As we’ve been rolling into 2022, our team has been following YouTube news closely and we’ve been paying attention to what YouTube has been indicating, what trends have happened in the past, what things are shutting down, etc. and we’ve been predicting where things are going in the future to help our clients prepare for what is ahead.

So, what happened in 2021 that you need to know?

  1. YouTube Shorts became a big deal. YouTube has been leaning into Shorts a LOT. We’ve seen an explosion of Shorts contributing to channel growth and almost being a new format in the platform. It’s SO much easier to create a Short than a whole YouTube video, so that’s been a significant change that we see making an impact moving forward.
  2. Chapters. YouTube has made long form content more consumable through the use of chapters. They are making this easier for creators by doing this automatically AND each chapter can rank independently from the whole video itself.
  3. The community tab requirement is 500 subscribers now. YouTube is making it more accessible for creators to post other kinds of content for creators.
  4. Dislike counts are now hidden. Self explanatory, but it’s been upsetting to a lot of people, it seems.

Here’s how this impacts our content strategy and where we see YouTube going in 2022 (these are just predictions – feel free to let us know what you think!)

  1. We think we’ll see a lot more full length podcasts on YouTube. We explain more why we believe podcasting on YouTube is about to take off big.
  2. There will be a better integration of Shorts, audio based content, etc. all on one channel. Based off some of what we’ve been seeing, it seems that YouTube wants to figure out how to make everything work on one channel vs. putting content separately on one channel vs. another (a podcasting channel vs. a main channel vs. a Shorts channel). They want brands and creators to avoid managing different channels and to make it more accessible for viewers. We think YouTube will continue to work on this in 2022.
  3. There will be better storytelling among education (and all) channels. The days of talking head videos are done. If you’re in a niche where there isn’t much competition, this may still work, but at this point, there is way too much good content on the platform to just throw a camera in front of your face and record without a plan. Becoming a good storyteller is something many channels are going to be forced into if they want to succeed on YouTube.
  4. We’re predicting better shopping integrations coming on YouTube. YouTube has such a big influence on people’s purchasing decisions, so we believe YouTube will leverage that better. We’re not sure what that’ll look like, but we believe it’s coming.

Do you have any predictions for 2022? What do you think of these and what are you going to work on this year? Hit ‘reply’ and let us know!

Thanks for reading.

Keep changing lives,

Tim