YouTube will be a much more exciting place in 2022 for brands, creators, and viewers. Today, YouTube’s Chief Product Officer, Neal Mohan, announced a host of new YouTube features that will roll out across the year.
These new features will open the floodgates of YouTube Shopping for brands, add more monetization ways for creators, deliver immersive viewing experiences through metaverse, and empower parents to secure their teens and adolescents with safer YouTube viewing experiences.
YouTube Shopping To Become Bigger And Better
Neal Mohan announced that YouTube will add Shoppable Videos, Live Shopping and improve how shopping appears across the app this year. With shoppable videos, users would be able to shop products featured in the videos of their favorite creators, like this partnership for Black-owned Friday.
Livestream Shopping, a successful e-commerce strategy used by brands in China, is expected to become bigger on YouTube this year. Last year YouTube tried livestream shopping by hosting the Holiday Stream and Shop which witnessed excellent engagement with over 2 million views and 1.4 million Live Chat messages. Livestream shopping offers viewers the option to engage on live videos with creators and simultaneously buy products featured in the live stream.
Social Commerce is the future. According to a new study by Accenture, shopping on social media platforms is slated to reach $1.2 trillion globally. YouTube is already the best platform for brands to claim their stake in Social Commerce, as it has over 2 billion monthly active users and has a strong influence over shoppers.
New Sources of Making Money on YouTube For Creators
Neal Mohan has promised that YouTube Creators will find more ways to make money and build a business across all video formats this year.
In 2022, creators will have more ways of making money on YouTube Shorts than just the YouTube Shorts Fund. This year Shorts creators can build content in collaboration with brands through BrandConnect! YouTube will also be integrating fan-funded features like Super Chat into Shorts and enable the selling of products through Shorts.
YouTube will also enable gifted memberships — the ability to purchase a channel membership for another viewer in the livestream — to a small group of channels.
Creating Shorts will be more fun this year! Following last year’s new feature that allows creators to remix audio from videos across YouTube, creators will be able to apply new video effects and use editing tools on Shorts. Creators will also be able to reply to individual comments on Shorts for better engagement with their fans.
YouTube will also introduce collaborative livestreaming this year, which will allow creators to go live together and provide more interactive livestreams to their audiences.
Enhancing YouTube Experience For Viewers
As of January 2022, on average, YouTube viewers watch over 700 million hours of content on TV daily. New features will be unveiled for viewers of YouTube on TVs to use their phones while watching YouTube on their TVs, to read or leave comments or share videos with a friend, to ensure easier navigation and more interactivity.
This year YouTube has expanded supervised experiences to Music, Living Room, and Assistant. Supervised accounts allow parents to choose from three different content settings that align with content ratings for pre-teens and older. YouTube plans to make gaming videos more immersive and interactive for gaming enthusiasts by introducing metaverse to YouTube. But not much details have been revealed on how this would be achieved.
Overall, 2022 will be an exciting year on YouTube for everyone, brands, creators, and viewers!
