Dashboard

Your dashboard gives you a snapshot overview of your channel, including your total video views, your subscriber count, recent comments, videos, and an overview of your analytics with stats on watch time, views, and even revenue, if you have monetization enabled.

You can click on Add widget in the upper right-hand corner of your dashboard to customize the content that appears on your dashboard when you log in.

Video Manager

Clicking on Video Manager offers you three options.

• Videos, where you can see a list of the videos you’ve posted, with the most recent list first. Marketers may find this particular snapshot handy because it shows you how many views, comments, likes, and dislikes your videos have, which makes it easy to compare their relevant performance. You can sort this list by clicking on the View in the upper right-hand corner and choosing Most viewed, Monetized, and other sort options from the drop-down list. You can also take bulk actions on this page or edit individual videos. (Check out Chapter 14 for more on the publishing and editing of videos.)
• Playlists, a listing of your playlists that you can sort by newest or oldest, edit playlists, or create new ones.
• Copyright notices, which gives you a listing of your videos that may have copyright issues. See the upcoming section “Being in Good Standing” for more on copyright.

Live Streaming

In the live streaming section, you can choose to start a livestream or schedule an event. You can also test your camera settings. (Check out Chapter 11 for more on setting up live streaming.)

Marketers should consider whether a livestream will help deliver against marketing and business goals. One of the trickiest things about livestreams is garnering decent audience numbers. Some interesting livestream applications for marketers can be live events, interviews with influencers and celebrities, or product launches.

Community

The Community section houses

• Comments
• Subscribers
• Super Chat
• Community Settings
• Credits

Super Chat

A super chat is a feature that lets a fan highlight their message in a chat, so it’s more applicable to fans. However, marketers may find creative ways to make use of it.

When you’re live streaming, fans can chat directly with you in a chat window (see Figure 15-2). Super Chat allows those fans to pay to have their message highlighted with a color to make it stand out against all other chat messages and pinned in the chat window for a set period of time.

If you’re a marketer creating a livestream that features a celebrity or influencer, the people tuning in may want to use the Super Chat feature to highlight their message. This feature generates revenue for your channel.

Channel

Within the Channel section, you can review and customize a variety of settings:

• Status and features
• Monetization
• Upload defaults
• Branding
• Advanced options

Upload defaults

The Upload defaults section is a huge timesaver. You can set the defaults you want implemented across each video you upload. You can, of course, override these settings when you’re uploading a video (see Chapter 14 for more on publishing videos) but having your favorite settings set as defaults will save you lots of time each time you upload. You can set defaults for

• Privacy, choosing from private, unlisted or public
• Category, such as music, sports, and travel
• The license that applies
• Title, which is helpful if you have a standard title format you use
• Description, where you can include standard text and links that appear in the description box for each video
• Tags that apply to your videos
• Comments and user ratings
• Monetization, including if you want to include midroll ads (see Chapter 4)
• The language the video is in and whether you’d like people in the community to help you with translating and transcribing your video

For marketers, consistency is key, and setting your defaults is a great way to ensure a level of consistency against every video you post. For example, while each video will have a custom description, you can include a standard boilerplate description across all your videos. See Figure 15-3 for an example from Oprah Winfrey’s OWN YouTube channel, which includes a standard description across all of her videos posted.

Analytics

Spending time regularly looking at your analytics is a key component of successfully using YouTube for your marketing efforts. For a deeper dive into all things Analytics, see Part 6.

Translations and Transcriptions

When you visit the Translations and Transcriptions section, you see a list of your videos that community members have either translated for you or transcribed. Your videos can

• Have your video’s title and description translated into other languages.
• Have the audio of the video transcribed, capturing whatever is said in the language it was said in, which enables people to see subtitles (closed captions) for your videos so they can watch without audio.
• Have transcriptions translated, allowing speakers of other languages to enjoy your videos.

Translating your videos can help you appear more often in the search results and reach more people around the world. If people who speak other languages or are living in other countries can enjoy your videos, consider asking community members to help you translate.

Google Translate is a fantastic tool that provides high-quality translations. Visit https://translate.google.com, enter some text, and then pick your language. You can even have Google Translate play back the translation through audio. I once had a conversation with a Romanian man and an Italian woman all at the same time using this tool!

Adding subtitles to your video may seem like a lower priority consideration because you’d assume that most people are listening to the videos they’re watching. However, many people are watching videos on their mobile phones, so Google has started to auto-play videos with no sound, instead using captions to entice people to click and watch more with the full audio. Further, millions of people are hearing impaired and use subtitles regularly.

You can provide translations and transcriptions to other people’s videos. If you click on Your Contributions on the left-hand side menu in Creator Studio Classic, you’ll see a listing of the contributions you’ve made.

Create

In the Create section of Creator Studio Classic, you find an audio library with tons of free music and sound effects. YouTube knows that when people are creating videos, they want to use music and sound effects, but most folk don’t have access to royalty-free sound that they can easily use. This library offers a deep and comprehensive selection of audio files you can freely use without worrying about running afoul of copyright laws and policies.

The library contains two tabs:

• Free music, which lets you browse songs by genre, mood (such as happy, dramatic, or sad), instrument, and duration.
• Sound effects, with categories from alarms to animals, horror to human voices, tools to transportation, and even weapons to weather.

When you find a music track or sound effect you like, you can download the file and use it in your video editing. (Discover more about video editing in Chapter 11.)

An additional section under the Create tab, named Music Policies, helps you search for popular music tracks that you may want to use in your videos and determine whether they’re available for use.

Your contributions

Any subtitles and closed captions that you’ve contributed to other people’s videos are listed in the Your contributions section.

Channel art

The banner image is the large image spanning the top of a channel. Look at your current banner and decide whether it still accurately represents you, your brand, your company, your marketing efforts, and your channel’s overall purpose.

Consider updating your banner if

• Your company’s brand image or style guidelines have changed. Ensure the banner is an accurate reflection of your brand.
• You have a new marketing campaign, product launch, or seasonal initiative. If you have an active marketing campaign or initiative, you may want to update your banner to reflect that. For example, if you run a garden nursery, perhaps you’ll update your banner to feature imagery that matches the season, such as spring flowers or fall clean-up.
• You want a refresh. Sometimes updating your banner keeps the channel looking fresh. People visiting your channel regularly will see that it’s being actively maintained.

Updating your banner is also a chance to ensure your social media channels are up to date. If you’ve created any new social media channels or built a new website, ensure the links on your banner are accurate.

Chapter 13 details the steps to update your channel art.

Text areas of your channel

Text lives in a couple of areas of your channel:

• Discussion or Community tab: Depending on which tab you have, you can post text comments, links, and, with the Community tab, images, such as GIFs. The Community tab is slowly replacing the Discussion tab across all channels. Check to see whether people have commented on this tab and like, dislike, heart, reply, or delete.
• About section: The About section describes your channel and its content. It also describes your brand or company, so, take a look at what’s written to ensure that it accurately reflects who you are and how you are using your channel. Consider updating the text if anything has changed.

Video organization

Probably the most important part of auditing and managing your channel is how you organize your videos, Time spent organizing is never wasted. Playlists are the way you organize videos, helping people navigate all your content and encouraging them to watch more of your videos.

Every time you upload a video, you should add it to an existing playlist or create a new playlist for it. Check regularly to make sure that you haven’t forgotten to add all your videos to at least one playlist. Likewise, don’t forget to remove unnecessary videos from playlists and make sure that you give the playlist a description.

Playlists can appear in YouTube’s search results, so creating playlists is a great way to help people find your videos and is a key technique for SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is the process of attempting to influence where your search result appears. For more on SEO, see the nearby sidebar.

Copyright strikes

YouTube applies a strike when you upload a video that contains content that you do not own the copyright for. For example, if you upload a TV show or movie, that’s a pretty obvious copyright strike waiting to happen. A common example of a copyright strike comes from people using music that they don’t have the rights to on their videos.

If you receive a copyright strike, it’s because the copyright owner has sent YouTube a complete and valid legal request asking them to remove your video. A copyright strikes is one way YouTube complies with copyright law so that the platform doesn’t become the Wild West of bootlegged movies and music.

You can see specific details of your copyright strikes by navigating to your channel, clicking on Creator Studio, clicking on Video Manager, and then choosing Copyright Notices.

The good news is that YouTube is forgiving. When you get a copyright strike, it’s a warning. You can resolve a copyright strike in three ways:

• Wait for it to expire: Copyright strikes expire after 90 days, as long as you complete something referred to as Copyright School. Visit www.youtube.com/copyright_school to find out more about this requirement.
• Get a retraction: Contact the person who claimed your video and ask them to retract their claim of copyright infringement.
• Submit a counternotification: If your video was mistakenly removed because it was misidentified as infringing or qualifies as a potential fair use case, you can submit a counternotification. For more on this process, visit https://support.google.com/youtube and search for counter notification basics.

Simply deleting a video does not clear your strikes. The best approach is to not use any copyrighted material in your videos.

Community strikes

Community strikes are the type of strike you may receive if users are flagging your content as inappropriate. The key difference between a copyright strike and a community strike is that your video isn’t necessarily breaking any copyright rules. However, it is potentially infringing YouTube’s community guidelines — for example, by being racist, sexually explicit, abusive, or offensive.

YouTube is a site that relies on user-generated content, so these guidelines are in place to ensure that the platform doesn’t fill up with potentially offensive content. When a user flags a video, a YouTube team member reviews the video. Your video can stay on the site until reviewed. Users can report videos, comments, and channels as violating community guidelines.

If you get a community strike, you’ll receive an email and see an alert in your account’s channel settings with information about why your content has been removed. Strikes expire three months after they’re issued. While you have an active strike on your account, you may not be able to access some features.

If you receive multiple strikes, here’s what happens:

• For your first strike, you may see some restrictions on your ability to do things like livestream.

  Don’t try to set up another account to livestream, as YouTube will know and may terminate your accounts as a result.

• For your second strike within a three-month period, you won’t be able to post any new content to YouTube for two weeks. You get full access back after those two weeks.
• If you get three strikes within a three-month period, that’s it. Your account gets terminated.

You can appeal strikes by navigating to your YouTube channel, clicking Creator Studio, and choosing Channel ⇒   Status and features. In the Community Guidelines Status section, choose to appeal this decision.

After you submitted your appeal, you get an email from YouTube letting you know the result. If you didn’t violate the community guidelines, YouTube will reinstate your video and remove the strike.

Read more about YouTube’s Community guidelines at www.youtube.com/yt/about/policies/#community-guidelines.