YouTube’s looking to help users find more relevant content when they tap through to a creator profile, with a new “For You” section, based on individual interests, now in testing in the app.
As explained by YouTube:
“We’re testing a way to make the channel homepage more personalized to individual viewers by adding a new “For You” section that will recommend a mix of different content types from that channel based on the videos they’ve already watched. During this experiment creators can’t opt out, but when we roll this out to everyone, creators will be able to control whether the “For You” section will be shown on their channels and which content types will be shown.”
As you can see in the above example, the new “For You” section will highlight the most personally relevant videos from a specific channel, as a means to help boost engagement, and encourage more interaction within the Channel profile.
That could be an effective way to boost engagement, by guiding users to the best videos that they haven’t seen, and those more closely aligned with their viewing history, as opposed to leaving them to sort through the entire channel history themselves.
It’s unlikely to have a huge impact, but maybe, by showing users the most relevant matches up front, that’ll help to guide them into the channel’s content, which could lead to more subscriptions, more engagement, etc.
On another front, YouTube’s also testing new tweaks to the channel layout:
“We’re starting to test changes to creator channel pages where tabs like “Playlists” won’t be shown in cases where those tabs have no content. We’re also testing improved access to the information from the “About” and “Channels” tab by updating the look and feel of the channel page. We’re testing this with a limited number of viewers to start.”
The updates are part of YouTube’s ongoing effort to maximize audience retention, and help creators grow their presence in the app. These, you would assume, would be lesser elements within the broader scope of audience building, but they could have an impact in getting more visitors to dig deeper into your content offerings.
You can read more about YouTube’s latest updates here.