YouTube is letting creators make reaction content on-platform, using everyone else’s long-form videos

Reaction content is a tricky beast. It’s one of the top content categories across all platforms and formats, from many-hour Twitch livestreams to many-hour YouTube video essays to bite-size TikTok duets and those Facebook videos where people put their faces in the corners of other people’s videos and just make exaggerated expressions the whole time.

But reaction content is just as contentious as it is popular.

Many creators do things right: they attribute clips (or even pay to license them) and add to the original content in a meaningful, transformative way by including their own new content and context. Others? They just steal stuff.

Reaction creator pirating gave birth to a crop of digital rights management companies specifically serving creators. For some, the main goal is reclaiming revenue when a creator’s content is reuploaded without their permission. Others focus on licensing out banks of UGC content from creators who are cool with people reacting to their clips–as long as they’re credited and compensated.

YouTube is now getting into this side of things. Kind of.

At its most recent Made on YouTube event, the platform announced an expansion of Watch With. Originally introduced so creators could live react to what YouTube calls “premium tentpole streams” (aka major broadcasts from YouTube itself), Watch With was expanded to creator livestreams earlier this year.

The newest update: YouTube will allow Watch With by default on all creator-made long-form videos.

“Whenever inspiration strikes, you can tap ‘React live’ on any eligible long form video or livestream to jump right into the conversations happening across the platform,” YouTube said in an official blog post

Basically, YouTube is taking a page out of TikTok’s book and baking in a way for creators to make reaction content fast, easy, and on-platform.

Where this gets interesting is the aforementioned attribution and compensation.

In its blog post, YouTube said Watch With was designed “with creators on both sides in mind.”

Here’s how that shakes out in practice:

• On the reaction creator side: Anyone who goes live using Watch With to react will keep their ad revenue and any Channel Memberships etc they earn during their stream.
• On the original creator side: They’ll get “clear attribution” and “added view credit” on their YouTube Studio analytics. It’s not clear if that “added view credit” will cash out into AdSense revenue, or if the reaction creator is the only one earning money here.

Also, does “added view credit” mean one full view for every view a reaction creator generates? Or do original creators only get partial views? (Somehow, considering YouTube’s recent first-frame change, we think it will probably be a full view.)

For any creators who aren’t into this, YouTube does say you can turn off Watch With in your YouTube Studio settings.

We’re curious to see where this goes. YouTube has been encouraging more and more on-platform creator collaboration, and this is a way for it to formalize a top content category. Will creators like it? Remains to be seen…