experiments across other channels i found that promoting liking the video had the easiest and best effect The provider they like if they are on an eligible account or platform it will just ask them if they want to hype That it easy done a quick short shout out you don have to change much But what if your goal is to really push hype

[07:05] Well, in my last video, a webcam review, I had a small 20 second call to action while showing off a webcam's quality. I simply asked viewers on mobile to hype and a lot of you did. But we had two major problems.

[07:18] First, obviously at my size, it's going to be harder to reach the same numbers as a smaller channel, especially because most of my subs are dead. I'm an education channel in a quick-to-give-up hobby.

[07:30] Most of my subscribers will start streaming and then stop streaming or creating after four months and never watch one of my videos again. They gave it a go, it wasn't for them, didn't work out, off they go. So unless a video really goes viral for me in those first seven days,

[07:44] I'll likely never reach the high speed aboard on this channel. But what was the second problem? My retention in that section was abysmal. It's the same for any call to action as I said, but it's now been more than 7 days, so that entire TTA is useless and viewers are now commenting that they can't see hype. So, how do I fix this? Well, I use my special secret technique.

[08:07] It's well known that using the YouTube editor to remove the low retention parts of videos can actually boost performance and retention after uploading. It's tricky to do because you're likely cutting sections of your story that viewers need to understand your ending, but if there's a sponsor segment that's expired or fallen

[08:23] through or a call to action like that one I showed you earlier, you can actually use the YouTube editor to carefully trim it, delete it and you'll boost your retention. I've done that in this stream scene video and I'm saving nearly 20-30 seconds on a

[08:36] minute video, which is actually huge. It seems small, but an extra 5-10% retention being saved is massive, and that's before I'm including the overall boost I'll get by allowing the content to flow without interruption. That video also had another new feature being tested

[08:52] on it, the new AI language dubbing feature. Essentially, YouTube will send videos to every other country except your main audience while badly translating the title and entire video with a bad AI voiceover, and after a lot of testing, it kills nearly everything it touches,

[09:05] including that video. I didn't even opt into it, it just forced it on. So click here to find out about the best 4K webcam that is only a hundred bucks. I'm genuinely blown away by this thing, I'm so sad. Anyway, see you next week.