YouTube Subscription Enhancements

YouTube recently announced some enhancements to their subscription system that make it easier and more intuitive for video producers (and watchers) to share their videos. Here are some of the new features and some ideas on how to use them to you advantage:

YouTube Status Updates

The bulletins you write on your YouTube Channel are now broadcast to all your subscribers in the Recent Activity module on the YouTube homepage. So now instead of only being notified of new video uploads, your bulletin board acts more like a Facebook status update:

Now you can type a message AND attach a YouTube. Then when you hit the ‘post bulletin’ button, your post appears in the ‘Recent Activity’ feed of all your Subscribers:

This could be used to update subscribers of upcoming videos or topics, share videos you like with your subscriber base, or promote older videos when relevant.

Syndication Status

YouTube also rolled out a new indicator that shows the syndication status of your video after it’s been uploaded:

Once you hit 100% you know your video has been delivered to all of your subscribers. Pretty cool !

Delete Items from Subscription Feed

Lastly, YouTube introduced some new features to help you weed through your subscription videos. First off, when you hover over a video in your ‘Subscriptions’ module you’ll now see a tiny “x” in the upper right hand corner:

Clicking the “x” will remove the video from the list and replace it with another video. So now you can quickly sort through videos that interest you while removing the ones that don’t.

You can also adjust the setting to remove videos from this module once you’ve viewed them:

My Take ?

I think these are all great new features that add a lot of value to the subscription system in YouTube by increasing communication and making it easier to find videos that interest you.