Summary
- YouTube’s Jump Ahead experiment is now widely available for Premium subscribers.
- This experiment is currently limited to people in the US and English-language videos but could be more widely available later.
- Although it has benefits, Jump Ahead could potentially impact creators’ revenue on the platform.
YouTube is one of our favorite entertainment apps, and that likely won’t change anytime soon due to the sheer volume of people who use the platform. While YouTube’s aggressive push to promote its Premium subscription has been unsavory on some occasions, there are plenty of benefits subscribers continue to enjoy, such as experiments. These experiments allow select users to test under-development features ahead of their wider release. The YouTube team is now pushing another experiment for Premium subscribers, one that should make it significantly easier to skip ahead to the best parts of the video.
According to 9to5Google, this particular experiment, called Jump Ahead, is currently rolling out to YouTube Premium users in the US and is limited to English-language videos only. Moreover, only the YouTube mobile apps appear to be reflecting this experiment as of now. If this feature sounds familiar, it’s because YouTube’s Creator Studio team announced its initial arrival in March.
This expanded availability should help the YouTube team gauge how users react to the AI-based Jump Ahead’s usefulness. The experiment will run until June 1, 2024, but there’s every chance that YouTube will push the date further or even blend it into the app.
How does Jump Ahead work?
The new Jump Ahead feature is basically a better version of the tried and tested double-tap to seek functionality. But instead of skipping ahead based on time intervals, Jump Ahead will utilize a combination of machine learning tools and user view history to cleverly skip to the most popular part of the video.
Jump Ahead is currently limited to a few videos on the platform, but that could change as it becomes more widely available worldwide. 9to5Google suggests that videos with higher view counts may be favored for this particular experiment, which makes sense. Despite the obvious positives of Jump Ahead, it isn’t without a few downsides, as we’ve previously pointed out.
Having users skip ahead to the most watched part of the video with a couple of clicks/taps could result in creators losing their revenue, potentially impacting ad placements in videos. So YouTube will have to consider some of these aspects before deciding on Jump Ahead’s broader availability.
