YouTube has unveiled ‘Hype’, an all-new mechanic designed to promote small streamers and creators and allow their communities to boost them up and better their discoverability. Per a recent release, Hype will ‘give fans a stake in the success of their favorite emerging creators’.
From the ground up, Hype has been created to help streamers with under 500,000 subscribers get ‘seen’ on YouTube.
How Does Hype Work?
YouTube’s ‘Hype’ feature is pretty simple.
If you’re following a small creator (<500,000 subscribers) and they publish a new video, you’ll be able to ‘hype’ that video and push them up a virtual leaderboard. The more hype a video receives, the further up the leaderboard it’ll rank, and if a streamer or content creator ranks high enough, they’ll secure special badges on their videos.
Users will have three ‘hypes’ to use per week, so you’ll have to vote sparingly on which videos you want to boost.
In the blog post discussing Hype, YouTube wrote:
With Hype, we hope to make the viewing experience more active and engaging, driven by shared purpose and enthusiasm. That not only makes hyping more engaging for viewers but also gives creators a powerful new way to connect with their audiences and grow their channels.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a neat new feature if it couldn’t be monetised. To that end, YouTube will allow viewers to ‘purchase additional hypes’ — but the team stressed that this will unlock another revenue stream for creators and not necessarily the platform, so that could be a huge win.
It was revealed that in test countries, users hyped up 50,000 channels with more than five million unique hype votes.
The team hasn’t confirmed when the feature will roll out globally, but we can expect Hype to land in new markets soon enough.
Do you think this is a solid feature for boosting small streamers, or will it likely end up being abused?