YouTube is expanding access to course options for creators, giving them new revenue streams within the app, enhancing “recommended products” for users who use Live Shopping, and allowing creators to add AI labels when uploading via mobile devices.
First, Courses: First released in beta to select creators in 2022, YouTube’s Courses option allows creators to offer free or paid learning programs on their channels.
As you can see from this example, courses allow creators to build unique video educational content for their channel, giving them another way to keep their audience engaged and also allowing them to earn additional revenue from taking their courses.
And now, YouTube will allow more channels to launch courses within the app, and create courses via YouTube Studio where available.
According to YouTube:
“When you designate a playlist as a course, the course will have a special course badge on your Watch & Playlists page, Search Home, Watch Next, and everywhere else courses appear. Your course will appear in a dedicated tab on your channel page and may also be featured on youtube.com/courses for easy discovery.”
YouTube says creators can also add quizzes to tie into specific videos, and each course will have its own “discussion” section, a playlist-level comments section where viewers can interact with each other on general topics related to the course.
“Once your viewers finish watching all the videos in your course, they’ll receive a badge that will appear in the You tab. The information panel on your course playlist page provides more information about the course’s length and a graph of their progress.”
Channels can choose to charge for their courses or offer them for free, and YouTube says it will be expanding this option to more creators and channels starting this week.
As mentioned above, once available in your region, channel admins will be able to create new courses within YouTube Studio. Learn more about courses here.
YouTube is also enhancing product visibility during live shopping by adding the ability to pin multiple products during a live shopping stream, which will then rotate through them during the broadcast.
As you can see from this example, creators using Live Shopping can now pin multiple items that appear during their stream.
Tagged products will rotate every 60 seconds, providing another easy way to highlight products during live broadcasts.
Finally, YouTube now allows creators to add synthetic content labels to their videos when uploading them to mobile devices.
In March, YouTube introduced new rules around the disclosure of AI content within the app to ensure transparency when AI tools are used to create video clips.
Initially, you’ll only be able to add these tags when uploading from YouTube Studio desktop, but going forward you’ll also be able to add these tags when uploading from the mobile version.
Creators who upload videos on the main YouTube app will also be able to add these tags during the upload flow, with more AI tags being used in the process.
YouTube’s latest batch comes with some handy updates that could open up more opportunities for more creators.