At the 2021 IAB NewFronts annual event for advertisers, YouTube positioned themselves as the replacement for traditional television networks.
At this year’s NewFronts showcase, YouTube boasted about their TV screen reach, promoting themselves to advertiser of traditional networks as a real competitor for linear TV.
At this point, even those of you who negotiated good rates are paying more for less every year. This is a moment. An inflection point to reset, reassess. If you were to start from zero and build based on where people are watching, you would start with streaming.
Allan C. Thygesen, President of Americas, Google
The Google owned online video streaming platform says that more than one billion hours of content on YouTube is consumed on televisions each day. That’s up from 450 million in June 2020 and 250 million in 2019. This number isn’t the only one they gave, stating that more than 120 million people watched YouTube on TV in December 2020 alone. Comscore says that YouTube is the number 1 in reach and watch time among ad-supported streaming services. YouTube represents 40% of watch time of all ad-supported streaming services analyzed. In September 2020, YouTube reached more TV viewers between the ages of 18 and 49 than all linear networks combined.
YouTube also highlighted upcoming ad products that allow brands to specifically target TV viewers. One such product is an interactive feature called Brand extensions. The upcoming feature rolling out globally later this year gives viewers the option to send information about an ad on TV to their phone, with one click. This makes it easier for consumers to find out more about the product and brands to gain key metrics. “Brands will be able to measure conversions generated by brand extensions, directly in Google Ads.”
YouTube’s new bite-sized ‘Shorts’ are coming to everyone in the US with even more fun to be had in brand new features.
YouTube have been slowly introducing their new platform to India and recently the United States. ‘Shorts’ are unique videos built into the main YouTube site of videos between 15-60 seconds, designed for having fun to music or simply in short-form.
YouTube Shorts have been available in the US in Beta since mid-March and in the next week they’ll officially be available to all users in the States. With the launch also comes a range of exciting new features to let creators make the most of the new feature, which offers a unique recording camera within the app made just for making Shorts quickly and uploading them straight away.
Users who can record Shorts directly from their app will now be able to switch between the standard 15 second recording length and a 60 second video. Whilst users will have to stick to the 15 second limit to use music from YouTube’s library in their Shorts, users can upload up to 60 seconds of video on Shorts without music.
Users who upload videos that are 60 seconds or less anywhere on YouTube will also have their content available on Shorts automatically. This means that whilst the recorder and Shorts section on YouTube are only available in India and the US currently, users all around the world can take part if they upload videos that are 60 seconds or less. These videos will automatically be included as Shorts.
New filters are coming to Shorts creators in both the recording section and the editing screen. So whether uploaders want to make their recording shine whilst they’re filming or if they decide after it’s made that it needs some pizzazz, user can add special effects at any point. Over the next year YouTube are planning to launch many more filters.
YouTube will be adding captions to Shorts automatically, as they do with normal videos. Uploaders will be able to add their own manual captions. Viewers will be able to toggle between automatic captions or the captions added by the creator.
To make it even easier for everyone to find Shorts and take part in the fun, there will now be a new tab on the bottomw of the screen in-app. This will allow users where the feature is fully launched to head to the Shorts section with a simple tap.
Changes to YouTube creators options
In the Creator Insider video where Shorts’ full launch was announced, they also had some great news beyond short-form fun.
Now channel owners will be able to edit their profile name and image on YouTube without having to change it to the same name and image on their Google account as well. Users will not lose their URLs if they change their name but they will lose verification if they’re verified. YouTube will then take a few weeks to re-verify the account, checking the name still meets their guidelines and aligns with the channel.
Also new for channels will be the content that remains in the comments section of their YouTube Studio. Initially when comments were sorted by ‘I Haven’t Responded’ meant that the channel hadn’t interacted with them, but simply liking a comment moved the comment out of this filtered display. Now hearted comments that haven’t been replied to with a message will remain under ‘I Haven’t Responded’.
Good news for trending music
Good news for artists on YouTube who will now have a better chance at being discovered when they’re trending. A new badge will show on videos in the music category when they’re on the trending list showing their position. Listeners can tap on the Trending badge to head to the trending list and see the rest of the trending music.
YouTube Kids now available everywhere for YouTube viewers
YouTube have launched their kid-friendly platform, curated to only show videos made specifically for children, in a load of new countries. YouTube Kids is now available everywhere that YouTube is.
The new countries YouTube Kids is now available include Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen, and Turkey.
Testing new timed comments: We’re currently testing a new feature that allows you to view comments timed to the exact moment you’re watching in a video. This experiment is available on some videos to a small group of people and we’ll consider rolling this out more broadly based on feedback. To see if you’re part of the experiment, go to the comments section on iOS or Android, and tap the Sort button to select “Timed Beta”.
Currently on YouTube, viewers can type a timecode in the comments and this will automatically be hyperlinked, allowing those who click it to immediately jump to that part in the video.
On SoundCloud, all comments are linked to a specific time in the audio. This is great if the comment refers to a particular portion of the track and acts as a visual representation of how popular conversation is around a song, as well as the most impactful moments.
YouTube’s implementation of this feature sounds to be somewhat similar to SoundCloud’s, however this could be dangerous territory. YouTube’s filtering algorithm isn’t perfect and comment sections can be filled with harassment. Having hurtful comments more prominent needs to be avoided at all costs.
Last year, YouTube introduced ‘chapters’. This let creators split videos into skippable segments, by writing timestamps in the video description. Great for audiences who want to jump to an exact moment.
YouTube’s parent company Alphabet shows the video streaming platform made over $6 billion from ads in the first quarter of 2021 alone.
Stay-at-home orders have seen YouTube’s ad revenues saw 49% over last year. Alphabet, YouTube’s parent company, reported the video streaming service made a little over $4 billion in ad revenues in the same quarter last year. This quarter’s financial earnings report shows YouTube ad revenues were over $6 billion. This does not include revenue from YouTube’s other products such as YouTube Premium and YouTube TV.
As a whole (including Google), Alphabet reported total revenues of over $55 billion in Q1 2021, a 34% year-over-year increase, and above analyst predictions at $52 billion.
Over the last year, people have turned to Google Search and many online services to stay informed, connected and entertained. We’ve continued our focus on delivering trusted services to help people around the world. Our Cloud services are helping businesses, big and small, accelerate their digital transformations.
There is an unthinkable amount of video on YouTube. How do they manage the billions of hours of video uploaded and streamed through their site? They’ve given some answers.
Have you ever wondered how they do it? Last year YouTube confirmed that 500 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every single minute. That’s 30,000 hours of video uploaded every hour and 720,000 hours every single day. That’s a lifetime’s worth of viewing added to YouTube every single day – a mind-boggling amount.
Put that into perspective of the storage required to hold that (safe to say my computer would be more than full up) and the server power needed to make it readily available and streamed every day and you have to think: what magic are Google harnessing to power this platform?
In a new article titled ‘Reimaging video infrastructure to empower YouTube‘, their lead software engineer Jeff Callow walks through the inception of the platform and the technology that has allowed them to do what can easily seem to be The Impossible. We’ll look at the key points that help to clear up the huge question of our title, but for much more information and a detailed explanation be sure to check out YouTube’s full article.
The Magic of Compression
Whilst they don’t delve into the no-doubt vast tracts of servers working to store and stream the incredible swathes of content delivered to YouTube, their secret to getting it out easily is in transcoding. Their efficient and refined transcoding methods allows them to compress video files as small as possible to make them easy to send around the world to many different devices, without cost to the quality.
Callow says: “An important thing to understand is that video is created and uploaded in a single format, but will ultimately be consumed on different devices – from your phone to your TV – at different resolutions.” With their transcoding processes they can ensure that the highest possible quality is available to the user’s preference – even 4K – with the smallest cost to transfer speed and data needed to download.
The article looks at how they’re making this process even better, encouraged by the huge uptick in video views in the last year. They saw a 25% uptick in video views in the first quarter of last year powered by lockdowns and social distancing, as well as a continuous move towards digital video for watching that has been taking place for over a decade now.
YouTube’s New Generation of Coding
At the recent ASPLOS conference (Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems – what a mouthful) YouTube unveiled their new, fresh system for transcoding video. You thought they were good at it beforehand? Now they reckon their new computer chips can improve computing efficieny by 20-33x compared to their old system.
Based on an illustration that YouTube have shared to exemplify the new system (which simplifies the real technological process) instead of separate systems encoding the videos for 4K on TV, HD streams on laptop, smaller resolutions on devices, and so on; their new VCU (Video trans-Coding Unit) will be able to handle them all.
Whilst the old system has worked pretty damn well, the amount of content they’re handling is certainly not decreasing. Not only is video uploading and consumption constantly on the rise, the type of content on YouTube is also transforming. Callow revealed that in the first half of 2020, daily livestreams grew by a whopping 45%.
Livestreaming was already on the rise in a big way, then the pandemic hit and we all found ourselves spending far more time online and in many ways – I believe – livestream became a way of connecting. It was a way to be a part of something that was happening and that moment and joining a community. Whilst we were physically separated, livestreaming spiritually connected us.
That huge new content requires new technology and infrastructure to power real-time video streaming and processing around the world to hundreds, thousands, or potentially millions of people at a time. With their new system they can scale the potential up here and use a one-fits-all distribution method through their VCU.
The new system of scaling various resolutions of content from the same source started in 2015, as the demand for 1080p became widespread and the push for 4K and even 8K began. Callow says: “We saw that the broader internet wouldn’t be able to accommodate this growth unless we shifted to more data-efficient video codecs (codecs are basically different ways to compress video data).
“However, data-efficient video codecs like VP9 us more computer resources to encode than H.264. The combination of these dynamics led us to pursue a dramatically more efficient and scalable infrastructure. Here’s a comparison of the image quality in a Janelle Monaé video. The VP9 version clearly looks better than the legacy H.264, but it uses 5x more computer resources to encode.”
Looking ahead with the amazing progress they’ve made in recent years in mind, Callow said: “One of the things about this is that it wasn’t a one-off program. It was always intended to have multiple generations of the chip with tuning of the systems in between. And one of the key things we’re doing in the next-generation chip is adding in AV1, a new advanced coding standard that compresses more efficiently than VP9, and has an even higher computation load to encode.
“As for me, I’ll be continuing my work on the project, developing future generations, which will keep me busy for a while.”
Digital Music News suggests moving The Joe Rogan Experience exclusively to Spotify has lead to a 40% drop in Google searches.
Since Spotify bought exclusive rights to Joe Rogan’s hugely popular podcast for a reported $100 million in May last year, the streaming platform are yet to publish any subscriber numbers, making it impossible to determine if followers have changed since the transition. Music industry news site Digital Music News published a Google Trends graph showing interest in the search term ‘Joe Rogan’ over the past year, pointing out significant spikes in the data such as starting to record for Spotify on September 1st and going exclusively to Spotify on December 1st.
DMN calculated in the six months leading up to December 1st, Google Trends hit an average of score of 57.9. Then after the week of December 1st and during 2021, this score dropped to an average of 34.6, representing a decline of 40.2% in search volume. Search results for terms such as ‘Joe Rogan podcast’ and ‘Joe Rogan MMA’ showed similar results. Digital Music News suggests Joe Rogan may be losing relevancy since his exclusive deal with Spotify, however it should be pointed out, this 40% drop is off the back of a publicly very busy 2020, first announcing the deal May 19th last year (you’ll see this spike on the left side of the graph above). Equally, declining Google Trends results of course do not confirm a drop in follower numbers on Spotify.
That being said, the removal of the podcast host’s videos from YouTube could well be leading to less Google traffic. The videos are now on Spotify, but the music streaming service has never been a video first platform and lacks key features such as comments. Rogan has discussed the video situation, saying:
It’s not as smooth as it probably should have been when we first transitioned over in December, but [Spotify] just wasn’t ready for the volume. They had never had a show — first of all, they created video because of the conversation we had about this podcast. They wanted the podcast to be audio-only, and my manager was like, ‘think about the Elon Musk moment when Elon Musk was smoking weed.’ That is a viral moment that only happens with video.
Joe Rogan
Later mentioning comments on videos on Spotify:
That’s where YouTube shines over all over forums, is that they have that comments section, and I think Spotify needs to recognize that. And I’ve tried to talk to them about that, and there’s been some discussion about putting comments — but one of the things they said is, ‘if we put comments on one podcast, we have to put them on all podcasts.’ But I go, ‘why? Just put them on mine, just put them on mine.
A major media partnership between Deezer and Globoplay will open up new music, podcast and video entertainment opportunities for Brazilian fans.
Deezer has made moves into the Brazilian market with a new arrangement with Globoplay. The video streaming provider is the biggest in Brazil, often compared to Netflix. The new agreement means users will have access to a range of entertainment in one convenient package.
With the new arrangement, Globoplay’s users get free access to Deezer Premium for 12 months. That’s a free subscription to Deezer’s catalogue of 73 million songs and all the Premium features. After a year, Deezer Premium will be available at a reduced monthly price.
The companies stated that moving forward, the partnership will spread to technology, marketing and content. Plans are apparently also being laid for further combinations of video and audio entertainment.
Erick Brêtas, director of Digital Products and Services at Globo, said: “We admire Deezer for their innovative spirit, ability to build and support music communities around the world and for their simple and user-friendly state of the art platform. We’re pleased to have Deezer as one of our selected partners and we are convinced that users will see the incredible value in 12 free months of Premium music.”
Earlier this year Globoplay launched a hub for online audio content, featuring popular podcasts such as Braincast. Globoplay also added its first original podcast, À Mão Armada, which will be available exclusively to Globoplay and Deezer users. The partnership gives Deezer commercial opportunities in Brazil, as Globo is a strategic partner of this season of The Voice Brasil.
Laurence Miall-d’Aout, Chief Commercial Officer at Deezer, said: “Deezer and Globoplay’s brands and ethos are closely aligned and look forward to bringing Brazilian consumers a diverse and powerful entertainment experience. Deezer is uniquely positioned as an independent global player to offer the best value for video and entertainment brands all over the world. Working with Deezer enables brands to offer their users one of the best music apps on the market, combined with the best local and international music catalogue in the world.”
Apple are due to hit the virtual stage in around five hours. You can stream the live event for free on apple.com and YouTube.
Apple’s first event of the year is due to kick off at 10am PDT today, that’s 1pm ET and 6pm in the UK. You will be able to find the pre-recorded livestream on Apple’s website here or the YouTube stream here and below. Click either link to set a reminder. Streams usually last between an hour or two, featuring a mixture of drone shots, fancy transitions and cringe.
As always, Apple are being tight lipped about what will be announced on stage later today, but we’ve heard leaks, rumours and predictions. Find all the details of what we’re expecting to see at this event here. The TLDR version is an iPad Pro, AirTags, iOS 14.5 and perhaps a redesigned iMac, iPad mini and Apple TV. Tune in to find out for sure.
Get your music heard on YouTube’s brand new short and sharable videos and become part of the next wave of mobile fun!
RouteNote and YouTube are working together to get your music in front of millions on the fun, catchy videos making up the new YouTube Shorts experiences. The new short videos translate the fun of quick, mobile shot videos set to music onto everybody’s favourite video platform for snappy moments with great soundtracks.
YouTube Shorts will be the new home for viral dance crazes, sing-a-long sensations, and all the fun that can be had in under 60 seconds – and your music could be the soundtrack. Songs make moments even more special and we’re thrilled to be putting your music in front of millions around the world to connect with brand new audiences.
RouteNote users can upload their music to YouTube Content ID and then whenever anyone uses your music in their Shorts you will earn money as well as having the chance to feature on the next viral hit.
The YouTube Shorts beta is now available in the US and India, but you can take part wherever you are! To get involved in YouTube’s short-form fun from anywhere else in the world, read our guide here.
Rave Reviews calculated how much the top creators on TikTok earned during 2020 from sponsored posts on the platform.
With around a billion users, short-form video sharing app TikTok is one of the most popular social media platform in the world. Despite nearly being banned in the US last year, TikTok and the creators on the platform saw tremendous success in 2020, in part thanks to the pandemic and stay-at-home orders. A new study from product review site Rave Reviews shows how much some of the top creators on TikTok made in 2020 from sponsored content.
Where Forbes calculated the total earnings of top creators from sponsored content to merchandise from June 2019 to June 2020, Rave Review took the $0.005-per-follower figure The Guardian estimates companies pay for product placement and sponsored posts, then calculated the total amount the top 100 most popular creators made by multiplying this figure by the number of followers and the number of ads they posted over the year, by searching for commercial tags such as #ad and #spon. Rave Review’s calculations do not include revenue from other sources such as sponsored posts on other social platforms and merchandise stores. Note, no earnings calculated can by 100% accurate.
Key Findings from Rave Review:
TikTok’s highest earner is Michael Le, who made $20,378,000 from 92 ads in 2020.
Michael Le also made the most ads (92), 30 more than the next most-frequent advertiser, Joe Albanese (62).
The TikToker with the most followers, Charli D’Amelio, earned $18,224,000 from 34 ads in 2020.
The highest-earning fitness TikToker is Demi Bagby, who made $3,266,500 from 47 ads in 2020.
Abby Roberts made $1,736,500 from ads in 2020, making her the highest-earning beauty & style TikToker.
Plotted on the graph below are the top 24 earners according to Rave Reviews. On the left you’ll see Savannah LaBrant earning just under $1 million in 2020, with Michael Le on the right, as the highest earner at over $20 million. Despite only being the ninth most followed account on TikTok, Michael Le made up for this by posting more ads than anyone else, with 92 product placement or sponsored videos. This in contrast to creators such as Bella Poarch who netted over $1.9 million from just seven sponsored posts.
