YouTube Hype provides smaller producers a chance to shine

The company has noticed that things tend to change once YouTubers reach 500,000 subscribers, with Bangaly Kaba, YouTube's director of product management, explaining that this number marks a kind of tipping point in terms of growth and revenue. "Most of our creators are smaller than that, and yet they saw a disproportionate increase in revenue," he says. And larger channels tend to get more views, which leads to more recommendations, which leads to more views, which leads to more revenue.

With a new feature called Hype, YouTube is looking to focus on growing smaller channels and helping people discover and share new creators. Hype is a brand new promotion system within YouTube. There is a new button to promote your videos and the most promoted videos will appear in the rankings of the platform. It is a bit like Trending, but it focuses specifically on smaller channels and the ones people recommend, not just the ones you watch. YouTube has been working on Hype since the beginning of 2023, when the company decided to focus more on building community within YouTube. (At Wednesday's Made on YouTube event in New York, "community" was the buzzword of the day.

 As the YouTube team talked to users, they realized that what viewers want most is to feel included," Kaba said. "We've done some research and found that audiences want to influence the creative process," he says. "We also heard they wanted to contribute to the conversation," including cameo-style videos and Q&A sessions with creators. But above all, fans wanted to find a way to more actively support the success of their favorite creators.

 In an age of duets, stitches, and remixes, viewers are creators and creators are viewers, so it made sense for YouTube to give everyone a way to grow. "We really wanted to empower fans to participate as community members and support their favorite creators," Kaba explains. Meanwhile, more casual YouTube viewers were saying the same thing: “They wanted to be able to discover things that they wouldn’t otherwise discover, or that YouTube might not recommend.” 

Viewers want content; creators want to grow; fans want to share. Hype is in the middle of all of these things. How Hype actually works is quite complicated: videos can only be promoted within seven days of being posted, and only if they are made by channels with fewer than 500,000 subscribers. Each user only gets three hypes per week, and each hype is worth a certain number of points, inversely proportional to the number of subscribers on a given channel. The idea is that smaller channels should also be able to rank, so each hype on a smaller channel will be worth more points  YouTube is doing a lot here to make sure that it's not just the larger channels that dominate the rankings. The 100 videos with the highest point totals go to the top of the leaderboard.

The leaderboards are specific to each country, and over time, YouTube also plans to personalize the Hype section for each user. The top 100 won’t change, but YouTube is suddenly getting lots of good data about which small videos people like across all subjects. Kaba says Hype won't affect YouTube's traditional algorithm, but the Hype section could soon have more filters and topical leaderboards, and Hype videos will start appearing in a new section in the Discover feed.

The goal of all this nuance and complexity is to make sure the leaderboard is fluid and people feel engaged with each thing they hype. "There's a certain beauty in showing people what they want to go ahead and spend their Hype Points on," says Kristen Stewart, an experience designer at Hype. "The message here is that this is something that really matters to people, and this is something that they really want to support." It's also an attempt to prevent people from cheating the system. (It's just the fact of the Internet: if you give people a table of leaders, they will try to hack their way up.) The restriction of the noise of the user means that it is not by chance.

You will start to see the media threshing button after enjoying the video as a way to further increase the content. When you deceive the video, it will show you how many points it has and if it has entered the leadership table. At the end of each week, you will receive an examination of the videos you made and how they finally played. There are also badges for the first people to promote a video or if, say, you promote five videos that make it to the rankings. 

“We’re thinking about everything we can do to recognize the hyperactive influencers,” Stewart says. For creators, hype means benefits: connecting with their most enthusiastic fans, taking some of the promotional work off their shoulders, and a way to monetize their most engaged viewers. Promoting a video also pays its creator a financial bonus, though we don't know how much. The two and Stuarts mentioned the possibility of paid noise, so that users can receive more than three per week for costs which will be transferred to the creator. "By default, it will always be free until the media threw ends with you," said Stuart, showing a provision of the appearance of a paid media threw. "And I'll show you how to get hyped for $2."

First off, hype is mostly unique to YouTube, but don't be surprised if it permeates the entire platform. YouTube is a huge, virtually overcrowded platform, making it harder than ever to break out as a new creator. If YouTube wants to welcome the next MrBeast, not just the current one, it's essential that it ensures new user growth and success -- but it can't take away the algorithm from the big chains. Hype gives YouTube the opportunity to do what works while figuring out what's next.