How do you make sure YouTube employees are aware of YouTube’s top channels?
Uncovering the Problem
During my career at YouTube, it was very common for employees to not know very much about YouTube creators. This was understandable since many people did not work directly with creators or research them every day, but the lack of creator knowledge meant that only a few well known top creators were being invited to events, referenced in marketing campaigns, or asked to give feedback on upcoming features. It also sometimes led to mildly embarrassing incidents like top creators not being recognized by YouTube staff, as well as executives drawing blank when asked about their favorite new creators.
COMING UP WITH A SOLUTION
To help solve the problem, I took some inspiration from the music industry. First, I created a design for “Creator Charts” that mimicked the popular Billboard Charts. My goal was to keep the amount of information minimal so that creators and their rankings could be visible at a glance, but also to provide enough data to support why each creator earned their place.
YouTube had recently switched it’s primary video metric from “views” to “watch-time“, so I based the primary ranking on how much watch-time each creator accrued each business quarter. I also included other useful data metrics such as views per quarter, subscribers per quarter, and uploads per quarter. To help readers understand what all this information meant, I used color coded text to indicate if a channel’s metrics rose or fell each quarter, icons to highlight fast-growing channels, and icons to display the channel’s content category and country.
Similar to billboard charts, we did not just create one version at a time. Each quarter we published the global chart, as well as vertical-specific charts (e.g. Most Watched Gaming Channels), regional charts (e.g. Most Watched European Channels), as well as country specific charts (e.g. Most Watched Icelandic Channels).
To distribute the charts, I took another lesson from the music industry and emulated the low tech solution of posters and street teams. I contacted the facilities teams at all of the eight YouTube offices across six countries and asked them to print and distribute the appropriate posters for their regions and leave them around specific locations in their offices.
I wanted to make sure the posters were placed in locations where employees would have the time to explore each chart and look up a couple channels on their own. I asked that the posters be placed in the kitchens and lunch areas where people often congregated, but there was one other area where I knew I would have people’s attention: the bathroom. My logic was that if there was one place in the world where I could reach every employee and make it socially acceptable to watch videos in a stall, it would be a YouTube bathroom.
Results
With thousands of posters printed and my somewhat unorthodox distribution method, we were able to reach YouTube employees in every team and at every level, feeding them up to date localized information on the platform’s most successful and fastest rising creators. One of the most unexpected outcomes was from YouTube creators, who would see the charts when they came by the YouTube offices for meetings. They would often stop and examine the charts for far longer than any employees, eager to find out where they ranked and to find out who their competition was.