I produce Music Tech-based educational content on YT. It started as a hobby and sideline to my main work (which at the time was classroom teaching of the same content). While I'm no longer working in classrooms (pandemic plus other reasons led to this), I'm still producing content, which I think is of good quality and worthwhile.<p>The issue I have with it is that I refuse to produce attention-grabbing clickbaity titles or thumbnails. I don't like the whole algorithmically-driven race to the bottom of the brain stem, and have zero interest in producing the same. I've had plenty of comments from viewers who say the videos are great and informative, but if I'd just jazz things up a bit then I'd get more views.<p>I'm just wondering how this will change (if at all) with this new program. It takes a LOT of time to produce decent content, and even more if you're going to provide a course and backup materials etc.. Writing curricula is HARD work, and writing tests, etc., that are actually valid is reasonably challenging and time consuming.<p>I currently get about £100 a month from YT, which definitely doesn't reflect the time I put into it (but I know it has other benefits as I sell a fair number of books partly as a result of the viewership). I know that the beasts of the platform (3b1b spring to mind) would do really well from this (and deservedly so), but I do wonder if things really need to change to make YT work well for genuinely-produced non-clickbait educational content.
> Every day, people come to YouTube to learn something new.<p>True.<p>> shows content on commonly used education apps without distractions like ads, external links or recommendations<p>External links seem important on educational files, and I kind of like recommendations when I'm browsing educational stuff, but whoo, no ads on educational stuff? That's great!<p>> Next year, qualified creators can begin offering free or paid<p>There it is.
Maybe just me, but I'm not really excited for established YouTubers to sell more stuff and expand their empires. It's already a winner-take-all game of attention.<p>The beauty of YouTube is finding like a retired professor who puts up their lectures on an account with a couple thousand subscribers.<p>It is not having a click-bait worthy thumbnail, over-produced video, and barely learning anything while being mindlessly entertained.<p>YouTube will kill many services in the process like skillshare, udemy, etc. They will continue to get bigger and bigger or this will fail miraculously.
<i>Next year, qualified creators can begin offering free or paid Courses to provide in-depth, structured learning experiences for viewers. Viewers who choose to buy a Course can watch the video ad-free and play it in the background.</i><p>So you're cloning Udemy? Meh. Not much to be excited about so far.<p><i>Finally, to help learners apply what they’ve learned, we’re introducing Quizzes — a new way for creators to help viewers test their knowledge.</i><p>That could be somewhat useful, but..<p><i>For example, a math creator who recently posted a series on algebra can create a Quiz on the Community tab to ask their viewers a question related to a concept taught in their latest video.</i><p>Does anybody ever actually visit the "Community" tab of a channel? Why add this extra friction? Hasn't the technology progressed to the point that quizzes could be integrated right into the video player? For that matter, why not have "adaptive" videos where your quiz results can affect the video that you see (like triggering an extra in-depth explanation for notoriously tricky topic if the quiz taker scores below a certain level, etc.).<p>I hope this works out and provides some value, but I have my doubts as it stands.
Can we go back to the chapter on YouTube where we had downvotes so we can tell whether or not a video is going to be high quality and informative or not?
Does it bother anyone else that YouTube has its own TLD (.youtube)?<p>TLDs used to carry a lot of weight, and used to signify something besides individual entities/companies... but it feels to me like that designation is becoming rather diluted.
YouTube killed learning on their platform, when they killed the downvote.<p>They removed the one metric that people had to signal that content is crap. So now people have to trust that "the algorithm" is filtering out all the junk. Which of course we know doesn't happen. The algorithm only cares about engagement, it doesn't care if the content is of good quality or even truthful.
I am creator of online programming courses (notably the ones on Khan Academy), and I would not feel comfortable delivering a programming course where the sole form of assessment was a quiz. A quiz format can be used to check on some kinds of knowledge, but a programming course requires coding exercises (like the challenges and projects used on Khan).
That being said, for other domains, quiz-style assessment can get you quite far, depending on the sophistication of the quiz software. I like quizzes with multiple answer types, per-answer feedback, spiral assessments, etc.
If you're making educational content to be embedded into another site, you don't need YouTube. Because you are not using Google for video discovery. So put your video elsewhere. Vimeo, PeerTube, etc. Preferably multiple places.<p>Relying on Google to maintain a non ad supported product is very risky. Basing a business on it is suicidal. See the infamous list of dead Google services.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https://killedbygoogle.com/" rel="nofollow">https://killedbygoogle.com/</a>
"Pay to watch"<p>I'm willing to bet that the algorithms will prioretize these videos over free videos... so, after watching a video on transistors (like you do now), you won't get a related video about history of computing (in the related bar, like you do now), but that video will get hidden, and you'll see a bunch of "pay to watch" content there.<p>The result it, some people will pay for stuff that's already available for free, hidden by the algorithms, some people won't learn something new, because they won't want to pay, and wont bother doing advance searches, and "free" creators will lose ad revenue and be forced to produce "pay to watch" videos.
Youtube has great individual creators like 3blue1brown, but I'm skeptical that youtube itself will supply the additional human curation and editing role required to make an educational resource that is consistently coherent and useful across a range of topics (like say, khanacademy.org).<p>I'm also curious what benefits youtube would provide a creator/educator like, say, musician Charles Cornell, who is already perfectly able to sell his course that he advertises in his youtube videos.
As a YouTuber who makes educational coding content, this is huge news! One of the biggest hurdles for making a course (for me) has been figuring out which platform to put it on. My entire audience is on YouTube so it makes total sense to put a course directly on my channel.<p>Most big creators have (some form of) courses on other platforms as they are a great source of income. For example, Ali Abdaal (back when he had 1M subs) made 40K - 60K[0] per month by making courses on SkillShare. Convincing your audience to buy a course on another platform may be a viable for big creators, but it is much harder for small creators like myself. Having courses directly on YouTube is the best alternative.<p>I've always wanted this feature, but never knew how to bring it up to anyone working at YouTube! If any one from YouTube is reading this feel free to reach out - I've got lots of ideas on this!<p>[0] <a href="https://youtu.be/VTTp5A-rSdc?t=2013" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/VTTp5A-rSdc?t=2013</a>
> shows content on commonly used education apps without distractions like ads, external links or recommendations<p>It's almost like they know how addicting their recommendations and other "distractions" are. They have to make a separate product to actually create a healthy environment for learning.
I’m hopeful that this will be a good thing for high-quality educational content. Udemy, as an alternative, is largely poor quality content scams that have fake reviews and outrageous prices (so that the seemingly constant “sales” encourage you to purchase).
If YouTube can improve on this experience even a little bit then it’s a success in my eyes.
Maybe I'm wrong for immediately thinking of the worst case scenario, but the moment I saw "Pay To Watch" I immediately thought about those garbage courses that will give you the "secret" to making gazillions of dollars in the stock market. I wonder how YouTube is going to approach content like that. This definitely won't just start with "qualified creators", and even if it does, the people deciding who is qualified may not be 100% accurate (or even worse, being "qualified" gives more legitimacy to a scam product).
Youtube, please fix your search function. Only show me the content I'm searching for, not something completely unrelated to my search "just in case I like it", also work on your recommendation system cause it still sucks... and stop trying to shove "shorts" don't my throat as well... There is a good reason I use Youtube and not Tik Tok...
Fantastic, so all those tutorial video you've been watching for free on Youtube?<p>That's now a course for $14.99, BUT DONT YOU WORRY<p>you get a quiz with it now.
Yeah, I don't need details and we don't need this.<p>The real issue is, the world loves and perhaps needs "universal video hosting," something like "the open web" but for video. Right now, "Youtube" is that.<p>And they're not a completely awful steward of it, but we need better. The for-profit model is not ideal.
I spend hours per week learning on youtube. The strength of it is finding 10 year old obscure videos with gems that aren't covered by big content houses. I've gone hundreds of hours deep into subjects I would not have if I had to pay and sign up and quiz and be quantized. All the while taking ads in the face like a good boy. I've always worried about the day Youtube starts killing (what I think is) its best feature, and I think we are finally there.
A lot of noise in the signal over there. I find YouTube to be full to the brim with absolutely brain-rotting stuff like "Brightside!", "Quickfacts!", "Get smarter every day!", and stuff that is more on the dumb trivia side than actual, usable knowledge.
YouTube has had the content and engineering UI to beat Coursera or iTunes U since 2009. As a nerdy little kid from Bangalore, I remember _really_ learning how to write code from Mehran Sahami's programming paradigms videos from back in the day. (While we're on the subject of Mehran-appreiciate: we're all still geometers living in the times of Euclid OR we're all coders living in the times of Mehran? :)).<p>Couple that with benefits of YT Premium, there's a ton of engaging features they can build here that very likely make it a super sustainable product long term. I'm super excited!
Good stuff - I could have never imagined how much I could learn through YouTube - it has basically taken my Spanish from a very rudimentary level to being able to almost watch Netflix series without subtitles (via Dreaming Spanish, which is hosted on YouTube).
This feels like forced innovation.<p>Why not build a new product, that actually does what they want to do? And use the YT infrastructure?<p>Why does Google have to shoehorn everything into YT?<p>It is important to note that having your videos on a platform like Udemy or the likes is orders of magnitude better than on youtube.<p>The clickbaity titles are a drag on cognition in YT.<p>Has anyone noticed how the YT recommendation algorithm is absolutely shit? I watch one video of some obscure thing, by mistake, and I get recommended for it for weeks.
This announcement just confuses things. Is it just to warn edtech companies that Google is muscling its way in?<p>The business model is unclear. There are no ads, so any income comes from more direct revenue sharing or user fees? If the teaching site embeds the video, what does google get?<p>The technical model is unclear. This is only to watch embedded in a frame on the creator site, and not on youtube? Yet, google wants to control the community tab and do quizzes? It sounds like Google wants to own the entire interaction.<p>It's unclear how or when to get started, and who this is relevant for. Who is qualified? Who do you contact?<p>It violates the first rule of youtube: say it in seconds.<p>And it's written as if the author/director is himself a creator, complete with personal anecdote about his kids. Must we present ourselves as such even for business communications?<p>I suspect my expectations of google announcements are dated.
There should be an alternative, I'm not a fan of new programmers relying on YouTube. I saw a code once from a fresh graduate who had a Java YouTuber for reference and followed the recommendation of the YouTuber that adding static to all the properties (variables and methods) is a good idea.
I am affiliated with a few Youtubers from a wide variety of topics and the general gist I have gotten from all of them is that they don't want to charge for content nor they do really want to do sponsorships or Patreon. They just want their CPMs to not be absolute garbage like they used to be.
The value of this initiative hinges on YouTube ability to support and pay creators who work outside the algorithm. I can't see them serving 2 masters like that.
Wow. It’s a little surreal to see YouTube build an “interactive” video learning playhead similar to ones I and others have built in our past.<p>It will be interesting to see how YouTube balances current incentives for long videos compared with online learning often being better delivered in many cases through short videos, known by many names (bite size videos, micro learning).<p>Learning videos are a lot of work to make and even more work to update, and updates are guaranteed. This provides some tools but whether it eases the workflow wha to hope will happen, it would empower a lot of subject experts.<p>Structured content is a great idea. Hopefully this won’t go away like the previous features for annotating and interactive in the past.<p>Having offline capabilities for this learning content is important if it is learning for the many and not the few.<p>YouTube in some ways is the worlds largest LMS already from a content perspective. We just may be heading into a post LMS world.
This sounds like a content acquisition strategy. YouTube's embedded player isn't very good for the average branded website, as it shows a bunch of "related videos" and links that usually take the user to other content. This leads content creators away from using YouTube as a video CDN for their websites, because I guess YouTube would rather not be a freebie CDN. Except I guess for some strategic content like education, they seem to be OK serving as a CDN for the partner's website ("distraction free" I guess means YouTube's eating up the video distribution cost on those websites without making money), and this gives YouTube more video content into their library, that they can turn around and recommend in their apps
I'm surprised it's taken this long, honestly. Seeing other sites which in some ways just clone Youtubes functionality but are focused on education, where creators can make courses and sell them (Udemy for example), it just makes sense to me.
Tiktok has replaced youtube for me. Shorter form video means less of a chance to sell me junk, more "in the flesh" content from real people.<p>For example I wanted to find a specific room on a cruise ship and someone recorded it in 30 seconds on tiktok. The _specific_ room! Youtube is becoming cable TV, too many grifters and long form content for no reason other than to make a buck.<p>On tiktok, I found great content for replacing a toilet flush mechanism, drilling pilot holes into wood to hang lights, a cruiseship stateroom walkthrough, CPU benchmarks, GPU benchmarks, Anker charging device review, it doesn't stop there.<p>Google should most definitely be afraid. They are losing this game.
Does anyone even use Youtube Music / Youtube Gaming? I just interact with the main Youtube site whenever I use it.<p>Structured Content sounds great, but we already have that: add a number to your video title.
If you have to <i>buy</i> the course to get access to this, I am not sure it will matter. I watch lots of youtube videos, and I pay for courses from places like udemy, but... I don't see myself as converting the things I already pay a youtube subscription (or a Nebula subscription, etc.) to watch into paid courses.<p>If it's cheap enough to temp companies like udemy to use it, fine, but then if would effectively be invisible to me. I don't <i>care</i> how udemy hosts their videos.
Great comments and perspectives from a lot of people so far, but what I am curious about is - will there be an affiliate program for this kind of content? Specifically, programming related courses.<p>Quite a few really good coders and designers publish on YouTube, but their courses are hosted elsewhere and can be promoted as an affiliate.<p>This sounds like you will now have to talk to these creators directly and make direct “deals”, or worse - not be able to affiliate with their courses at all.
That are great news! It's about time that YouTube focus more on learning content! I'm building a platform where people can connect who consume the same YT videos. I fell like the comment section is a horrible place for educational content. Would love to hear your thoughts on my project. It's <a href="https://www.baselog.co" rel="nofollow">https://www.baselog.co</a>
Is this the end of Udemy? Edx and Coursera have positioned themselves uniquely by offering online certificates and degrees from reputed universities. I've noticed that most of the content creators on Udemy have channels on YouTube as well. They usually offer free content to showcase their paid content on Udemy. They wouldn't have to do that anymore as they can just switch to Youtube.
I think it all goes back to the fact that if we'd still have stars for rating videos on YouTube instead of algorithm-driven suggestions and no real way to decide whether people really liked the content or not, we wouldn't be here. That would not be necessary if I could still clearly see who's got good ratings and who doesn't
Why do I feel like I'll still be asked to like and subscribe?<p>I'm not interested in youtube cloning good resources we already have only for it to be sunset or charge a bunch. Like when people got upset about the firebase and map price hike
I'm pessimistic on their approach to "qualified creators" and what measure or qualifications they use to determine that.<p>Theres no shortage of quacks, frauds, and fakers ready to "teach" you all they [don't] know on a subject, or worse: spread misinformation in the form of structured "educational" content.<p>Just take a look at LinkedIn these days...
As a kid that grew up poor, all I can think about is great... another way to divide the haves and the have-nots.<p>Society benefits when education is free. Keeping educational content behind a paywall just speaks to greed.
I've learned so much from youtube, I've routinely provided tips to people who generate great content. It's awesome to see them invest more into this :)