Tag: YouTube

YouTube Introduces “Name Handle” To Make Creator Tagging Simpler
YouTube, the video-sharing platform, has introduced a new feature specifically for its creators, but still regular users can take advantage of it to change the way they identify their channels or even themselves. As a result of this new functionality, any user on the site can now have their very own name handle.

The platform is known for its unique user engagement, and Recently, Netflix also introduced a feature that is identical to the one that is now available on YouTube. Previously, this function was exclusive to the gaming community on both platforms; however, from now on, it will be available across the board and to all users.

YouTube has introduced a number of new features over the past several years, but the most significant of these is YouTube Shorts, which functions in a manner very similar to that of TikTok and Instagram Reels.

Read also: YouTube Takes on TikTok: Give Creators 45% Revenue

YouTube Name Handle Feature

It is well known that the “@name handle” system is primarily available on social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter. This system makes it simpler to tag a person in a post and provides a one-of-a-kind name ID.

When you tag a creator or user in the comment section or in the description of a Short, you may find that it is not as simple as it is on the other platform; nevertheless, this will soon be the case because YouTube has also included the same @-handles.

The creator will receive a notification in their Creator Studio in the form of a notification or an email. This handle will appear in the channel URL as well as on the main page of the creator’s YouTube channel.

Get Your YouTube handle right away!
1. Handles are a new, unique identification (for instance, @youtubecreators) that will be used for ALL YouTube channels.
2. People will be able to find you and your YouTube channel due to your unique @handle.
3. Additionally, since handles are unique (unlike channel names), it is simple to determine if you are interacting with the correct individual or not.
4. Your username will also serve as the URL for your specific channel (for instance, youtube.com/@youtubecreators).
5. Prior to this update, only creators with 100+ subscribers were qualified for a custom URL; however, now all channels will have a special URL based on their handle!
6. In the upcoming months, users will be able to utilize your handle on YouTube in comments, mentions, short videos, and more.
Tiktok, Instagram and YouTube will oppose cross-platform video sharing

Availability

The YouTube handles change will be made available to all channels over the next few weeks in a phased rollout. Once it has been rolled out to all channels, your handle will start to appear in a few places across YouTube (and more over time), including the Shorts player, search results, your channel page, comments and mentions, and other places. This will continue to increase over time.

Because of this, you need to get prepared to pick up your favourite handle before someone else does so. And if the channel owner didn’t choose their handle before November 14th, then YouTube will choose one for them based on their channel name; however, you are free to modify it at a later time if you so desire.

In addition, you can look for additional information in the official FAQ. On the other hand, YouTube’s future strategy for watermarking short videos will be facilitated by this functionality.
October 20, 2022
YouTube Takes on TikTok: Give Creators 45% Revenue

YouTube, in its effort to counter TikTok’s unequalled growth, has announced new initiatives for YouTube Shorts to compete in the short-form video arena. The platform rolled out new revenue-sharing tools for content creators on its YouTube Shorts video products.

Hitherto, TikTok has been dominant in this area as it has appealed to the younger creator generation with its simplicity and money-making opportunities, and with this, it has been so successful that other platforms have copied its features; YouTube has added a watermark to short videos.

Until TikTok’s surge, YouTube had been the most sustainable source of income for content creators, who received a share of the revenue from the ads that appeared with their videos. Thousands have made YouTube their full-time job with the partner program unveiled a decade ago. The platform has now decided to return to primacy.

According to the YouTube announcement, shorts will soon be eligible for monetization, and creators will keep 45% of the revenue generated from viewership.

Read also: Tiktok, Instagram and YouTube will oppose cross-platform video sharing

This is a significant update for creators who earn income on YouTube. Unlike long-form videos, which allow creators to profit from ad revenue, shorts have no direct path to monetization. YouTube has a “Shorts” “fund” that awards money to creators for popular videos. However, that’s not the same as a residual income stream.

“It’s a really big moment for creators,” said Amjad Hanif, YouTube’s vice president of product management. “When we launched the partner program 15 years ago, it was the first of its kind and kicked off the creator economy. This brings all the goodness and benefits creators have felt from revenue sharing and brings it over to short form as well.”

YouTube Programs and Eligibility

YouTube announced that, as of early 2023, YouTube Shorts creators would be able to apply to its YouTube Partner Program (YPP) provided they meet a threshold of 1,000 subscribers and 10 million short views over the previous 90 days. The YouTube Partner Program was started in 2007 and gave creators access to YouTube’s tools and ways to make money. It also allows revenue sharing from ads being served on your content.

The creators will also be able to take 45% of the revenue generated from ads that run between short videos.

“This seems like a giant attempt to grab frustrated TikTokers,” said Serena Kerrigan, a TikTok star with over half a million followers.

YouTube’s new revenue-sharing program could make TikTok less important to young people who make videos online, which has been the case so far.

According to the statement of Amjad Hanif, Vice President of Creator Products, on YouTube’s official blog post, “In Shorts, ads run between videos in the Shorts Feed.” So, every month, revenue from these ads will be added together and used to reward short-shorts creators and help cover the cost of music licensing. From the overall amount allocated to creators, they will keep 45% of the revenue, distributed based on their share of total short views. The revenue share remains the same, whether they use music or not.

Those creators who do not meet the required threshold to join the YouTube Partner Program will still make money through early access to fan funding features like Super Thanks, Super Chat, Super Stickers, and Channel Memberships, which allow fans to pay creators for certain features.

“This new lower tier will allow creators to join much earlier in their journey as a creator and earn directly from our fan fencing products,” Hanif said.

Kenyans created the most YouTube content in Africa

YouTube Benefits VS TikTok’s

Adding revenue sharing to short-form videos is a significant change in the ecosystem of creators. No other platform offers revenue sharing. For instance, TikTok, for instance, pays creators out of a fixed pool of money called its “creator fund.” However, the more creators who join the fund, the more ways the money is split.

In order to give Creators more Benefits, YouTube said it is also “launching Super Thanks for Shorts in beta to thousands of creators, with a complete rollout expected next year.” Viewers can show appreciation for their favourite shorts, and creators can interact with their fans through purchased, highlighted Super Thanks comments. And we’re 2020, and the popularity of short-form video has exploded on YouTube, with over 30B daily views and 1.5B monthly logged-in users.

In 2021, YouTube launched a $100 million fund to reward YouTube Shorts creators for their most viewed and engaging content throughout 2021 and 2022. TikTok launched a $200 million creator fund in 2020, while Snap Inc. launched a new fund late last year for top performers of its video product.

September 23, 2022
Tiktok, Instagram and YouTube will oppose cross-platform video sharing

As the Chinese-owned video sharing app, TikTok, begins to gain popularity as the most used app for short videos, Instagram, the Meta-owned platform, and YouTube, which Google owns, have added new features to discourage users of their own short-video apps from sharing content between platforms.

Cross-sharing is the most significant challenge faced by users of short video platforms since it is common for users to submit videos from one platform to another. For example, many people upload videos from TikTok to Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts, and vice versa.

YouTube Introduced Watermark

A few days ago, Sarah, the Community Manager for YouTube, said that the site, which Google owns, is getting ready to implement watermarks on downloaded videos.

When a viewer downloads a short from any publisher’s channel, there will be a small thumbnail with the publisher’s account name and the YouTube Shorts logo. This will assist viewers to identify both the platform and the true publisher.

YouTube asserted that “If you’re a creator who downloads your shorts from YouTube Studio to share across other platforms, you’ll now find a watermark added to your downloaded content.”

YouTube has also started testing these features for certain restricted standards, but they haven’t said what these standards would look like yet.

“We’ve added a watermark to the shorts you download so your viewers can see that the content you’re sharing across platforms can be found on YouTube Shorts,” the company added.

YouTube has said they plan to release it somewhere in the next month for mobile devices and in a few weeks for desktop computers.

Content Creators Can Now Earn with Tiktok Pulse

What Is Instagram Doing?

The Meta-owned platform, Instagram, is also working on something new, even though it already has a watermarking mechanism for downloading the reels.

And in addition to that, the company that owns Instagram, Meta, is working on something new, although it already has a watermarking mechanism for downloading the reels.

However, there are a lot of creators who download their reels before uploading them online, which allows them to get around the video’s watermark. However, the firm has developed a method to stop this practice.

Users can’t download reels with audio that has not been broadcast yet. This seems the best way to deal with the problem since it makes it harder to put the videos on another platform.

The Verge reports that “It means if you want to export the footage from Reels to use in another app (like TikTok), you have to actually post the reel first to save the sound.”

Read: Tik Tok Sets To Launch Music Streaming Service

Observations on Tiktok

Also, we all know that TikTok is now the most popular site for short videos, and that it has used watermarks since the beginning to stop users from sharing their content on other sites.

When YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels first came out, many people just put TikTok videos on them. But these platforms have now made it clear that copying and pasting the content is not allowed. With the help of TikTok’s watermark, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels have started recognizing copied content and secretly reducing the reach of the videos in question.

August 30, 2022
Nigerians Await August’s Commencement of 5G

A wide range of industries is expected to benefit from Nigeria’s 5G rollout scheduled for August 2022. For the most populous country in Africa, 5G will help deliver improvements in the fields of education, business, smart cities and entertainment.
Benefits Of 5G To Nigeria’s Economy
According to the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), the benefits of 5G wireless technology include offering Nigerians higher data speeds and improving reliability and availability among others. It connotes that Nigerians can connect smart devices in the home, including home security systems.
Meanwhile, The NCC recently disclosed that subscriptions to mobile broadband currently stand at the sum of 83.37 million in the country.

Read: Zambia Updates Its 5G Spectrum Roadmap
On a broader scale, this network will also create smart cities, raising the prospect of driverless cars. This comes on the heels of the announcement of Nigeria’s first smart city project, Silicon Delta, in Port Harcourt. The project is expected to be a smart, green city with smart accommodation, and the targeted completion date is the year 2030.
Benefits Of 5G To Nigeria’s Entertainment Industry
5G is set to transform the entertainment industry in Nigeria, as it will enable excellent streaming of 4-8K video, enabling Nigerians to watch the latest Nollywood film releases on Netflix or follow live streams of sports matches from around the world.
The technology will also provide gamers with a stable, lag-free online gaming experience on consoles and PCs and the opportunity to stream live on sites such as Twitch and YouTube. This technology will enable Nigerians to benefit from the latest developments in iGaming, such as live casinos, for which many new UK slot sites have dedicated pages within their sites for traditional casino games such as roulette, and blackjack and poker with live dealers. 5G is essential in the field of live streaming in order to enable users to enjoy optimum service.
Across Nigeria, the fifth-generation network will also benefit the education sector as 5G will enable virtual learning in Nigerian schools, greatly reduce download speeds for documentaries to be shown in classrooms and create the opportunity for hologram technology to provide virtual guest speakers in schools.
The fifth-generation mobile network will enable Nigeria to participate in what is known as the Internet of Things, which enables the worldwide collection, transmission and sharing of data on the internet via smart devices.
In business, this means companies will be able to optimise supply chain management and enable more efficient manufacturing.
The result will be that being able to participate actively in the Internet of Things (IoT) will allow businesses to reduce costs, create efficiency and increase profits. 5G is an essential prerequisite in order to access the Internet of Things. It will provide a wide array of other benefits to Nigeria, which will be felt across a range of industries.
Nigerian businesses will reap the rewards of 5G as it provides access to the IoT, while the online entertainment industry will be able to provide improved video streaming experiences to Nigerians, which will benefit online gaming and live streams. It is hoped that 5G technology will create a wealth of opportunities for Nigerians.

August 9, 2022
Kenyans created the most YouTube content in Africa

YouTube, an American online video sharing and social media platform owned by Google launched on February 14 2005, has witnessed increased channel growth and subscriber growth on its platform on an annual basis.

During this year’s YouTube Annual Roundtable virtual meeting, Mr Alex Okosi, Managing Director, Emerging Markets, YouTube EMEA, revealed the figures, saying Kenya’s content creation growth grew at the fastest rate year over year, at 70 per cent.

Okosi asserted that for the Kenya market, the percentage of YouTube channels making seven figures or more in revenue is up over 60 per cent year over year, with over 400 channels having over 100 thousand subscribers, which is an increase of over 70 per cent year over year, and six channels having over one million subscribers and one channel with over one billion views, while over 45 per cent of watch time on content produced by channels in Kenya comes from outside of Kenya.

In terms of YouTube African investments, Okosi stated that since the 2020 launch of the #YouTubeBlack Voices programme, creators from Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa were selected to participate in programmes earmarked to help amplify their fresh narratives and highlight their intellectual power authenticity.

The streaming of YouTube has been dominated by mobile devices with 70% of watch time with daily watch time on mobile app devices averages more than 60 minutes. Despite having 300 channels and a combined subscriber base of 100,000, Nigeria and South Africa lag well behind Kenya in content offerings, including everything from cooking shows to music videos to travelogues and sporting events.

Among the Kenyan channels with over one million subscribers are:
Citizen TV with 3.17 million subscribers,
Churchill Show with1.95 a million subscribers,
KTN News with 2.19 million subscribers,
NTV Kenya, with 1.91 million subscribers,
K24 TV with 1.19 million subscribers,
The latest target is R&B singer Otile Brown with 1.08 million subscribers.

The numbers indicate that Kenya leads Africa in consuming its content, with a paltry 45 per cent of Kenyan content being consumed by a global audience.

Furthermore, Mr Okosi introduced the newly formed team to promote African content creation. He said that the Google-owned video streaming app had launched programs to assist producers in Kenya and Africa to improve the quality of videos on YouTube, thereby expanding.

March 5, 2022