YouTube is experimenting with a design update to the subscription page which means that if you want your videos to stand out to all of your subscribers, there’s a few things that you need to keep in mind.
The biggest update is that a lot of users, including myself, are reporting a new grid layout to the YouTube subscription page as opposed to the previous layout, which is kind of more like a list.
Now, not all YouTube users have this. It seems like some get it and lose it after a few weeks, and then others get it and some have it on one browser but not on another browser, and I personally have it across all browsers. And we’ll tell you how to get back to the list version if you have the grid and want to get away from it back to your list. But first of all, lets talk about the implications that this has. If this is something that YouTube seems to be testing quite actively, and if this is something that they later roll out more broadly to all users, what does it mean?
Well you can see a couple things right off the bat. Just by looking at this grid, it takes a lot of the emphasis off of the description text. There’s no more snippet text anywhere on this. It also takes somewhat of an emphasis off of the title and places a lot emphasis, in my opinion, on that thumbnail.
Now you can see it just by looking at my subscriptions, what some creators are already trying to do to stand out. A lot of them are putting a colorful border around their thumbnail to kind of make it pop and stand out a little bit more. I’ve seen other creators just go with a black and white image to try to stand out a little bit more. And others, kind of like what I do here at Video Creators, and I might be a little heavy handed in to this, but my thumbnails are clearly designed and with a big red sidebar with some text on it. I’ve seen other creators just really going more for like a big branding type of elements so their thumbnails are easily recognizable in a subscription feed.
I’m curious to see which way YouTube officially lands on the design layout thing. It’ll be nice if they give us the option, you know, to switch between grid and list view depending on which one we preferred, just like you can do with your own videos in your video managers, for example. So far, that does not seem to be the direction they’re heading.
And so I want to hear from you in the comments below about any tactics, or strategies, or tips that you have, or how to make your videos stand out in a whole bunch of other YouTube subscriptions. How do you make your thumbnail and your title really stand out? If you are a user that hates the grid layout and wants to go back to the list layout for your YouTube subscriptions, well this apparently is a cookie-based test that they’re doing. So all you have to do is go into your browser settings, find that cookie that’s called VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE. Delete that cookie and your subscription page will go right back to the list view that you’re used to.
But assuming most of your subscribers are not quite that savvy nor do they care as much about changing it, let me know, comments below. If this is something you guys are thinking about for your channel, as always, read the comments down there. We will all learn a lot from each other. That’s one of the things I love most about the community here at Video Creators is that we can all invest into each other’s channels, help each other out, and there’s always a lot of really good helpful stuff added, contributed by you guys. So thank you so much.