YouTube is ubiquitous in our lives today, forming a core part of our media viewing experience. While subscribing to your favorite channels ensures the home feed includes some of their content, there are other ways to make sure you never miss a new video from your creators: the familiar bell icon.
Using the bell icon below a video on the web and mobile apps, users can select from All, Personalized, None, or Unsubscribe. The All option is fairly self-explanatory and lets you receive all alerts from your most preferred creators, either as standard notifications on your phone or from YouTube’s dedicated notifications pane.
YouTube has now (re)announced an experiment that could change this behavior for some users. In a post on the YouTube tests and experiments thread this week, the team said this “will impact viewers who are subscribed to a channel and have set the notifications to ‘All’ for the channel.”
This will specifically affect users who have not “recently engaged with a channel,” even with push notifications enabled. While push notifications will no longer appear for these users, they will continue to find updates in the YouTube app’s notifications section and within the Subscriptions tab, so they’re not completely cut off (via 9to5Google).
YouTube makes it clear that “actively engaged viewers” will continue to see notifications from their favorite creators when set to All. Furthermore, creators who post videos “infrequently” won’t be impacted by this test.
What’s the rationale behind this change?
More videos bring more eyeballs, which means creators have an incentive to keep uploading. But as YouTube explains, this can sometimes overwhelm users, who may then take a drastic step such as turning off notifications for all of YouTube, rather than tweaking notifications for that specific channel/creator.
This creates a problem for other creators, as updates from their channel would no longer reach the viewer in this scenario. YouTube says this experiment is being conducted to identify ways to address the issue and help creators reach their audiences more effectively. You should see no change to your notifications if it’s a channel or creator you regularly watch.
The experiment itself isn’t new and has been in the works since March last year, so it’s likely already live on your account, even if you haven’t noticed it. It’s also possible that YouTube is expanding the scope of the experiment with this announcement a couple of days ago.
What do you make of this experiment?
