YouTube

YouTube drives revenue by placing ads on videos hosted within their platform. They rely exclusively on Creator driven content to sustain engagement and therefore are heavily invested in helping creators both produce better videos as well as to help them maximize how they can set up their ads to generate more clicks and subscriptions to their pages.

When we first met with YouTube to discuss this creator success initiative, they had various offline (downloadable) learning materials on how to use its different platform tools to maximize impact. But one of the issues with this approach was that the information was presented in a linear, for everyone fashion. YouTube creators are a very diverse group ranging from amateur artists who create for passion all the way to huge production companies who are trying to promote highly produced and deep content in a consistent manner.

In designing the new interface for the new online training portal - the YouTube Creator Academy, we did a lot of research on who was using YouTube and what they wanted to get from the platform both today, as well as as their experience grew. This was a highly interesting part of the initiative as the YouTube Creator community is very open and engaged in terms of providing feedback and ideas for how things could be improved.

We then developed personas and user flows to inform the content strategy and architecture. Much of the existing training content was repurposed with more user friendly verbiage and the introduction of more visual learning aids. We also created new content that was missing from the newly defined journeys or deemed critical for success. The result was a master portal infrastructure that supported segmented modules with gamification to incent engagement and success. We even trained the client team on how to update and mature the program ongoing with existing internal YouTube communications and learning teams.

The program results drove an immediate improvement on Creator program engagement and adoption of new YouTube tools to drive success. The year of the Creator Academy program launch had the highest Ad revenue growth at the time and the revenues have continued to grow. YouTube is now the second most visited website in the world and the most popular entertainment platform for audiences under 25.