YouTube Channels For Dummies. Rob Ciampa

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СКАЧАТЬ start looking ahead to planning a channel. If you’re new to YouTube or you need to dig a bit deeper as a user, this is the chapter for you.

What You’ll Find on YouTube

      You’ll find, in a word, videos on YouTube. You’ll find, in several words, just about anything on YouTube. We would say that you’ll find anything you can imagine, but even we never would have imagined that anyone would make a compilation of animal clips from the defunct app Vine, and we definitely would never have imagined that the compilation would have been viewed over 214 million times. The best way to describe what’s on YouTube may be to start with the categories that YouTube lists on its home page.

      Managing your identity

      Your entire YouTube experience is driven by whether YouTube knows who you are. It doesn’t use any magic to figure it out. Instead, YouTube simply determines whether you’re logged in or logged out. When you log in, YouTube can make video recommendations based on your viewing behavior. In other words, after YouTube knows what you like, it does its best to bring more of that great video content to you.

      

YouTube and its parent, Google, are in the advertising business and are not promoting online video for the betterment of mankind (though some channels on YouTube actually help achieve that goal). By understanding your viewing behavior when you’re logged in, YouTube and Google are able to serve better and more relevant ads to you. That’s good for them, for the advertiser, and for the viewer. Sure, most people don’t like ads, but YouTube is truly trying to do a better job of targeting ads. (Chapter 13 covers this topic in more detail.)

      As you can see in this chapter and throughout the book, you need to be logged in to do most of the important things on YouTube. Sure, you can watch videos without being logged in, but you’ll miss a good part of the experience. You need a Google account to log in, and we show you how to set up one of those a little later in this chapter, in the section “Working with a YouTube Account.” You also have the option to create a YouTube channel for an existing Google account.

      

You don’t need a YouTube channel to log in to YouTube — you just need a Google account. Having a channel though, as you’ll soon find out, helps you organize your YouTube viewing without having to create any videos.

      Navigating the home page

      The home page of YouTube (www.youtube.com) is a fickle beast. It was once the fount of discovery for YouTube viewers. If you were looking for new content, the home page was the place to be. Over the years, though, YouTube changed the home page experience. Many changes have been tied to the company’s desire to know its viewers. Viewers who are logged in with accounts and who have a history of using YouTube see videos that might appeal to them based on past usage. New users and those not logged in see the videos that are currently most popular on the site.

      The logged-in experience

      As long as you’re logged in to YouTube when you watch videos, the site is busily keeping track of everything you see and trying to form an idea about what kind of videos you like. This information dynamically drives the home page you see, and YouTube tries to show you videos that it thinks you’ll like. Your home page will come to be dominated by material that is similar to material you’ve watched in the past.

Here’s a quick tour of what you’re likely to see when you log on to www.youtube.com after you create an account. (Again, we tell you more about creating an account later in this chapter, in the section “Working with a YouTube Account.”) Take a look at Figure 2-1 to see how a YouTube home page looks when you log in.

      Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and sometimes you need a thousand words to explain what that picture is actually trying to show you. When it comes to the YouTube home page, you definitely need the thousand words. The list in the following section offers descriptions of what's on the home page.

      Along the top

      These are essentially YouTube’s main controls, and with them, you can access most of the site’s essential functions.

       The Guide icon: This button, consisting of three horizontal bars, sits next to the YouTube button. Clicking it brings up a guide of channels and topics that may be of interest to the viewer.

       The YouTube button: Though it looks exactly like the YouTube logo, this button actually does something in addition to looking pretty; clicking it always brings you back to the YouTube home page.

       The Search box: Whenever you need to search for a video, this is where you go. Enter keywords to find videos that may match what you’re looking for.FIGURE 2-1: The logged-in YouTube home page.

       The Upload icon: When you’re ready to upload a video, you get started by using this camera-shaped button. Clicking it opens a dropdown menu, giving you the option to post a video or do a livestream. (Read more about the Upload icon in Chapter 9.)

       The YouTube Apps icon: This button, consisting of nine tiny squares, allows you to access a suite of other YouTube applications, including its own television service, YouTube TV; music streaming, via YouTube Music; and a safer, child-oriented site, YouTube Kids. It also has helpful tools for creators. The Creator Academy provides instructional guides for users hoping to maximize their channel’s effectiveness. YouTube for Artists offers musicians a means of promoting and growing their content.

       The Notifications bell: Notifications of any activity relevant to your user experience appear here. As a YouTube creator, you’re alerted whenever activity happens on your channel, including comments, video sharing, and more. As a viewer who has notifications turned on, you’re notified whenever channels upload videos or make posts.

       Channel icon: A round image button shows either the Channel icon you come up with or an image associated with your Google ID when you’re logged in. Use this button to get to YouTube Studio, which is your YouTube Mission Control, or to configure your YouTube account settings. You can log on to YouTube through your Google account, but we recommend having an associated YouTube channel, to get all the benefits of your YouTube experience, such as creating playlists. (For more on playlists, see Chapter 3.)

      Down the left side

      

The menu functions running down the left side of the screen complement the functionality of the ones that run across the top and focus more on content. You can toggle what’s shown on the left side by clicking the Guide icon:

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