Official YouTube Blog

A different kind of #YouTubeRewind: What you liked in 2019

Thursday, December 5, 2019

In 2019, you joined forces to set a record for the most liked video on YouTube, helped an unlikely country star take over the charts, and brought Minecraft’s popularity to new heights. As 2020 draws near, it’s time to celebrate the moments that defined the past twelve months in pop culture.

But first, we can't ignore the elephant in the room: Last year’s YouTube Rewind, um, wasn’t your favorite (to put it lightly...). So this year, we tried something different and looked at what you did like — a lot. Our Rewind 2019 video compiles the top videos and creators that you liked and watched the most around the world, from the biggest games to must-watch beauty palettes and breakout stars.

But of course, it's also time to announce our annual lists of top trending videos and top music videos.

2019 saw creators transform into mainstream celebrities with genre-defying influence: James Charles and Tati’s back-and-forth transcended the beauty community; Shane Dawson continued to find success with his longform docuseries format and foray into the makeup world; and MrBeast’s ultra-charitable challenge videos united viewers across the internet.

Also on this year’s top trending list: A long-requested episode of Hot Ones, a meme-making moment from Soulja Boy, a conversation-starting short film, SNL’s most-watched sketch of 2019, an underdog victory in the ring, and an informational video on why spiders and bees are actually our friends.

Collectively, these 10 videos were watched 305 million times and for around 50 million hours. The channels behind them total more than 110 million subscribers.

YouTube gift codes are now available on Amazon

Wednesday, December 4, 2019

Give the gift of endless entertainment to your friends and family this holiday season with YouTube gift codes, now available for purchase on Amazon in the U.S. Whether it’s for a friend miles away, a loved one at home, or a last minute gift, we’ve made it easy to treat someone to their favorite YouTube products.

Something for everyone

YouTube gift codes can be used to enjoy YouTube subscriptions, to buy or rent movies and shows, or to become a channel member on YouTube. Recipients can use their gift code towards a YouTube Premium subscription to watch uninterrupted — with ad-free, offline, and background — play. They can also enjoy these same benefits with YouTube Music Premium, a dedicated music streaming service that’s their guide to the entire world of music. For sports and entertainment fans alike, a YouTube TV subscription offers cable-free live and on-demand TV with 70+ channels and free unlimited cloud DVR storage space. Movie buffs can redeem their gift code to watch the latest and greatest movies and shows available on YouTube. And fitting with the giving spirit, recipients can use their gift code to support their favorite YouTube creators with a Channel Membership, which unlocks badges, emojis and creator perks.

Easy to buy and redeem

To purchase a gift code, simply:

Click here to get to the purchase page.
Choose a design and your desired amount.
Enter the recipient’s email address and a message.
Pick your delivery date and select purchase.

On the delivery date, the recipient will get a YouTube gift code delivered via email with instructions for redeeming on youtube.com/redeem. When redeemed, the gift code value will be added to the recipient’s Google Play balance, which can be used to make purchases on YouTube or Google Play.

Give a YouTube gift code today!

— The YouTube team

The Four Rs of Responsibility, Part 2: Raising authoritative content and reducing borderline content and harmful misinformation

Tuesday, December 3, 2019

YouTube is an open video platform, where anyone can upload a video and share it with the world. And with this openness comes incredible opportunities as well as challenges. That’s why we’re always working to balance creative expression with our responsibility to protect the community from harmful content.

Our community guidelines set the rules of the road on YouTube, and a combination of people and machines help us remove more violative content than ever before. That said, there will always be content on YouTube that brushes up against our policies, but doesn’t quite cross the line. So over the past couple of years, we've been working to raise authoritative voices on YouTube and reduce the spread of borderline content and harmful misinformation. And we are already seeing great progress. Authoritative news is thriving on our site. And since January 2019, we’ve launched over 30 different changes to reduce recommendations of borderline content and harmful misinformation. The result is a 70% average drop in watch time of this content coming from non-subscribed recommendations in the U.S.¹

Raising authoritative voices on YouTube

More and more people turn to YouTube to catch up on the latest news or simply learn more about the topics they’re curious about — whether it’s climate change or a natural disaster. For topics like music or entertainment, relevance, newness and popularity are most helpful to understand what people are interested in. But for subjects such as news, science and historical events, where accuracy and authoritativeness are key, the quality of information and context matter most — much more than engagement. That's why we've re-doubled our efforts to raise authoritative sources to the top and introduced a suite of features to tackle this challenge holistically:

Elevating authoritative sources in our systems: In 2017, we started to prioritize authoritative voices, including news sources like CNN, Fox News, Jovem Pan, India Today and the Guardian, for news and information queries in search results and “watch next” panels. Let’s say you’re looking to learn more about a newsworthy event. For example, try searching for “Brexit.” While there will be slight variations, on average, 93% of the videos in global top 10 results come from high-authority channels. Authoritativeness is also important for evergreen topics prone to misinformation, such as videos about vaccines. In these cases, we aim to surface videos from experts, like public health institutions, in search results. Millions of search queries are getting this treatment today and we’re continually expanding to more topics and countries.

Providing reliable information faster for breaking news: Reliable information becomes especially critical as news is breaking. But as events are unfolding, it can take time to produce high-quality videos containing verified facts. So we've started providing short previews of text-based news articles in search results on YouTube, along with a reminder that breaking and developing news can rapidly change. We’ve also introduced Top News and Breaking News sections to highlight quality journalism. In fact, this year alone, we’ve seen that consumption on authoritative news partners’ channels has grown by 60 percent.

Providing context to users: Sometimes a video alone does not provide enough context to viewers about what they are watching. We want to make sure that people who watch videos about topics prone to misinformation are provided additional information while viewing. To that end, we’ve designed a variety of information panels that target different types of context, such as general topics and recent news prone to misinformation, or about publishers themselves. For example, when people watch videos that encourage viewers to skip the MMR vaccine, we show information panels to provide more basic scientific context, linking to third-party sources. Or if people are viewing news videos uploaded by a public broadcaster or a government-funded news outlet, we show informational notices underneath the video about the news outlet. Collectively, we’ve delivered more than 3.5 billion impressions across all of these information panels since June 2018 and we’re expanding these panels to more and more countries.

Reducing borderline content and harmful misinformation

Content that comes close to — but doesn’t quite cross the line of — violating our Community Guidelines is a fraction of 1% of what’s watched on YouTube in the U.S. To give a quick comparison, meditation videos (a fairly narrow category) have more daily watch time than borderline and harmful misinformation combined. That said, even a fraction of a percent is too much. So this past January, we announced we’d begin reducing recommendations of borderline content or videos that could misinform users in harmful ways. This work is still ramping up and we’ve expanded to more countries outside of the U.S., including the UK, Ireland, South Africa and other English-language markets. And we have begun expanding this effort to non-English-language markets, starting with Brazil, France, Germany, Mexico and Spain.

So how does this actually work? Determining what is harmful misinformation or borderline is tricky, especially for the wide variety of videos that are on YouTube. We rely on external evaluators located around the world to provide critical input on the quality of a video. And these evaluators use public guidelines to guide their work. Each evaluated video receives up to 9 different opinions and some critical areas require certified experts. For example, medical doctors provide guidance on the validity of videos about specific medical treatments to limit the spread of medical misinformation. Based on the consensus input from the evaluators, we use well-tested machine learning systems to build models. These models help review hundreds of thousands of hours of videos every day in order to find and limit the spread of borderline content. And over time, the accuracy of these systems will continue to improve.

Our work continues. We are exploring options to bring in external researchers to study our systems and we will continue to invest in more teams and new features. Nothing is more important to us than ensuring we are living up to our responsibility. We remain focused on maintaining that delicate balance which allows diverse voices to flourish on YouTube — including those that others will disagree with — while also protecting viewers, creators and the wider ecosystem from harmful content.

[Read more] The Four Rs of Responsibility, Part 1: Removing harmful content

¹Based on the 28-day average from 9/17/19 - 10/14/19, compared to when we first started taking action on this type of content in January 2019.

From the timeline:

July 27, 2015; https://youtube.googleblog.com/2015/07/youtube-comments.html

Sept 14, 2016; https://www.blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiative/digital-news-initiative-introducing/

July 20, 2017; https://youtube.googleblog.com/2017/07/bringing-new-redirect-method-features.html

Feb 2, 2018; https://youtube.googleblog.com/2018/02/greater-transparency-for-users-around.html

July 9, 2018; https://youtube.googleblog.com/2018/07/building-better-news-experience-on.html

July 9, 2018; https://youtube.googleblog.com/2018/07/building-better-news-experience-on.html

July 9, 2018; https://youtube.googleblog.com/2018/07/building-better-news-experience-on.html

March 7, 2019; https://india.googleblog.com/2019/04/bringing-greater-transparency-and.html

June 3, 2019; https://youtube.googleblog.com/2019/06/an-update-on-our-efforts-to-protect.html

June 5, 2019; https://youtube.googleblog.com/2019/06/our-ongoing-work-to-tackle-hate.html

July 8, 2019; https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2019/08/preserving-openness-through-responsibility.html

Google.org, Susan Wojcicki and her husband, Dennis Troper, support families experiencing homelessness with $1.35 million grant

Thursday, November 21, 2019

San Francisco Mayor London Breed and Susan Wojcicki

Today, CEO Susan Wojcicki stood with San Francisco Mayor London Breed at Hamilton Families, a nonprofit organization that supports families experiencing homelessness, and announced a combined grant of $1.35 million to the program. The grant comes from Google.org and from Wojcicki and her husband, Dennis Troper.

Here are her remarks from this afternoon:

"Thank you, Mayor Breed. I’m so glad to be here with you, and all of your leadership in fighting homelessness. I also wanted to say thank you to everyone here at Hamilton Families and the impact you've had in our community and in the lives of so many families.

Sometimes the scale of an issue can make us feel like it’s impossible to solve.

And even though we know it’s important, we wind up doing nothing because it feels overwhelming for us.

The work at Hamilton Families shows how we can make a difference in a tangible way, one family at a time.

Over the years, I’ve always recognized how serious a problem of homelessness is in the Bay Area, and I’ve contributed — along with my husband — to support many local organizations that help meet the needs of people experiencing homelessness.

I’m here today because of an idea that first started with a school project. Earlier this year, my daughter worked on a project about homelessness.

As I listened to her questions and reactions, I realized I didn’t have a lot of answers for something that was so important and affecting so many families. We spent time researching different solutions, including coming here, and that’s how we got in touch with Hamilton Families.

We were impressed by the services offered here that give families a fresh start.

And that’s why we’re gathered today — to announce a new grant to further support all the incredible efforts done by Hamilton Families to find families permanent homes, and along the way meet their needs by providing shelter, meals, and more. We appreciate everything you do, from offering counseling and job resources to giving children the chance to succeed at school.

Today, Google.org is contributing $850,000. And together with my husband, Dennis, we’re contributing $500,000 — for a total of $1.35 million to boost the work of Hamilton Families.

Over the next year, this grant will make an impact in our communities, and it will help Hamilton serve 700 families and find housing for another 200.

And it will also fund an outreach effort — a series of videos and podcasts — that will tell the stories of individuals who are facing homelessness.

Our goal is to help the community understand the problems that can lead to homelessness and also inspire others to get involved in whatever way they can.

Sometimes, the greatest gift we can offer is our time. And in that spirit, next year, we will organize an event for the YouTube employees to come to the shelter. We're very excited about that.

Homelessness is an incredibly complicated challenge for our society. But if we all come together to look out for one another, our combined contributions can make a big difference."

Can anyone match Freddie Mercury’s legendary voice? Queen and YouTube Music are challenging fans to find out!

Thursday, November 14, 2019

"Bohemian Rhapsody" is considered one of the greatest rock songs of all time, so it’s no wonder the music video recently hit 1 billion views on YouTube. For decades, fans have belted out the song’s iconic lyrics alongside Freddie Mercury’s one-of-a-kind vocals, but how many can really sing it just like Freddie? YouTube, Google Creative Lab, and Google Research — working in partnership with Queen, Universal Music Group and Hollywood Records — have built a new AI experiment called FreddieMeter to find out!

Released in support of Mercury Phoenix Trust, a charity founded by Brian May, Roger Taylor and Jim Beach to raise awareness and funds for the fight against HIV/AIDS, and in honor of the 44th anniversary of the band’s first-ever live performance of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” at the Empire Theater, Liverpool, U.K in November 1975; FreddieMeter was created to let fans around the world determine how closely their singing matches the voice of Queen’s legendary frontman, Freddie Mercury.

FreddieMeter shows users how closely their voice matches Freddie Mercury’s legendary range by analyzing the singer’s pitch, timbre, and melody to assign them a score of 0 to 100. Queen fans, killer impressionists, and anyone who enjoys a little karaoke and are ready to step up to the challenge can get started by doing the following:

SING: Pick one of four QUEEN songs on the microsite ("Bohemian Rhapsody," "Don’t Stop Me Now," "Somebody to Love" or "We Are the Champions") and sing your heart out!

SHARE: Get your score and share! Download the custom scorecard asset directly to your device, then share it on YouTube Stories, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

CHALLENGE: Using the hashtag #FreddieChallenge on social channels, challenge three friends to see how they measure up.

DONATE: Encourage a charitable donation to Mercury Phoenix Trust in your post → http://www.mercuryphoenixtrust.com/donate

Google Creative Lab and Google Research created FreddieMeter using new on-device machine learning models, and it’s been trained on Freddie’s isolated vocals, as well as samples of people trying to sing like Freddie. FreddieMeter is trained on and optimized for individual singers and works on desktop, Android and iPhone devices, and the audio doesn’t get uploaded to any servers to be analyzed, so all vocals stay totally private unless shared by the user.

FreddieMeter continues YouTube’s celebration of Queen’s music and “Bohemian Rhapsody’s” 1 billion views milestone, which coincided with the release of a newly remastered HD version of the video. The achievement made history with the anthem being the first pre-1990s video to reach one billion views on the platform.

In partnership with Universal Music Group and Hollywood Records, YouTube also recently launched ‘You Are The Champions,’ a unique campaign that gave fans an exclusive chance to become a part of Queen history with a starring role in brand-new, user-generated videos for three of the band’s most celebrated tracks: “A Kind of Magic,” “Don’t Stop Me Now” and the iconic “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The results were pulled from more than 10,000 submissions from more than 120 countries around the world, showing the depth and love for Queen and Freddie amongst their loyal global fanbase.

To take on the #FreddieChallenge now or find out more about FreddieMeter, visit freddiemeter.withyoutube.com.

Nate Boyer: From Green Beret to the starting lineup

Monday, November 11, 2019

Nate Boyer at the Texas Longhorns stadium. (YouTube)

Nate Boyer is no ordinary football player. While being deployed in Afghanistan, the former Green Beret learned how to play football by watching YouTube tutorials. At age 30, after practicing relentlessly, Boyer joined the Texas Longhorns as the team’s long snapper.

YouTube caught up with Boyer in advance of Veterans Day to learn more about his journey from the military to the football field, and to get his advice for others who might want to follow in his footsteps.

YouTube: Today is Veterans Day. What does this day mean to you?

Nate Boyer: Veterans Day for me is a time for us all to come together — veterans, civilians, families, everybody — to recognize those who have defended this country. In particular, it’s important to me that we honor the vets who didn’t come home to the same kind of appreciation that we get today, especially Vietnam vets. It’s also an important moment for vets to recognize each other and ourselves. It’s okay to receive that appreciation and pat yourself on the back; you’re somebody who was willing to make a sacrifice for their country.

YouTube: Your story is incredibly inspiring for many young people. What would you say to a kid who dreams of making it in the big leagues?

NB: I’m a testament that anything is possible. I’m not a great athlete. I’m good, but not great. I’m not very big. I was too old, too inexperienced. I had every reason to not even try. I knew I was capable, because of my experience in the military, and that’s what gave me the confidence to go all-in and chase my dream. But it’s important for all young people to know that they can keep plugging away, against all odds. Don’t quit, and you’ll get better every day. Be okay with the process and understand that it takes time to improve. It will happen.You will achieve some success and you will probably get a lot farther than you had imagined.

YouTube: How can we help?

NB: The cool thing about YouTube is that it helps you see what is possible. I had a dream that I wanted to make come true for myself, to play college football. People have dreams and crazy ideas, and they wonder if it’s possible to make it happen. On YouTube, you can find all kinds of examples of what other people have made happen for themselves, and it makes you believe that your dreams are possible, that there is a path you can follow. We’re all capable. We need to believe that we can take a chance to follow our dreams.

If you can dream it, you can YouTube it. If you can YouTube it, you can do it.

YouTube: What else have you learned from watching YouTube?

NB: I have learned all kinds of things around the house: how to replace the lightbulb in my headlight, putting together a bed, following recipes. I’m now working in film and television, and I even use YouTube to learn about acting and hosting. You can learn anything from YouTube.

— The YouTube Team

Introducing a fresh new look for YouTube on desktop and tablets

Thursday, November 7, 2019

Starting today, we’re bringing you the new YouTube homepage — a design that brings more features to the viewing experience on Home to help you find the next great video to watch. The updated design will begin rolling out today across desktops and YouTube apps on Android and iOS tablets, and will be available to everyone soon. Here’s what you can expect to see:

Customize what to watch next with your queue

You’ve told us you want a better way to queue up the next video to watch, so we’re introducing the option to add to queue on desktop. You can select a handful of videos to watch next without interrupting the video you’re currently watching. Videos in your queue won't save after you've closed your browser, but you can always save videos to your permanent "Watch Later" playlist, too.

Remove suggestions from channels you don’t want to watch

We launched a feature on mobile earlier this year to make it even simpler for you to tell us to stop suggesting videos from a particular channel, and today we’re bringing this to desktop. Just select the three-dot menu next to a video on the homepage, then select “Don’t recommend channel.” After that, you should no longer see videos from that channel suggested to you on the YouTube homepage. You may still be able to find these videos if you search for them, or visit the channel page or Trending tab.

Coming soon: select topics to refine your Homepage and Up Next videos

Earlier this year, we added a new feature to the YouTube Android app that lets you select your favorite topics and customize your Home feed with related videos. We’ll be releasing it on desktop and tablets soon!

We’ve been experimenting with this updated design for a few months and — based on your input — have made dozens of improvements to the layout, most notably adjusting the thumbnail sizes and showing more videos on larger screens. We’re excited to roll this out to everyone, and we hope you’ll find the updated design and new features helpful as you navigate the incredible breadth of content available on YouTube.

Posted by Essam El-Dardiry, Senior Product Manager

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