YouTube’s new Hype feature is a way to promote and discover smaller creators

When a YouTube channel hits 500,000 subscribers, the company finds that things tend to change. That half-million mark is a turning point in terms of growth and revenue, says Panjali Kapa, ​​YouTube’s director of product management. “We’ve just seen disproportionate growth in revenue, even though most of our creators are smaller than that size,” he says. Bigger channels tend to get more views, which increases their recommendations, which increases their views, which increases their revenue, and so on.

With a new feature called Hype, YouTube is trying to focus on growing smaller channels and helping people discover and engage with new creators. Hype is a brand-new promotion system within YouTube: There’s a new button to promote a video, and the most promoted videos will appear on a platform-wide leaderboard. It’s a bit like Trending, but it’s focused specifically on smaller channels and what people specifically choose to recommend rather than just what they watch.

YouTube has been developing Hype since early 2023, when the company decided to focus more on building communities within YouTube. (At Wednesday’s Made on YouTube event in New York City, “community” was the buzzword of the day.) Kappa says that when talking to users, the YouTube team found that what viewers wanted most was a sense of involvement. “We had some research that told us viewers wanted to influence the creative process,” he says. “We heard feedback that they wanted to contribute to the conversation.” People wanted Cameo-style videos, they wanted Q&As with creators, and so on.

But in any case, fans wanted a way to help their favorite creators succeed. There’s something appealing about being the first to do something great, and sharing it with the world—it makes people feel invested in the stuff they’re promoting. And in an age of duets, companion videos, and remixes, viewers become creators and creators become viewers, and giving everyone a way to grow made sense for YouTube. “We really wanted to let fans engage as community members, to help support their favorite creators,” says Kaba.

Meanwhile, regular YouTube viewers keep saying the same thing: “They want to be able to discover things they otherwise wouldn’t have discovered, or that YouTube wouldn’t have recommended otherwise.” Viewers want content; creators want growth; fans want engagement. And buzz is at the heart of it all.

The actual mechanism behind the promotion is quite complicated. A video is only eligible for promotion for the first seven days after it’s posted, and of course, if it’s produced by a channel with fewer than half a million subscribers. Each user gets only three promotions per week, and each promotion is worth a certain number of points inversely proportional to the number of subscribers a given channel has. (The idea is that smaller channels should be able to get on the leaderboard too, so each promotion for a smaller channel will be worth more points — YouTube does a lot here to try to make sure that the larger channels don’t just dominate the leaderboard.) The 100 videos with the most total points make it to the top of the leaderboard.

The leaderboards vary by country, and over time, YouTube also plans to customize the “Promoted” section for each user. The top 100 list won’t change, but YouTube is suddenly getting a lot of good data about which short videos people like best across all topics. Promoted won’t impact YouTube’s traditional algorithm, but the Promoted section could soon have more filters and topic-specific leaderboards, and promoted videos will start showing up in a new section of the recommendations feed, Kappa says.

The goal of all this nuance and complexity is to make sure that the leaderboard changes frequently and that people feel invested in everything they promote. “There’s a certain beauty in showing people the things that they’ve gone out of their way to say they want to spend promotion points on,” says Christine Stewart, an interaction designer at Hype. “There’s a signal here: These are the things that people really care about, that they really want to advocate for.” It’s also an attempt to prevent gaming the system. (It’s just a fact of the internet: If you give people a leaderboard, they’ll try to hack their way to the top.) Limiting the number of promotions users get means that each one is a much stronger positive signal than a typical like—and it’s no coincidence that there’s no unpromote button.

You’ll start seeing a Promote button after you like a video as a way to further promote the content. When you promote a video, it’ll show you how many points it earned and whether it made it onto a leaderboard. At the end of each week, you’ll get a Spotify Wrapped-style summary of the videos you promoted and how they ultimately fared. There are also badges for the first few people who promoted a video, or if you promoted, say, five videos that ended up on the leaderboard. “We’re thinking about all the things we can do to celebrate people who are great promoters,” says Stewart.

For creators, promoting a video has the potential to do all sorts of things: it’s a way to connect with their biggest fans, offload some of the promotional work, and monetize their most loyal viewers. When you promote a video, the creator also gets paid, but you don’t know how much. Both Kappa and Stewart mentioned the possibility of paid promotion, where users could get more than three times a week for a fee that’s shared with the creator. “The default is always free until the promotions run out,” Stewart says, showing a model of what paid promotion might look like. “Then we’ll show you that you’re promoting for $2.”

Hype is initially its own thing within YouTube, but don’t be surprised if you see it seeping out across the platform. YouTube is a massive, practically overcrowded platform, and it’s harder than ever to break in as a new creator. Making sure new users can grow and succeed is crucial for YouTube if it wants to be home to the next Mr. Beast, not just the current one. However, you can’t tweak the algorithm away from big channels. Hype gives YouTube a chance to do what works while knowing what’s next.