YouTube brings the Hype
This week’s 5 stories include YouTube’s new way to surface great content, shopping in games, shopping from content creators, and the latest big batch of Netflix viewing data.
YouTube announced a new engagement tool and metric this week - Hype. A Hype is essentially a ‘super like’ - when you enjoy a new video from a small account (under 500,000 subs), you can give it a Hype, to give it a chance to be seen by more people. YouTube is creating a new chart of the 100 most hyped videos, and users are restricted to just 3 hypes per week (but in future they may sell additional ones).
This will allow more videos from small accounts to break out, and small accounts to make it big more quickly, but also give viewers more ways to find really good content. Presumably it will be gamed (I’m imagining forums and WhatsApp groups of fans regularly sharing specific videos to hype) but it’s a good additional data point for YouTube, and it will benefit the best new and small creators, one of the things that was key to TikTok’s success.
Thanks to Bram Meuleman for the link!
Continuing the ‘everything is shoppable’ megatrend, Roblox is now following other content platforms and adding a commerce partner. Roblox is a huge game, with nearly 80m daily active users, and lots of brands have an official presence. Soon it will be possible for brands and creators to directly sell physical items through Shopify within the game, without having to click through to a third party. Last month Roblox did a partnership to sell cinema tickets (for Beetlejuice) within the platform, and this new deal, which will fully launch in 2025, will give many more opportunities to engage audiences in new, unique and personalised ways. In a way it is a bit like the previous story - very keen fans want more ways to participate, whether by giving a special ‘like’, or through commerce.
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Meanwhile Expedia has partnered with a number of creators to let them open shoppable storefronts on the platform so that they can directly create lists of their recommendations, which people can then click on to book. This takes out some of the friction of being inspired on an app like Instagram and then having to search for the hotels etc, but it also gives the creators a potential reward for their recommendations. Expedia has also created collections with notable celebrities including footballer Virgil van Dijk (including hotels in Liverpool), with media owners including Condé Nast Traveler, and local tourism organisations including Visit Orlando.
Apple’s health app was released just over 10 years ago, and ever since it has been pushing the idea of health as a reason to use its devices, including measuring heart rate (and irregularities) through the Apple Watch. In the last couple of weeks it has won new two FDA approvals in the US for health uses; the (most recent) watch now has approval as an ‘over the counter’ device to help to check for sleep apnea, a sleep disorder which impacts breathing, and the (most recent) Airpods now have approval to serve as hearing aids. We might see Apple’s products as media devices, but items as intimate and personal as a watch or headphones can also be much more central to people’s lives.
Another data dump from Netflix, focusing on the first 6 months of the year, listing their IP against the number of viewing accounts and time spent. It’s fun to dive into the data, and a few things are apparent, including:
Netflix has such depth of content; the table for TV shows is nearly 7,000 rows long, and the one for movies is over 9,000. Viewing can drop off quickly; Squid Game: The Challenge, which came out in November, and was one of the hits in Q4 only reached 3.3m subscribers in the first half of 2024 (less than the original Squid Game drama, which is reached over 5m, despite coming out in 2021). & Films generally have higher reach than TV shows, but have lower time spent (because they are shorter).