There are a couple consistent themes to YouTube‘s new features this year: fandom-building, and gamification. It’s talked up the importance of strong creator-viewer relationships with tools like Hype, which spotlights smaller creators with dedicated communities, and has added things like platform-wide badges that level up with user actions like getting in early when a creator opens up Channel Memberships.
Its latest rollouts follow those themes exactly. In the latest episode of Creator Insider, YouTube announced it’s adding poll stickers to Shorts and is now letting creators set Super Chat goals during livestreams, encouraging viewers to keep donating until they hit a specific dollar amount and unlock a reward.
Polls on YouTube are a funny thing. Creators have been able to use them before, but only in Community text posts. While text posts might seem like an afterthought feature for creators whose main output is video, our reporter Sam Gutelle spotted YouTubers like Balkan Gains who seem focused on growing their audiences mainly through polls.
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Balkan Gains, for example, posts a new poll about a new topic every single day, asking viewers their opinions on everything from whether they’d risk $500 on a double-or-nothing bet to which “evil” skill they would learn to whether or not they can run fast. This strat appears to be working for him, because his channel has grown to over 635,000 subscribers, and new polls often get thousands of comments from viewers expounding on their opinions and debating one another.
Now, that same method of creator-viewer interaction is coming to Shorts. “The goal is to help creators engage their communities and gather instant insights,” a member of Team YouTube said in Creator Insider’s new video. We can imagine lots of scenarios where this will be helpful to creators looking for faster and/or more regular input from their viewers, rather than waiting for the comments section on their next video.
We also wonder if this will lead to some creators treating Shorts more like Stories–posting 10- or 20-second clips solely because they want to include a poll. How will that shift the Shorts ecosystem? Will those videos take space from more traditional Shorts on people’s recommended feeds? Guess we’ll find out!
As for Super Chat polls, YouTube has struggled to make livestreaming work for years now. Ludwig laid out a pretty thorough list of things it needs to do if it wants to keep up with platforms like Twitch–which, at this point, we’re not sure it does. One of the reasons is a general lack of features compared to competitors.
That changes just slightly with the introduction of Super Chat goals, which look aesthetically similar to Twitch’s Hype Trains. With the goals, creators can set an amount they want to raise during a particular livestream, and choose a reward they’ll give out, like an extra video or a merch discount, if that amount is reached.
The idea is to get viewers to band together and make the goal happen. For them, it’s an exercise in community cooperation and showing support for a creator they like, and for the creator, it is, of course, more money.
Twitch’s Hype Trains are sort of similar, but creators can’t set individual goals. Instead, Hype Trains kick off when there’s an organic spike in subscriptions, Bits gifts, and donations, and viewers have to keep subbing/Bitting/donating to push the train to the next level. Creators can, like on YouTube, select what reward viewers get when the train hits certain levels.
Many Twitch streamers, however, use third-party tools to set their own per-stream sub/donation goals, so YouTube introducing Super Chat goals is a reflection of an already-popular practice within the streaming ecosystem.
For now, Super Chat goals are classed as an “experiment” that’s available to a limited number of YouTube creators enrolled in Super Chat. Experiments may or may not roll out to the platform as a whole, but we think if YouTube does choose to put this one out, it’ll be a step toward improving its livestream experience for both creators and viewers.
