Inside The YouTube Partner Meetup New York City

Many of you wonder what happens inside the little invite-only club of YouTube Partners, and since I happen to be both a blogger and a creator, I actually had the inside vantage. Plus the YouTube team was cool enough to ok me sharing the deets on DigitalChickTV.com.

I was particularly curious about the demographics of the attendees and what their channels featured, so I could figure out what content seems to work on YouTube, and if that is changing with their new initiatives.

Although the crowd did not represent ALL of the east coast partners, the crowd was, as expected, largely male and almost entirely under, say, 35, like BarelyPolitical, HowCast, Tubefilter. But with many Next New Creators present, there was a higher representation of scripted content than I saw at the last meetup, like talented comedy writer/producer Dan McNamara (dbmcnamara). Like, like, like!

And there was a good percentage of female partners, yay! I crossed paths with Lauren Francesca from sketch comedy group Key of Awesome, teen empowerment channel WeStopHate, female-centric love & relationships network YourTango, cosmetics vlogger JustineMetz (jpmetz), comedienne/host ChescaLeigh, all-girl comedy group CandySliceComedy, and culture vlogger Shessomickey. In my quick, not-even-remotely-scientific poll of some of the female partners, it seemed most of them had informational vlogs on a variety of topics or sketch comedy channels.

After indulging in some Google-icious appetizers while awkwardly glancing at name tags (remember: we’re nerds), Ryan Nugent, Audience Development Strategist (formerly of Next New), led a presentation on how to build your channel. Here are some of his tips:

1) The first 15 seconds of your video must be awesome. So, no long opening credits. Start with something that grabs the ADD-generation.

2) The two most important things on YouTube are your video title (use keywords) and your video thumbnail. You do NOT have to use the automatic thumbnails generated by YouTube. You can create your own. Make them enticing and appropriate. It helps. They showed examples. Views jumped dramatically. Just sayin’.

3) YouTube, a major, major search engine, is all about algorithms. The more people interact the better you fare in the algorithm and the higher your rank in their search engine, so you want people to comment, like, click on annotations. Mucho importante. And the frequency you post videos also helps your ranking in the algorithm. Hence why YouTubers post several videos related to one sketch (for example): the sketch itself, a behind the scenes video, a commentary, etc. Now, for those who are producing expensive, labor-intensive shows, you don’t necessarily need to have tons of episodes to upload. You can upload ancillary videos that are less expensive and labor-intensive in between episodes.

4) YouTube is interactive and therefore is all about “calls to action”. Perhaps have your host or a character give the viewer a question to respond to. You can even ask people to subscribe within your video, ie. by having your host mention it or by adding an annotation. And use annotations. Seriously.

5) If you are adding a video which ties into big events like holidays or movie releases and you want YouTube to possibly spotlight them, make sure to post it two weeks before the event to get in the pre-buzz search trend. Again, make the algorithms your friend.

6) The big buzz was about partners collaborating with other partners in order to leverage both partners’ subscriber bases, something you can and should be doing even if you are not a partner. There are many ways to do that. One easy way is to add other channels as subscriber recommendations, so when people subscribe to your channel they have the option to subscribe to other similar channels you recommend. Another idea is to collaborate on a video and annotate so fans can find both of your channels.

7) Order your tags by most relevant and include alternate spellings of words.

8 ) Make playlists. They’re cool, and they also help with the algorithm, because it provides an alternate way for people to find your videos and watch several in a row.

Thanks to YouTube’s Manager of Strategic Partnerships Margaret Healy, Kathleen Grace of the YouTube Next Lab, Kate Rose (all digital chicks if you noticed) and the rest of the YouTube Partner Group for organizing this meetup and particularly for feeding me. And for those of you who are partners in other cities, make sure to check out events in cities across the US.

And if you’re not a partner, totes steal these audience building tips!

Below find some partner videos:

And of course, Downsized: