YouTube has redesigned its mobile app to put its creators’ content “front and center” and is planning on adding two new major studio spaces in Toronto and Mumbai, CEO Susan Wojcicki announced Thursday at Vidcon.
Giving her second keynote at the annual conference of online video platforms and creators afterdebuting here last year with a plethora of new features, Wojcicki said the redesigned app will “include a simple way for fans to opt in to all notifications from favorite creator’s channels,” which got a whoop from the crowd of creators gathered at the Anaheim Convention Centre.
The app redesign dovetails with what Wojcicki said were YouTube’s top three priorities: “Mobile. Mobile. And mobile,” she said, noting that more than half of YouTube views and watch time are on mobile devices, with 100% year-over-year revenue growth from mobile.
Wojcicki, who took the reins at YouTube just a few months before last year’s Vidcon, also noted that the event (which has grown extremely rapidly in its six years) and 10-year-old YouTube itself are still in their formative years. “If both of us were people, Vidcon would be going into first grade, and YouTube would be going into fifth,” she said. “That basically means that we’re just getting started.”
Another piece of news that was cheered: YouTube’s livestream feature is about to go from a 12-step to a three-step process.
“Four years ago, we released a livestreaming product. But we heard from gamers that it needs some work,” Wojcicki said. “We listened, and as a result, soon you will be able to livestream content much, much more easily than it did in the past.”
Wojcicki championed YouTube’s growth over the past year, including a 60% upshot in time spent on site — the new metric by which YouTube is measuring the success of its creators.
“We’ve been focused on watch-time because we want you to be engaged with the content … the more time they’re engaging with the platform, the more likely it is that they had a really positive experience with YouTube,” Wojcicki said in a fireside chat with Shahrzad Rafati, CEO of BroadbandTV Corp. “We though that long-term, this was a better metric for us in terms of our users and their performance on our platforms.”
Wojcicki also highlighted YouTube’s move into virtual reality, with 360-degree 3D video.
“Later this year we’re going to launch support for 360-degree videos in 3-D which is what will enable truly immersive virtual reality experiences,” she said. “And we’re going to make sure all our Spaces are outfitted with the latest Jump cameras that capture 360-degree video in 3D in unprecedented quality.”
Vidcon opened Thursday with a keynote from co-founder (and The Fault in Our Stars author) John Green, and continues with dozens of panels, keynote speeches and meet-and-greet opportunities through Saturday. The annual gathering started in 2010 with a modest 1,400 people in the basement of a Los Angeles hotel and was moved to Anaheim in 2012, where attendance has grown to well more than 20,000.
Though it’s gained a reputation as a place where teens come to stalk, run after and scream at their favorite creators for a shot at a selfie, its backbone as the only major online-video
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Source: Mashable