YouTube follows Twitter with new clickable hashtags above video titles
Twitter reinvented how hashtags are used in English language and YouTube are taking their hashtags to another level putting them front and centre of videos.
YouTube have started including clickable hashtags at the forefront of videos, sandwiched in between the video itself and it’s title. The new layout will allow viewers to easily explore YouTube’s billions, potentially trillions, of videos for any similar videos using the same tags.
Making tags so prominen will enhance video discovery making it simple to jump from a cat video to a page of more cat videos with one click. Each video will display the first three hashtags that the video creator has tagged their video with so creators need to ensure that their most important and relevant tags are placed first.
The feature has been launched for the YouTube Android app and is also available on the web player. It is not yet available on iOS, say YouTube on their updated Help page regarding hashtags, and they haven’t revealed when or if they plan to bring the new feature to videos on Apple devices.
YouTube are well aware of how hashtags can be abused and have policies in place to prevent uploaders taking advantage of the tool. Specifically YouTube make clear that over-tagging videos won’t be tolerated as each extra tags make them less relevant to users. YouTube say: “If a video has more than 15 hashtags, we’ll ignore all hashtags on that video. Over-tagging may result in the removal of your video from your uploads or from search.”
In addition any offensive tags can and often will result in the removal of the video, including: Misleading or unrelated hashtags, harassment, hate speech, sexual content, vulgar language, and non-hashtags which YouTube define as “ordinary descriptive tags or repetitive sentences.”
YouTube have been experimenting with more new features for Android in the past few weeks including an Incognito Mode for private video browsing on the app. In addition YouTube have improved the aesthetic of their Android app with video thumbnails now extending to the edges of the screen without a small white border on each side.
Sorry iOS, we guess you’ll have to wait a bit longer for these cool new tools.