YouTube has announced a new feature called Hype, which aims to try and shift the balance of exposure in favor of smaller YouTube creators.
YouTube has discovered that when a YouTuber reaches 500.000 subscribers things tend to change in terms of channel growth and revenue.
In other words, there is a disproportion in visibility and by extension in profits. Although most of the creators have fewer subscribers than the 500.000 mark, those who cross it start to have better overall visibility and their earnings take off.
And big channels also tend to get more views, which makes them recommended more often, resulting in even more views, and even more revenue.
With a new feature called Hype, YouTube is trying to focus on growing smaller channels and helping users discover new creators.
Hype is a completely new promotion system within YouTuber. There's a new button to promote a video, and videos with the most ads will appear on a platform-wide leaderboard.
It's a bit like Trending, but it focuses specifically on smaller channels and what people choose to specifically recommend rather than just what they watch.
YouTube has been working on Hype since early 2023, when the company decided to focus more on building communities within YouTube. The actual mechanism behind Hype is quite complex.
A video can only be advertised in the first seven days after its publication, and of course, if it was created by a channel with less than half a million subscribers.
Each user only gets three campaigns per week, and each campaign is worth a certain number of points that are inversely related to how many subscribers a particular channel has.
The idea is that smaller channels should also be able to reach the leaderboard, so each campaign on a smaller channel will be worth more points. The 100 videos with the most total points rise to the top of the leaderboard.
The leaderboards are country-specific, and over time, YouTube also plans to personalize the Hype section for each user.
You'll start seeing the Hype button after you Like a video as a way to boost content even more. When you promote a video, it will show you how many points it has and if it has reached the leaderboard. At the end of each week, you'll receive a Spotify Wrapped-style compilation of your promoted videos and how they performed.
