YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki on Friday promised the company would do a better job with communicating to creators about its experiments and tests. Today, YouTube is making good on that commitment with an update about a new feature it’s testing out: an Explore tab, aimed at offering viewers a more diverse set of video recommendations.
The news was announced via the Creator Insider channel – the same channel Wojcicki highlighted in her recent update as the “unofficial” resource operated by YouTube employees. The channel today offers weekly updates, responses to creator feedback, and behind-the-scenes info on product launches.
According to the announcement, the new Explore feature is currently in testing with just 1 percent of iPhone YouTube app viewers, so there’s a good chance you won’t see the option in your own app.
However, if you do happen to be in the test group, then you’ll notice the bottom navigation bar of the app looks different. Instead of the tabs Home, Trending, Subscriptions, Inbox and Library, you’ll instead see Home, Explore, Subscriptions, Activity and Library.
YouTube experiments with new features all the time, including GIF-like video previews and auto-generated thumbnails. Now, the video-sharing company is testing a new Explore tab that it will roll out to one percent of iOS YouTube app users over the next few weeks.
Like Instagram’s own Explore tab, YouTube’s new experiment was created to help users discover more videos, topics and channels that might get buried under the onslaught of new content daily. It’s aimed squarely at creators, as well, to make sure their videos get surfaced to audiences that might like them. For example, if you’ve been watching a bunch of videos about telescopes, you might see some videos about high-end cameras in your Explore tab. There will also be new “shelves” within the Explore area, including areas for trending videos and one for emerging creators “on the rise.”
Explore will recommend videos based on what viewers are already watching, but with a “broader scope” than its home screen already does. “Explore is designed to help you be exposed to different kinds of topics, videos, or channels that you might not otherwise encounter,” Leung said, “but they’re still personalized — so they’re still based on your viewing activity.”
The new Explore tab, meanwhile, will be more similar to the Explore tab offered by, say, Instagram, which aside from the personalized “for you” channel, also offers up feeds dedicated to science, sports, art, and more for users to scroll through. Twitter provides a similar service, which lets users scroll through different types of feeds that aren’t necessarily full of people that they follow.