Save 50% on a 3-month Digiday+ membership. Ends Dec 5.
The pitch is simple. “Get More into YouTube.” That’s the message being featured, along with an accompanying clip, on YouTube’s redesigned home page. With the Google-owned property reaching over 100 million unique users in the U.S. per month, and streaming 3 million videos per day, it would be hard to argue the idea the people aren’t currently into YouTube.
But the site has a consistency problem, which it knows it needs to address. People come to YouTube all the time for all sorts of video clips, but they don’t come back again an again to watch series as much as professional/semiprofessional content creators would like. And they don’t funnel users as well as they could to other content. That’s the thinking behind YouTube’s channel strategy.
“Our approach is very different from when I first joined the company [in 2006],” YouTube sales chief Suzie Reider noted at an industry conference this week. “Back then, the thinking was “let the algorithm predict what people want to watch.”
Now, the site has over 20,000 content creators, and it’s spending $100 million on new content. The algorithm isn’t going to cut it.
“What will be new for us is promoting a channel guide, and a new look and feel,” said Reider. “We’ve never explicitly promoted content. We are now going to help users find things.”
More in Media
Digiday+ Research Subscription Index 2025: Subscription strategies from Bloomberg, The New York Times, Vox and others
Digiday’s third annual Subscription Index examines and measures publishers’ subscription strategies to identify common approaches and key tactics among Bloomberg, The New York Times, Vox and others.
From lawsuits to lobbying: How publishers are fighting AI
We may be closing out 2025, but publishers aren’t retreating from the battle of AI search — some are escalating it, and they expect the fight to stretch deep into 2026.
Media Briefing: Publishers turn to vertical video to compete with creators and grow ad revenue in 2026
Publishers add vertical video feeds to their sites to boost engagement, attract video ad spend and compete with news creators.