YouTube’s expanding access to its courses option for creators, providing another potential revenue stream for creators in the app, while it’s also enhancing its “Featured Products” display for those using Live Shopping, and making it possible for creators to add AI labels when uploading via mobile device.
First off, on courses. Originally launched in beta with selected creators back in 2022, YouTube’s Courses option enables creators to offer free or paid learning programs on their channel.
As you can see in this example, with courses, creators can build their own video education offerings, aligned to their channel, providing another means to keep their audience engaged, and also bring in additional revenue from course take-up.
And now, YouTube will enable more channels to launch courses in the app, which will be creatable via YouTube Studio where available.
As per YouTube:
“Once you designate a playlist as a course, your course will have a special course badge on the Watch and playlist page, as well as well as in search home, watch next, and anywhere else your course appears. Courses will appear in a dedicated tab on your channel page and your course may be featured on youtube.com/courses for easy discovery.”
YouTube says that creators can also include quizzes, and associate them with specific videos, while courses will also each have their own “Discussion” section, which is a playlist-level comment section where your audience can engage with one another on more general course-related topics.
“When a viewer finishes watching all of the videos in your course, they’ll receive a badge, which appears in their “You” tab. An information panel on the course playlist page will include more information about the course length and chart the viewers’ progress.”
Channels can choose to charge for courses or make them available for free, and YouTube says that the option is being expanded to many more creators and channels from this week.
As noted, when it’s available in your region, channel managers will be able to create a new course within YouTube Studio. More information on Courses here.
On another front, YouTube’s also enhancing its Live Shopping product displays by adding the ability to pin multiple products in live shopping streams, which will rotate during the broadcast.
As you can see in this example, creators using Live Shopping will now be able to pin multiple items to be displayed during the stream.
Tagged products will then be rotated every 60 seconds, providing another simple way to highlight products during your live broadcasts.
Finally, YouTube’s also now giving creators the capacity to add synthetic content labels to their videos when uploading on a mobile device.
Back in March, YouTube implemented new rules around AI content disclosures in the app, to ensure transparency when AI tools had been used to create video clips.
At launch, it was only possible to add these tags when uploading via YouTube Studio desktop, but now, creators will be able to add these tags when uploading on mobile as well.
Creators uploading videos in the main YouTube app will also now be able to add these tags during the upload flow, ensuring that more AI tags are used in the process.
Some handy updates in YouTube’s latest batch, which could provide more opportunities to more creators.
