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The new clip button.
Ron Amadeo
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The clip button brings this timeline interface to the right. Choose 60 seconds of footage, name it and share!
Ron Amadeo
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The URL functions like the normal YouTube sharing window and can be embedded.
Ron Amadeo
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This is watching a clip. The clips are not new videos. As a link to a timestamp, they are just the video complete with special positioning data for the search bar. Here, the search bar gets a starting and ending point, and you can click on the “watch the full video” link on the right to start from the beginning.
Ron Amadeo
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The clips are not publicly listed and only appear in this new private “clips” section.
Ron Amadeo
YouTube is testing a popular feature of live streaming platforms like Twitch: the ability for viewers and creators to make longer video clips, allowing them to share small clips of a video. The feature is currently “in testing” with a small group of channels while YouTube collects feedback.
Clips are 60 seconds long and can be created by pressing a new “Share clip” button. From there, users will get a draggable timeline editor to make a clip, name it and share it via a new URL. This video has clips enabled, if you want to try it out. For now, the feature works only on a desktop browser, but support for Android and iOS is coming “soon”.
Unlike Twitch, which creates a new video from a clip, a YouTube clip link will load the original video with a start and end point in the search bar, and the approximately 60-second clip will loop between these two points. It looks somewhat similar to the ability to link to a timestamp on a video, only 60 seconds long and in a loop. A big blue “Watch the full video” button to the right of the video will start the full video, and since you are already on the page with the video loaded, your browser is not going anywhere.
Another major change for Twitch is that a channel’s YouTube clips are not publicly listed anywhere. One of the best features of Twitch clips is a “popular clips” section attached to each channel, which lists the most recently viewed clips. The “popular clips” section on Twitch serves as a reel of crowdsourcing highlights, constantly updated, and is a great way to get a feel for a new channel or keep up with the main events. The YouTube clips you’ve created are listed only privately in your account settings, making them more like a shareable personal label.
It is not clear how the clips will affect the YouTube ecosystem. Clips on a live streaming platform like Twitch work because Twitch streams last for hours and are not very shareable. All of this will certainly apply to YouTube live streams, but you’ll also be able to make clips from videos not broadcast live as well, and here YouTube differs from Twitch.
YouTubers tend to make ten-minute videos carefully crafted to appeal to “Algorithm,” YouTube’s recommendation engine, which is seen as the best way to increase audiences. If someone makes a 60-second clip of a ten-minute video and it goes viral instead of the video, is that good for the creator? A clip is a timestamp link to the original video, so creators will still have a view of the original video, but the algorithm also scores creators on watch time and other metrics.
This will also hinder the reading of ads. Larger channels often include built-in ad readings as part of the video, and clipping them from a video and sharing a clip can hurt the creator’s revenue. Google says that ads will appear in clips “as long as the original video is at least 30 seconds long”, so there is still some way to make money, but that makes YouTubers even more dependent on Google’s automatic ad program instead third-party ad agreements that they can do with ad reads.
List image by Rego Korosi / Flickr