On the Podcast: YouTube wants in on your workflow

FYI, Tubefilter has a podcast.

It’s hosted by our very own Joshua Cohen (that’s me) and Lauren Schnipper. Subscribe to Creator Upload on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

And we’re now also brought to you in part by Nikon. 

YouTube made some very big announcements at its now-annual Made on YouTube press event. Here they are in my order of importance: 

• AI-generated insights – Starting next year, AI-generated video suggestions will be integrated into the YouTube Studio, where they will provide relief for creators who are suffering from writer’s block. “AI Insights is designed to help spark your next idea and outline suggestions based on what your audience is already watching on YouTube,” reads a post summarizing this year’s Made On announcements. “In our initial test, more than 70 percent of those surveyed said it’s helped them develop and test ideas for videos.”

Everything Else (more or less in order of how much it will positively benefit YouTube and creators)

• YouTube Create – Like ByteDance’s CapCut–which is ostensibly intended for people who want to publish their videos on TikTok, but has become popular with creators posting on YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels, too–YouTube Create is meant to be a full suite of mobile editing tools. Its launch lineup includes editing, trimming, and automatic captioning features, as well as voiceover editing capabilities and a library of filters, effects, transitions, and royalty-free music.
• Aloud – A new feature that will let creators dub videos into multiple languages.
• AI-powered music discovery – YouTube Global Head of Music Lyor Cohen (pictured above) revealed AI-powered suggestions will bring new search options to Creator Music, the audio licensing service YouTube announced earlier this year.
• Dream Screen – Another new feature that will bring “fantastic settings” to Shorts by harnessing the power of generative AI. Users will input setting ideas into the Dream Screen and receive AI-generated backgrounds in response.

The items in Everything Else ☝️ are definitely cool and big value adds, but they all help creators unlock more potential value and/or streamline the production process for pre-existing videos. (The obvious exception here is YouTube Create, but there are alternatives for that in the market already, so I won’t dive into it here.) 

AI-generated insights can integrate into creators’ workflows to help them (at worst) save time with their video ideation process, and (at best) conceive of videos they never would have thought of before. 

YouTube first started out as a distribution platform for videos. Then it provided some analytics and insights to help you understand how to make your videos better. Then it gave you basic editing capabilities, music choices, and more tools to help with the production process. Now it’s thinking outside the confines of actual video production and into the realm of creative workflow and ideation. It’s not an objectively obvious leap, but it starts to become one after you spend a few moments to think it out. 

Part of the reason YouTube launched Shorts was to compete with TikTok (clearly), but the platform also wanted to provide lay individuals with an easy way to become creators (or at least easier than long-form content creation). A short-form video is a format- and video-production answer to the question, “How do we make it easier for creators to YouTube?” The AI-generated insights is a tactical answer. 

love it. If it actually provides great results, it will be a huge boon for creators who struggle to find what’s next. At minimum, it will give them more confidence in their current decision-making processes. And if it proves even remotely useful, I fully expect YouTube to integrate itself more into different components of the creator workflow.

I get into all this and more with Lauren on the latest installment of Creator Upload. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whenever you listen. You’re gonna dig it.

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