SAN FRANCISCO (Hypebot) –
YouTube has added a number of features in recent weeks that offer new opportunities for musicians and music marketers using the popular viral video site:
Friend suggestions: An ongoing "find your friends" project kicks off with a module on the homepage that makes friend suggestions based on the email addresses of people with whom users have shared videos within the past.
Trending Topics: When there is a spike in searches on a given topic, YouTube are beginning to tease that out on our browse pages to help you see what the world is watching on any given day. You might see the queries appear in a "Trending Topic" spotlight on that category's browse page or at the bottom of the page.
New Discovery Features in Insight: They've released three new features in their analytics tool that should give more sophisticated ways of using Insight to better understand your audience. Now you can access a "discovery over time" graph that combines data about your views with where those views came from; a "views from mobile" section where you can see which of your video's views came from mobile phones or platforms that use our APIs; and "views from subscribers" where you can more deeply understand how the homepage subscriptions module, the subscriptions page, and subscription email drive views of your videos.
Activity subscriptions: To this point, subscribing to a band or label meant never missing any of their uploads. Now, any new subscription will send notifications of all public actions that user performs (uploads, favorites, ratings, comments, etc) in a Recent Activity module on the fan's homepage.
Effortless "More Comments": Replacing the page-based system, YouTube will now have a "Show More Comments" link at the bottom of comments that, when clicked, quickly appends 10 more comments to the end of the list.
Resume where you left off: Let's say you're watching an epic (read: longer than 20 minutes) video, and you get distracted and click away. The next time you return to the video, it will resume where you left off watching, assuming you've watched more than one minute of the video and there are more than three minutes left.
Subscriptions comes to Shows: Users can subscribe to their favorite shows on YouTube to never miss a new episode. Find the show you want to watch, go to its About page, click Subscribe, and episodes that hit the inbox will now indicate the name of the show (as opposed to the name of the channel or provider).
