YouTube is making comments more fun — and fandom more lucrative for creators

YouTube’s comments section is getting an upgrade, alongside the rollout of other community-focused features such as exclusive paid memberships, the company announced at its Made on YouTube event on Wednesday. Commenters will now be able to respond with GIFs or leave comments from their TVs, while creators will get news tools to support their fan communities, including features to personalize moderation, invite members into VIP-like areas, and give fans new ways to help them make money from their content.

Comments are still one of the main ways YouTube viewers interact with creators’ content, but they’ve often lagged behind other social networks’ commenting features. For instance, TikTok just announced that commenters can respond to videos with their voice and add polls, photo carousels, and Live Photos to their comments. Spotify lets video podcasters use polls and Q&As to engage their audiences.

YouTube is finally catching up a bit by adding support for leaving GIFs in comments and letting users comment while watching YouTube on TV. The latter works by voice, not painfully typing out “LOL” on your remote control, YouTube noted.

One of the more interesting additions is a new comment moderation tool that’s personalized to each creator’s needs. Though YouTube already offers a comment moderation filter, creators may want to tailor it more precisely, particularly on live videos, where it’s harder to keep up. For now, the company is calling this personalized moderation an “experiment” and didn’t provide specific technical details about how it works.

Other features are meant to help creators grow their fan communities — and make money from that fandom. These arrive at a time when revenue from advertising is no longer the only way creators monetize their videos.

The company said its Channel Memberships features are evolving, with the addition of paid, members-only communities, where members can share posts and start discussions with other top fans. YouTube will market these communities alongside other memberships on a new “channel memberships” page for viewers, designed to help them discover ones that match their interests.

Hype, a feature that lets fans recommend smaller creators’ videos to others and climb fan leaderboards, will gain new functionality dubbed “Hype with Jewels.” Previously, fans could only “hype” videos three times per week for free. Now they can buy Jewels, a virtual currency of sorts, to hype videos even more, helping to support creator and grow their audience. Fans motivated by clout may also appreciate that their handles will be permanently added to the video’s description.

YouTube said viewers have so far hyped more than 75 million unique videos over 1 billion times.

The company’s direct messaging feature for sharing videos with family and friends will also support group chats in the next few months. Users will be able to record quick, raw videos and share them in these conversations, too.

These community-focused features arrived alongside other creator tools, including those for A/B testing, live dubbing, AI-assisted video editing, and more.

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Sarah Perez

Consumer News Editor

October 13 – 15

San Francisco

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