YouTube Will Stop Emailing Subscribers About New Uploads Aug. 13

Subscription notifications are a seemingly constant source of frustration for YouTube creators. There’s the less-than-intuitive bell-clicking system, delays in sending out notifs (which can impact a video’s crucial first wave of traffic), and sometimes, complaints that notifications don’t get sent out at all.

In March, YouTube tried mitigating delayed/unsent notification issues by introducing new metrics that show creators when, how, and how many notifications were (and weren’t) sent out for each video, as well as “common reasons” for unsent notifications. Now, it’s streamlining the overall notification process by removing one kind of missive: emails.

“Less than 0.1% of these emails are opened, and people have told us that these emails contribute to inbox overload,” Team YouTube wrote in a Community post on the YouTube Help forums. It clarified that regular YouTube emails about things like user account updates and service announcements won’t be going away.

The team said YouTube ran a test where it removed subscriber notifications, and results showed that “when we don’t send these emails, more people engage with push notifications and their Subscriptions feed.”

There was also no negative impact on watch time for videos where subscribers didn’t receive an email notification, YouTube said.

Moving forward, users will be notified of new videos using push notifications on their YouTube mobile apps and on desktop if they (a) use Google Chrome and (b) have notifications turned on. As usual, the number of notifications/new videos will hover in the corner of users’ mobile apps, and the Subscription feed within the app will have a red dot, letting them know they have unseen content.

This change will roll out Aug. 13.