YouTube Making Moves…In The Most Calculated Way

This article was originally published by DriveWealth.

We have now heard two big announcements from the fan-favorite video-streaming service, YouTube, in the last ten days. If we think about these announcements, they seem to be the product of some very calculated internal decisions. From all we’ve heard, we think YouTube is starting to play hardball. Let’s run through these recent developments:

YouTube’s first major announcement reached the public on February 7th, announced the release of a new mobile live-stream feature. You might be thinking “finally” because if you frequent any social media sites, you know that the mobile live-streaming thing has been done ten times over in the past two years – by major sites like 

To start, one major criterion of YouTube’s live-streaming feature release is that it is only accessible to YouTubers with 10,000 or more subscribers. Essentially, only famous YouTube stars can “go live” for right now, which has led many users to ask what is the purpose of such a restriction? Well, while the move may seem a little bit cautious, it will certainly address a major issue that has prevailed on Twitter’s Periscope and even Facebook Live: the issue of quality.

If you have seen any of your friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter go live, you might have noticed – it can make for an uncomfortable and unorganized recording. While many of the videos are really funny and entertaining, there is definitely a large subset of social media users that has become, shall we say, a little too excited to be live-streaming to hundreds or even thousands of people. So, YouTube plans to tackle this problem of quality by building its live-streaming feature from the top down. Typically, users with 10,000 or more followers have so many followers because they create good content, and because people want to see more of their videos in the future. By maintaining high-quality content from the start, YouTube can ensure that its feature will be a hit right out of the box, before it expands access to its entire user base.

This caution from the get-go is also expected to help out YouTube’s revenue—as a large portion of its money comes from between-video advertisements. This works in a simple way: the more captivating content that pops up onto users’ screens while they are in the YouTube app will keep them clicking on and watching videos for longer. And, the longer they use the app, the more likely they are to see ads – generating revenue for YouTube. Of course, if you’re watching a video and a live-stream of your great uncle’s slam poetry contest pops up, or you spot a clip of some extremely bored teenager twiddling his thumbs on live-stream, your chances of staying and watching videos within the YouTube app are much slimmer.

Lastly, it seems that releasing this feature to only the most highly viewed YouTubers first will almost create a sort of advertisement benefit for YouTube’s over 1 billion other users that access the site each month. This is due to the fact that all YouTube users can watch the live-streams currently, even though only a small sect of users can make live-stream videos. Basically, YouTube will have everyone watching and enjoying, regardless of their ability to publish. We think that if more users grow to like the feature over time, more will be excited to use it when it is released to the public later this year.

Finally, YouTube made another, albeit smaller, announcement on February 20th in which it stated that it would be putting an end to its pesky (and unskippable) 30 second ads by 2018. Instead of the 30 second ads—that, quite frankly, make users want to escape the app without even watching their selected video—YouTube will reformat all of its ads into shorter (still unskippable, sigh) six-second formats. Still annoying, but much more doable, we think. And, of course, YouTube will maintain all of its advertisement revenue at the same time.

So, it seems that in the past few weeks YouTube has been stepping up its game to give the users what they really want—shorter ads and the ability to “go live”. Do you think these calculated decisions will benefit YouTube in the future? You may want to stay up-to-day on Google stock in the coming days (as Google owns YouTube) to see if YouTube’s calculations make a difference!