This week was Google’s annual “Made on YouTube” promotional event in New York, and the company unveiled a number of new features and upgrades. Several are precisely the sorts of things you’d expect a big tech company to announce in late 2024: AI bells & whistles. Dream Screen, which generates AI backgrounds for your YouTube Shorts videos, is getting a major upgrade, while YouTube Studio’s upgraded “Inspiration” tab uses large language models (LLMs) to help creators brainstorm new ideas for videos and features.
However, a few of the new features seem to hint at a promising new direction for the streaming platform, or at least a slight reversion to a former way of doing things. The service announced a number of changes focused on building community and engagement around individual creators, hopefully fostering the growth of their channels and projects.
Most visibly, there’s a brand new YouTube homepage coming in 2025, displaying exclusively for users watching the platform via Smart TV apps, gaming consoles, or set-top boxes. The new aesthetic strongly resembles the familiar design of subscription VOD apps like Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and Max. Unlike the familiar, text-heavy web interface, or the mobile app’s vast and infinitely scrolling collection of videos to choose from, YouTube’s new TV homepage highlights a few individual creators and channels with large inviting thumbnail images and cinematic auto-playing trailers.
Displaying YouTube channels using the aesthetics of Netflix shows and Max films sends a strong message. This is not disposable lean-back content you lazily thumb through on your phone, looking for something momentarily distracting until the next bus arrives. This is appointment viewing, just as compelling and lavishly produced as the next episode of “House of the Dragon,” or if you prefer, “Emily in Paris.” (YouTube VP of production management Christian Oestlien references “House of the Dragon” specifically when describing the new homepage to The Hollywood Reporter.)
YouTube actually takes the paradigm shift even further. Creators now have the option of re-organizing their content into a more conventional “series/episode” format, like a TV show. When users visit their newly-redesigned “Creator Show Pages,” they’ll get a chronological rundown of content presented in the familiar format of a season of television, along with a more prominent “Subscribe” button allowing them to follow that creator’s work moving forward. YouTube has also added QR code functionality for links in video descriptions, making it at least slightly easier for creators to share internet links with viewers watching their content on TV.
The fresh homepage upgrade is complimented by a few more features designed to promote up-and-coming creators to find audiences and build communities., Moving forward, popular videos from channels with under 500,000 subscribers will get a featured “Hype” button. The most-hyped videos of the day get their own dedicated leaderboard, providing another way for creators who are still building their audiences to have a breakout, highly-visible success.
There are also new moderation and interactivity features coming to YouTube’s mobile app, allowing creators to engage directly with their viewers. YouTubers will have the option of enabling “Communities” on their channel pages, essentially providing their followers with a limited social network of their own. (When a channel enables Community, fans can start posting art and pictures to share with other fans.) The platform also introduced a new analytics hub for creators who want to delve more deeply into community management, with options like automated AI comment replies. (Seems less than ideal, but hey, it’s your channel.)
YouTube recently overtook Disney as Americans’ #1 favorite overall media distributor to watch on their television sets. According to Nielsen, 10.4% of all TV viewing in the month of July in America went to YouTube, compared to Disney’s 9.9%. (But bear in mind, Disney’s number includes not only Disney+ but all of their TV and cable networks combined, including ABC, ESPN, and Disney Channel.) So reworking the YouTube app experience from a living room perspective makes a lot of sense. On one level, some of these aesthetic changes were likely inevitable. Nonetheless, taken collectively, they seem to indicate a larger shift within YouTube, that hopefully could be a significant benefit to independent creators on the platform.
After years as a haven for independent creators – fostering the growth and development of hundreds, even thousands, of popular original shows, channels, and brands from relative unknowns – YouTube found itself at a crossroads in the late 2010s. Despite massive traffic, advertisers were hesitant to go all-in on the platform, which was still largely identified by the mainstream – fairly or not – with amateurish or even inappropriate videos likely to offend potential customers.
In response, YouTube moved away from a creator-forward subscription model – which encouraged viewers to find and support favorite individual personalities and channels – to an algorithmically-driven approach designed to push more people to the same kinds of trending and highly-profitable content. This both increased the overall time users spent on the platform – being constantly pointed to new, endlessly scrolling videos at least vaguely associated with what they’d just seen – while pushing them toward content from reliable, and advertiser-friendly, brands and producers.
Financially, it’s hard to find fault with YouTube’s approach, and the platform has also significantly spiked traffic. Nonetheless, it has not always been the best shift for ambitious, visionary creators seeking to build a long-term business, establish an iconic brand, or tell long-form stories. These kinds of creators rely on repeat visits from a dedicated audience of fans, and YouTube’s move away from subscriptions to a more algorithmically-driven experience stripped a lot of these channels of their regular audiences.
There are dozens of YouTube genres where this change has become obvious. While panel discussion and recap shows once dominated the platform, they’ve become an increasing rarity, as they don’t make for the flashiest thumbnails or most attention-grabbing headlines. Costly-to-produce and not-always-timely sketch comedy has essentially died on YouTube, and moved almost entirely over to TikTok. Even the essential YouTube genre of the vlog is seemingly on its way out.
But perhaps the powers that be at YouTube have recognized the need for a new approach. Now that more people are watching YouTube on their main television sets, it’s time for the platform to start hosting more appointment television-type content. Sure, some people will want to watch video game playthroughs or beauty tutorials on their family room big screen, but a Disney+ and Max-style interface also calls for Disney+ and Max-style programming, with higher production values, more expansive visions, and ongoing narratives and throughlines. Perhaps it’s time for YouTube to start fostering a unique line-up of original content from everyday creators… again.
