Youtube has added their own spin to the “stories” sharing format adapted by major social media channels. Reels on YouTube will be given their own tab, separate from the creators’ main list of videos.
Roy Livne, YouTube’s Senior Product Manager says, the idea with Reels is to introduce a new video format on Youtube that lets creators express themselves and engage fans instead of posting a full video. There will be more casual posts, for when users may not want to upload the entire video. Creators can make Reels by shooting quick mobile videos of 30 sec each then adding filters, music, text and more including new “Youtube – y tickers”. Unlike other platforms, creators can add multiple Reels and they won’t disappear after 24 hrs.
The new feature is a part of the update to the social-media-style features added to the Community tab. Launched about a year ago for only a select few top creators, YouTube’s Community features are now available to channels with more than 10,000 subscribers. In their Community sections, creators can share polls, pictures, text, GIFs and other content — designed to let channels feed their fans new content on YouTube itself (instead of other social platforms) in between their major video uploads.
An exciting and different feature from other platforms is that viewers can give a thumbs up or down to the content they, just as they do to videos and comment on regular videos.
In addition, YouTube said it has updated how posts in Community reach users across the platform. Now, a channel’s most-engaged viewers can see Community posts in the Home feed, “whether they’re subscribed to your channel or not,” according to Livne. YouTube also has “optimized” notifications about new Community posts so that subscribers are eligible to receive them, but they won’t necessarily get a new notification for every new post.
YouTube is yet to reveal when the Reels feature will arrive in beta, which creators will receive the format first or how long until it’s publicly available. Looking at the trend, it would seem like daily vloggers would be the best test pool to test the new feature.
