YouTube is making its notifications work better for creators

YouTube wants its creators to engage with their subscribers via push notifications, but that tool can be counterproductive if the messages sent through it feel spammy. To strike the right balance for its notifications, YouTube is testing an update that would limit communications with subscribers who don’t engage with a channel’s uploads.

For years, many creators have encouraged their subscribers to sign up for push notifications by clicking or tapping a bell icon that appears next to the subscribe button. Since YouTube implemented that system, it has published sporadic updates, including a 2020 announcement that brought notification analytics to creator dashboards.

Notifications have become one of the simplest growth tactics in use on YouTube, but there’s a catch. When a subscriber doesn’t engage with a channel’s videos for a while, they may see a flurry of notifications from that channel as an annoyance, which in turn causes them to unsubscribe.

At first, that may not seem like much of an issue. After all, if a subscriber is disengaged, what’s the harm in trying to win them back before they unsubscribe? The problem, as YouTube explained in a forum post, is that many of these aggrieved users respond to intrusive notifications by disabling the system entirely. That makes it harder for other creators to reach out to their fans.

In a test that is currently active among a limited group of creators, YouTube is seeing what happens when disengaged subscribers stop receiving push notifications from the channels they’ve lost interest in. Those subscribers are still able to see the muted notifications by tapping on the inbox in their YouTube app.

Creators who upload infrequently won’t have their notifications silenced. Subscribers who regularly engage with a channel’s content will still receive pushes as usual, so creators who are worried about notification delivery issues can put their pitchforks down.

“When viewers turn off all notifications from YouTube, all creators are unable to reach even their most engaged viewers outside the app,” reads the forum post. “The goal of this experiment is to help us find ways to reduce this problem.”

The inherent spamminess of push notifications has presented a problem that YouTube has been trying to solve for years. One solution has been to get rid of emails that notified subscribers when new uploads arrived on the channels they followed. For in-app notifications, a contextual solution is a more sound approach, so YouTube is adjusting its sliders to figure out the notification frequency that produces the best results for creators.