During the Made On YouTube presentation, YouTube announced a new feature to help emerging YouTube channels grow. The feature is called Hype and it lets viewers Hype a video to make it popular. In this way, Viewers can be a part of their favorite YouTuber’s success story.
If a video was published less than 7 days from a YouTube channel with under 500,000 subscribers, its viewers can hype it. The more hype a video gets, the higher it rises in the leaderboard of the top 100 hyped videos from the week.
The company has also created an algorithm to give bonuses to small creators who have smaller viewership. It will give a point multiplier to channels with fewer subscribers to help them compete with larger channels in the leaderboard.
Viewers can see a new “Hype” button below the existing “Like” button. Clicking it will give the video Hype and help it rank higher on the leaderboard. To prevent the abuse of the feature, YouTube has restricted users to three “hypes” per week.
Hype can help creators get more collaborations, brand deals, and exposure. But it will also put pressure on the creator. Sudden growth on YouTube will add the pressure of maintaining the higher level of quality and engagement to be relevant. Small creators who are making good videos will surely get more exposure if they have some fans who are watching them regularly.
YouTube has made it clear that hyping won’t influence your YouTube recommendations and search results.
In the coming months, YouTube will also allow fans to purchase more “Hypes”. This will be another revenue source for the video-sharing platform. However, the company didn’t confirm if it plans to share Hype revenue with creators.
Before releasing the feature, YouTube did beta testing in Turkey, Taiwan, and Brazil. Viewers hyped videos over 5 million times across 50,000 channels. Most people who used the feature were from the age group of 18- to 24-year-olds.
