YouTube Live Streaming for Podcasters: transcript
There was a YouTube talk about live streaming for podcasters on July 16.
Here, Podnews has produced a transcript of the event, to make it accessible and searchable for all of the podcast community.
The subjects covered were:
0:00 Welcome
2:24 What is live streaming?
4:29 Planning your live content strategy
18:14 The technical aspects of live
29:43 Before you go live
34:41 Making money with live
42:45 Enhancing live through interactions
Hi, everyone.
I’m Stephanie Chan, and I’m a strategic partner manager on the YouTube podcasting team.
And I’m excited to speak today to Warren Reed. Warren is a live solutions consultant focusing on live streaming events like Coachella, the NBA playoffs, South by Southwest, Google I.O., and more at YouTube.
So, Warren, thank you for being here.
Thank you.
When you read that out like that, it makes it seem like I’m more important than I am.
My name is Warren.
I do work on the live solutions consultant team.
And I think I’m positioned to kind of give you guys the heads up on all things live streaming because we work on a lot of events with a lot of high profile creators.
So we’ll have some best practices and some technical strategy things to talk to you guys about during this podcast workshop.
Yes.
And we specifically are excited to be here because, you know, we meet a lot of podcasters looking to grow on YouTube and forge a deeper connection with their community.
And live streaming on YouTube can really transform your show from a one-way broadcast into an interactive community event.
So as Warren said, you know, we’ll talk about ways to leverage features like live chat and Q&A to help boost engagement for your show, tap into those search algorithms you hear so much about to reach new fans on YouTube, and also strategically repurpose your live content to maximize your reach.
So in just a minute, I’m going to hand it over to Warren to kick us off with this presentation.
And then we’ll do a Q&A with questions pre-submitted by you all in the audience, as well as live questions from the session today.
But first, a few housekeeping items.
So keeping with today’s theme, we have a live chat going to the side of the video.
So we’ve already seen folks from Morocco, Denmark, Nashville, so Egypt.
Yeah.
So feel free to introduce yourself and chat with others.
And if you do have a question for us for the live Q&A, please click the ask a question button under the video player and submit it that way, rather than in the chat, since that’s just going to help us keep track of things before our dedicated time at the end.
And you can also, you know, like and upvote other folks’ questions that you think are relevant.
So another thing to know is that we will be sending out links to resources we mentioned after the end of the session in a follow-up email.
So you’ll have them on hand moving forward, and you’ll also be able to access a replay of the session.
And with that, Warren, let’s dive into live streaming.
All right, I’ll take it away.
So the first thing people tend to ask when it comes to streaming on YouTube, first thing they say, oh, YouTube has live streaming.
It’s kind of like an old inside joke.
But the second thing they say is like, what is live streaming? And live streaming is basically taking your video content and playing it back in real time so that everyone is tracking along at the same point.
And live streaming on YouTube is really the only place that you have real-time interaction with your community, and they real-time interact with themselves, right? You know what an upload looks like.
I leave a comment two weeks later, somebody replies, a week after that, somebody replies, but this is happening right now.
Live streaming is topical.
Live streaming is relevant.
And live streaming just pops, right? Also, it’s not as saturated as the upload space.
So why go live in addition to that? Live streaming allows you an additional creative output.
It gives you that freedom to choose what you want to discuss in real time with your audience.
And there’s a lot of confusion with people.
It’s like, I don’t know what to do when I go live.
Simple key fact of it is if you see something and you think it’s cool, turn on your camera and stream it.
Odds are your audience will think it’s cool as well, right? That kind of creative freedom you don’t have when you’re sitting behind an editing bay trying to chop things up.
Like I mentioned before, the deeper connection with your audience via real-time chat and engagements with the chat.
And in addition to an alternative revenue stream with super chats, memberships, as well as stickers and pre-mid-roll ads.
But YouTube Live is also growing.
Kind of crazy.
Over 300 million logged in daily viewers.
And that was a statistic about two years ago.
It has only gone up since then.
In addition to going up on surfaces like living room and television, right? Living room is the fastest growing source of YouTube watch time with more than a billion hours on average watched on televisions every day.
So think about that when you’re trying to think about your strategy for formatting what you do when you go live.
Speaking of, the next thing we’re going to get into is how to plan your strategy.
Before you even get in front of a computer, you should put pen to paper on what you like to do and accomplish with these streams or the singular stream moving forward.
And you do that by drawing a roadmap, right? What is the mission of your channel? And does the live stream deviate from that? Or is it in the same path? That will help you determine what sort of metrics you want to look at when you’re determining the success of a live stream.
Whether some people like concurrent viewers, some people like new subscribers.
I myself look at average view duration because that tells just how engaging your content is.
But things are different depending on what you want to do and the goals that you want to set.
So having these clearly written down before you even decide to turn on your camera uh, will give you a lot of context for the content you put on screen.
Uh, additionally, the type of streaming you’re doing matters because that will determine the success of your broadcast.
When I, when we say temple events, we’re talking about things that happen twice a year, once a quarter, you know, uh, things that the community rallies around like, uh, concerts or Q and A’s and, and stuff like that with temple events, the success of your temple event is going to be preempted by the event itself.
How much promotion are you willing to drive to that one event to get traffic there in real time at the same time, as opposed to consistent creation of an episodic, whether it’s weekly or daily or monthly, the success of that is going to be led in with inertia, right? Like if you go live Monday at two o’clock, every Monday at two o’clock, then you would expect to see a slow accumulation and growth over time of the people who tune in because you’ve conditioned your audience to see you at that time.
And even if you don’t plan ahead and schedule, they’ll know when the next one is coming.
It’s kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way.
And I’ll interject to in, in the podcasting community on YouTube, we’ve seen folks do both of these things, right? Like there are some sports recap podcasts that re you know, that go live multiple times a week to kind of talk live about, um, the events that have gone on and their take on things.
And then there are also folks who maybe do a monthly Q and a with their viewers where folks will submit questions and they can just answer them, um, kind of together as a community.
And so you definitely don’t have to go one or the other.
You can do both.
You don’t, you don’t have to do just live or just VOD.
You can really combine it in, uh, in a cadence that makes sense for you.
You guys are seeing it right now in the live chat.
There’s a lot of like connecting going on that’s happening with you guys and with your communities, right? That kind of like community cross pollination is what we hope to see when you go live with your live streams.
Um, because live streaming is so unique to each individual use case that I can’t give you a roadmap to do this, do that.
And you’ll have a million viewers.
Um, you’re going to run into very unique, specific issues that somebody in the community might’ve come across and might be able to help you out with, because there are tons of software.
There’s tons of chat bots.
There’s tons of moderation tools.
I’m sure you guys are familiar with it.
It’s like, where do you even start? But hopefully by the end of this, we’ll give you, uh, a little bit more insight.
Um, and knowing your crowd can help give you that insight into what you want to stream as well.
Um, are you trying to collect your current community, uh, in a place to just have a forum with them? Or are you trying to reach a new community that’s, you know, separate from the content that you provide now is the broadcasted content going to have wide appeal or is going to be very, very specific.
And to that, we say you need a content plan not to make your stream sterile, uh, but you need a format, right? Something to sort of lean on.
I’m going to hit this note.
I’m going to hit that note.
We’re going to riff a little bit.
Maybe we go off on a tangent, but you want something, you know, to ground yourself to your intended audience.
And once you have that content plan, you, the structure of your stream, the structure of your podcasts, um, will become a little bit more regular and your community will become a lot more used to it.
And one of the things I wanted to say is like embrace the niche.
Um, this is like one of my, my favorite slides only because let’s, let’s go back maybe 20 years.
You are a community college field hockey team in Arizona, right? You might be subject to a local cable television channel 667 that, you know, only people in that region can have access to, right? Like maybe a few moms and grandparents and dads. Um, but with YouTube, you have a global audience.
All you need to do is turn the encoder, turn your live stream on.
And that small niche community of global field hockey lovers, you know, that’s, those are thousands of people worldwide, right? Those.
So if you have a hobby, if you’re into something that you think, ah, you know, no, one’s going to like it, give it a shot.
I promise you, you’ll in 20, was it 2017? No one would have predicted that like a giraffe giving birth would have been the most popular stream like on the planet, right? Like it’s ridiculous.
So give it a try.
If you have an idea, it’s worth a shot.
I heard about a channel recently that actually just follows around trash trucks as they go around the city.
And this is just footage of the trash trucks picking up trash.
Um, and that’s has, you know, many, many viewers.
It’s really interesting.
So yes, no niche is too small.
No, I, I really, I personally like the, uh, animal cams specifically people who like put their cameras on like their goldfish.
It’s kind of like really calming, but there’s like a weird community that builds around that.
Anyway, sorry to go off on a tangent, embrace the niche is what we’re saying.
Again, have an anchor, right? Like going off on riffs and tangents, uh, can, can only last for so long.
And then, you know, your, the intended use of your content became something else really quickly.
Uh, so free flowing conversation like this is great, but you know, have a plan of what you’re kind of trying to get through because if we spent a half an hour talking about all the great niche live streams on the platform, you guys would be mad.
Be like, I came here for podcasts.
I wanted to learn about podcasting, right? So make sure you have what you want to accomplish in your content plan and your content strategy before you go live.
Again, it’s not written in stone.
You can deviate, but it definitely helps to anchor you back to the primary content.
Um, and keep it casual.
Like I said, don’t, nothing’s written in stone.
The great thing about live streams is it humanizes you to your audience, especially if you don’t go live all the time, right? They get to see your thought process, contemplate things.
They get to see the behind the scenes, whereas primarily they’re watching you do quick jump cut edits of flashy things.
And, uh, this is a side of you that they, they really subscribe to see, right? They want to get to know you better, especially if you’re, if you’re somebody interested in, you know, starting a business and using commerce and shopping, people want to engage with you on that front because they feel safe with you and they know you and live streaming can be another way to draw them in.
Um, being nimble is one of the things that I think is really important because live streaming is so topical.
You have a content plan, you have a content strategy, and you have the anchors that you want to talk about, but breaking news happens all the time in every vertical in every niche.
So you might want to push back your content schedule because this one thing popped up. You have to be nimble enough, uh, to, to be able to pivot to things as they happen, especially depending on the content, right? Some evergreen education, things might not pop up as frequently, but if you’re a podcaster talking about, you know, sports trade deals happen pretty frequently, music signings happen pretty frequently, you want to be able to pivot and talk about the, the, the top of mind items of the day.
Um, and with that, you want to plan ahead, right? Communicate when you’re going live to your audience and schedule it on your channel.
Scheduling live events is one of the really unique things that we have that other platforms don’t.
It’s not just an off air player.
It’s saying, Hey, I’m going live today, and I’m going live Wednesday.
I’m going live Friday.
If you have a content calendar, you can schedule all of those events in advance.
Even if the content changes, even if you shift the dates, like I said, nothing is written in stone.
You can push an event back by a day.
You can change a thumbnail and a title depending on the content that you want to ship.
But the goal is when you go live and people engage with your content, they’re going to instinctively go to your channel and say, when are they going live again? What else are they doing? And you want to have something to drive them to scheduling lives helps with that.
Sorry, went too far ahead.
And it helps on your channel to create a shelf of upcoming live streams.
When you go live, your live stream takes the top banner in your channel carousel, right? So when people land on your page, oh, they’re live right now.
Let me go in.
But after that, excuse me, had salsa water.
That was a bad idea.
After that, on your channel below, you want to have a string of upcoming live events so that people can set those reminders and be notified that these broadcasts are taking place on these specific dates.
You can also use those metrics to say, a lot more people are interested in this than this than that.
Maybe I should stick to covering this kind of content.
And for most channels, like I said, the living room experience is growing.
But on the living room experience and also on mobile, the watch next space is where you want to be.
And you can only be in the watch next space by having planned ahead with that content, right? Watch next is a top source of traffic and how the majority of viewers discover new content.
So if there’s something relatively close to what you’re doing content wise, there’s a good opportunity that you’d be placed in there.
And that’s only possible if you actually schedule it.
If you schedule it in advance.
There are a few things I want to hit on the head today, but scheduling in advance is one of them.
People ask about, you know, promotion and live live is risky.
We don’t know what you’re going to do.
We don’t know what you’re going to say, right? We don’t know the content that’s going to appear on your stream. So if you plan ahead, then we know your channel.
We know that like, hey, this is a person in the partner program with X amount of subscribers. They’re not, you know, trying to to grift spam or scam.
We could probably nest them into certain workflows.
How far in advance are people usually? Oh, man, as soon as the sooner, the better.
I like I deal with a lot of leagues.
And for different reasons, they have different strategies for like how far in advance they want to schedule.
But to me, there’s no reason.
The NFL is live on YouTube, especially on primetime and also on YouTube TV. The schedule is out.
There’s no reason why, in theory, you can’t schedule every single game on the channel and have people pick which ones they want. Also, they’ll be able to discover which ones they can’t see.
Right.
So the sooner the better.
I would recommend if you’re going to go up against the line at least 48 hours as a respect to your audience.
Right.
If you want people to join, you can’t be like, hey, guys, I’m live right now.
Expect them to drop everything and just show up on your landing page.
Right.
That’s just a recipe for disappointment for them and for you.
They’re gonna be, oh, I got the notification, but I guess I missed it.
I’ll catch them next time.
Or they’ll go directly to the live archive because the URL you use to promote your live stream is the same URL that the archive is gonna live on.
So you start to accrue the live views as total views.
And then the new viewers who show up for the live archive also get counted as views there within 24 hours of your live stream ending is when most people see the largest boost to their viewership.
Um, and I know that there’s this, uh, ingrained habit to like take down the live stream, especially if, uh, the aesthetics of it is different than the stuff that you normally produce.
I would say fight against that urge, uh, because the live stream has multiple, multiple purposes, not just, you know, a full episode archive review.
All right.
I’m gonna use that to take a deep breath, maybe peruse the chat a little bit.
Um, yeah.
Thank you guys.
All right.
Hosting companies.
There’s actually way too much to go on here.
It’s just, it’s just me and Stephanie.
So like, I’m not going to get into that yet.
We’ve got a Q and a portion at the end, but we’re going to go into the technical aspects of live next.
Um, and one of the primary things after you’ve got your content plan, after you’ve got your calendar, you’ve got your schedule, you’ve got your anchors, you’ve got your hooks about what you want to talk about.
You want to say, how do I want this to look to my audience? Right.
Am I, am I focusing on the living room first? Is that how I want most people to consume it? Am I sitting in a 16 by nine sort of set? Um, and therefore the landscape horizontal would be the best.
Or am I catering to the personal experience of the shorts and the immersive live feed? Um, those are the two different ways that they’re viewable.
But if you do the immersive live feed, if you do the mobile streaming, it can still appear, uh, on your channel, on the living room.
If you do the 16 by nine, the horizontal feed, it will not show up in the shorts feed as you swipe.
Um, and one of the things we’ve seen people do is like simulcast both trying to capture both audiences and redirecting one into the other.
Um, in order to go live with a vertical feed, all you need is your mobile phone.
But if you wanted to add a little bit more polish to a little bit more, uh, layers, top third, middle third, bottom third notifications, you can use an encoder to send a nine by 16, uh, resolution feed to your mobile entry point.
Uh, we give you that, that, that opportunity on YouTube for horizontal streams.
Again, you can go live with a traditional landscape stream using your mobile phone, just turn it sideways.
You can also go live using the webcam and you can also go live, uh, with an encoder.
I’ll get into these in a second, but obviously mobile and webcam are the easiest and encoders require a little bit of, uh, upskilling in order to use.
But if you’re listening to this and live streaming is something you want to do, I strongly encourage you to take the time out, maybe not immediately, but take the time out to learn about the various encoders and how you can use them to work for you.
Um, like I mentioned before the, the feature comparison on live and, um, vertical live and horizontal live need to be taken into account, right? Vertical live feeds are eligible for shorts.
They’re scrollable, uh, more scrollable in the shorts feed, but they don’t have mid rolls.
They don’t have pre-rolls.
Um, and you can’t, people can’t gift memberships on those, right? Uh, it’s not exactly feature parody based on technical limitations, but for the horizontal feed, if that’s, if those are things that you value, if you want to stream in 4k, right? If you wanted to do a live redirect, which is basically a raid, um, you would need to do that with a horizontal traditional desktop landscape feed.
And no matter how you’re streaming, uh, and this is another diagram that I love because no matter how you’re streaming, these are the base four components that comprise a live stream, you have your audio video, which is basically the content that you’re putting in front of people is fed into an encoder.
Now the encoder, depending on what you’re using it for, can only send the signal or it can be used as like a content production sort of suite and encoder, but you need an encoder to send it over the air to the platform of your choice.
And when you use your mobile phone, uh, then your phone is the encoder.
If you’re using, you know, webcam or some software device, then your laptop becomes your encoder.
And from there, you need to send it over the internet, whether it’s 4g, whether it’s wifi, whether it’s a hardline ethernet connection, or whether it’s a satellite truck, it needs to go out over the internet to YouTube, to the platform of your choice for ingestion.
And the pictures at the bottom are basically the three ways people stream, you know, the mobile casual creation, the DIY setup, which I’d venture to guess there’s no stats here, but I’m just like 90% of people are using some sort of software, hardware, microphone mounted camera setup with key lighting in their homes, uh, sort of scenario, or whether you’re, you’re a massive, uh, encoding producing truck.
When you condense it down, these are the four components that they use to create the content and deliver the feed to the platform.
Now, just delivering the feed to the platform, you know, as myself on camera is one thing.
But when you think about live streams, you think about all of the other onscreen animations.
I want my chat to show up next to me.
I want to have my banner down below that has all my socials.
I want to have my content here, my slides here, and this other thing you’re going to need.
Basically, if you’re using your laptop or a software, you’re going to need that to be done by your encoder, whether it’s a cloud based encoder, uh, like StreamYard or whether it’s, uh, something you download like OBS to use locally, you’re going to need the encoder to do that.
And you’ll set up scenes and sources that in and of itself is like a whole training by itself.
But thankfully to everybody, we have resources on encoders, especially encoders that work well, uh, with YouTube, uh, through our verified partner program.
Um, and you can go to see the full list of verified devices on the platform and pick whichever one works for you, whether it’s cloud, mobile, hardware, or software.
And this might be getting ahead of ourselves, but I was curious, can folks take their live stream on YouTube and then put it on other platforms as well? Yeah, you can.
I don’t strategically, I don’t know why you would do that, but you absolutely can.
Um, the way that it funnels in is kind of the opposite, right? People tend to stream to other places and then simulcast, uh, to YouTube and or upload to YouTube.
Um, but all, all roads lead here, right? So if you’re streaming somewhere, you might as well take a step out of your workflow and stream it to YouTube as well.
So at the very least your archive is living there.
You don’t have to worry about the processing times of uploads and stuff like that.
But yeah, no, great question.
Um, but if encoders sound like way too much, that’s completely understandable.
But if, if this is something you want to, uh, do long-term, I recommend that you just start to, uh, invest time into just understanding what an encoder is.
But again, if encoders are too much, we have a product called webcam in YouTube.
If you’re looking at the GIF on screen, it’ll show you exactly how it works and how you use it.
Basically you log into YouTube, you go to the top, right of the camera, you click go live.
It’ll take you to the webcam page where it’ll ask you, what’s the title of this? What mic and camera are you using? And then it’ll take a snapshot of you to use as a thumbnail again, not written in stone.
If you’ve got better assets than the photo that you, you just took, you can use it in place.
Uh, but basically up until that point, you’re live to your audience.
Once you click stream an extremely simplified workflow and used by a lot of people.
One caveat with webcam, you can use encoders with webcam.
You can pipe in your program feed and have all that stuff flowing through into webcam, but webcam is a solution primarily meant for, uh, beginning to emerging users, right? So it’s a great on-ramp.
And one thing that I didn’t want to touch on here that you always want to consider is content ID, right? I’m not going to play the game with you.
You know exactly whether or not you have the right to stream what you’re streaming.
Um, and the way that we would flag to you and say, Hey, creator X, um, we’ve found a detection match that says you’re streaming something you don’t have the rights to.
We’ll let you know you have more than enough time to remedy that situation.
We’ll, we’ll give you maybe about three to five minutes to say, Hey, um, can you adjust this? We’ll send you a notification in your live control room during that time.
We’re still our backend systems are working to verify whether or not.
This is actually copywritten content at the end of which if you haven’t, you know, turned down the music or completely turned off whatever’s being pirated, we will slate your stream until we verify.
And once we verify and catch it, we will terminate the broadcast.
Um, this is always one that people like to ask questions about.
So I wanted to make sure I addressed it here during the technical part of it.
But once all of those things are taken into consideration, you, you know, that you want to go live, um, using your phone or whether you want to use a 16 by nine landscape, you need to designate the vertical that you’re using and create your playlist for your podcast.
So when you go in to create a live stream, it’ll say, Hey, what vertical is this? Is this gaming? Is this music? Is this news? Is this, you know, plants and animals? Uh, podcasting is not a vertical.
You can select podcasting is a bucket.
You create a playlist.
You create independent of live streaming that you tag videos and streams into.
So when you create a live stream, one of the questions that asks you, does this live stream belong to a podcast? Does this live stream belong to a playlist? So before you even go live, you want to create your podcast and then start sending your content into that podcast bucket.
And the same thing goes for, let’s say, you know, if you have a podcast that’s normally not live.
And so most of your VOD videos, they’re just in the playlist.
You can, when you’re scheduling the live stream, right, you can actually have it go into that playlist.
So that live stream is like the next episode in that normally, you know, VOD playlist.
Yeah, 100%.
Like live comes off as like this, like off the cuff sort of thing.
But now that you sort of see behind the curtain, there’s a lot of planning and preemptive decision making that goes into actually successfully executing a live and making sure it hits the intended audiences it needs to go to.
Oh, one more thing.
I saw a question prior to this talking about, oh, if I’m, if I’m audio first and I’m ingesting my podcast via RSS feed into YouTube, can I do live too? And the answer is yes.
Absolutely.
You would just do the same thing where if you have your playlist where those RSS ingested videos are going into, you would put your live stream or your premiere, whatever it is, like in that playlist where it belongs. 100%.
Great question.
Pre-live preparations and moderations, right? So you’ve got your content strategy.
You’ve got your schedule.
You’ve got your anchors.
You’ve got your device.
You’ve got your format.
You’re ready to go.
I’m not, I don’t have any copywritten content on my stream.
I think we’re ready to go.
What do I do next? The first thing before you go live is to rehearse.
What you didn’t see here is us working on our intros, us making sure that the audio levels were correct.
The proper slides were in the proper places.
Things weren’t misspelled.
You want to make sure to check everything.
Does the thumbnail look right? Is the time scheduled to start the actual time it’s starting? That’s on the official sort of page, but when you bring it live and you want to test gear, it doesn’t need to be public to your audience, right? So if I’m broadcasting tomorrow, I can go live right now and create an exact copy of what I’m going to do on the stream tomorrow and schedule it as unlisted or schedule it as private.
Now, unlisted means anybody with the link can view the live stream.
Private means only the channel owners or people associated with the channel or people who have been invited via email can view the stream, right? So a lot of people like to test privately and say, hey, this is the producer’s test or this is the sponsor’s test to make sure that they see what they need to see.
But the second thing that I want to make sure that everybody gets out of this in in addition to scheduling in advance is to test.
Make sure you test everything.
If you’re going live with your phone, I would test how long you can be live before your phone gets too hot or how much battery does it drain, right? You don’t want to plan for an hour and a half long mobile broadcast and then you’re at 15 or 20%, right? So test and plan ahead for all things.
I also encourage you to create a custom thumbnail, right? Thumbnails are your contents billboard, right? That’s the most explosive thing that pops up in your face when you index something for search, right? So a compelling thumbnail can entice viewers to click all over your channel and just sort of dig through your content library, right? Make sure it’s accurate.
You know, having a live indicator or some sort of description to say, hey, this is not an archive.
This is not a VOD.
This is me in real time talking also makes your live stream pop because it’s topical and happening now.
And even though you have a theme for your channel and your uploads, you kind of want to keep your custom thumbnails different, but in theme, if that makes sense.
Do people sometimes have a different thumbnail for when they’re actually live versus when it becomes an evergreen archive video? Yeah, yes, absolutely.
Massive big creator.
I’m not going to say his name, but he’s like a household name.
He does that pretty regularly, right? So this is one thumbnail that I’ll use for the upcoming broadcast and while it’s live.
And then when it becomes an archive, I’ll upload the secondary thumbnail so that it fits in theme with the rest of my content, right? Once it finishes live, it goes into the graveyard and becomes a VOD with all the other content on YouTube, right? So you want to make sure that it matches the theme that you’re intending for it.
Chat moderation is also something to consider.
Chat management, chat moderation.
We give you a ton of tools to make this easy for you, easy for your team.
And one key way to highlight members of your community is to make the moderators. People love engaging and helping.
And the moderators you choose for your VOD content are will also be the moderators.
They will also have moderation access for your chat.
Similarly, the keywords that you use to block on your comments under your videos also apply to chat.
One of the things that we also have is hold for review on chat.
So some of the times our auto detection systems get it wrong and get the sentiment wrong or have like a question mark, like, is this sketchy or not? And what that will look like on your live stream is a hold for review, which means you or your moderator can say, yeah, actually, you were right to block that.
Let’s decline that.
Or you say, actually, that was a pretty innocent sentiment.
I will approve it.
And that conversation goes through what our system will then do is learn from that sentiment and then allow more like that or allow less like that depending on what the moderators and the owners do, right? It’s like real-time machine learning inside your chat based on sentiment of what you approve.
So you’re responsible for the community that you curate, right? So please curate responsibly.
Yeah.
On top of that, before we get into this next segment, I just wanted to make sure that, you know, we’re drinking from the fire hose a lot.
And if there’s anything I need to slow down on, how we do it on time.
Oh, we’re good.
I think we should, yeah, keep going.
Awesome.
All right.
What we’re all here for, right? Making money with live streaming.
Making money with live streaming.
There are a few ways to earn revenue with live, right? The main monetization products you can use are ad revenue, Super Chat, Super Stickers, Jewels, which is a new addition, memberships, and shopping, right? For fan funding for vertical live, Super Chat, Jewels, and memberships are available.
But ad revenue, like I said, gifted memberships, like I said, are not available for vertical streaming. So please take that into consideration when you’re choosing the format for how you choose to go live.
In terms of ad revenue, pre-roll ads and mid-roll ads can be used and run during the stream, right? If you have a horizontal stream and are eligible for monetization, you may get ad revenue from the streams, right? Ad serving is not a guarantee for some viewers, right? As most, a lot of people will not get an ad, depending on, you know, whether I’m a premium user, whether or not they’ve just been served an ad.
There’s a ton of reasons why people may or may not be served an ad when you trigger them.
But pre-roll ads, the distinction is that they run before the live stream.
Mid-roll ads, the distinction is they run during the live stream.
But one of the things that I’d want to call out is like, when you trigger an ad, it doesn’t always mean that it takes up the space on your stream, right? It can appear as a banner ad, it can appear as a web on display ad, right? So when you go into your live stream settings, you can tell us, hey, when I trigger an ad, these are the types of ads I want to serve to people, whether it is an on-screen ad or whether it is a display ad on the page.
And when you want YouTube live ads, you can choose to run them as you want.
So we’ve introduced, because managing live stream is really, really cumbersome if you’re not ready.
So we have an ads automator as a new addition to the live control room.
So when you go live, you can say, actually, serving ads is like way too much for me.
I’m going to let you determine when the best point is to serve an ad.
And you can also specify and tune in the frequency.
I want you to be conservative when you serve ads automatically over my content.
Actually, I want you to just be balanced about it.
Or actually like, I want you to be aggressive when you serve ads over my content.
You can tell us, tell the system how you want those ads to be served over your live stream.
Additionally, we’ll let you know that an ad is about to come up.
And if you’re in the middle of something, and this is really important, this is why you want to pay attention to your live control room, not only just, you know, for warnings and for troubleshooting, you can pause an ad.
You can say, like, actually, this is not the right time to serve an ad.
Let me delay that a little bit and go to the next marker and serve the ad because I’m actually covering something really important right now.
And it’ll break my train of thought to show ads.
100% 100%.
It completely depends on how long you’re going live.
But I think you absolutely should, whether it’s a transition between segments, whether it’s, you know, a bio break, whatever it is, I think you should plan in at least a break in the content, right? I know sometimes people on tangents and they have streams of thought, but I think your audience would greatly appreciate you to chop it up.
As a part of your content plan, please work those in. And again, what viewers, you know, might see coming soon, less intrusive ad formats.
So it doesn’t necessarily cover your content.
It could be picture-in-picture windows side-by-side or display ads popping up, covering the chat commentary description momentarily.
Super chats are probably people’s favorite way to contribute to streams and the most popular way for you to make revenue.
And super chats allow viewers to basically purchase bright color messages that stand at the top of the chat window.
The duration that they’re pinned up there is based on the amount as well as the color, right? The darker, the red, the higher the amount, the cooler, the lower the amount.
And people use this in various ways, but be sure to thank the people who are giving you those super chats, right? Like whether it’s on screen or whether it’s a call out with a chat message, make sure you’re calling those people out, right? They want to be a part of the community.
They would like to be acknowledged.
So try to find a way in your content calendar, uh, whether it’s a segment specifically dedicated to thanking super chat users or ad hoc.
I’m going to thank people as it happens, right? Some people have notifications where they prioritize super chats, right? I will stop this content if I get a super chat and I will listen to your message.
Um, whatever works for you, whatever works for your community, but make sure you show support for what they love.
And, and that’s you and your content.
So please make sure that you address super chats as soon as they come or whatever they come in.
Jules is a new way for viewers to, uh, support vertical live streams.
So with super chats, um, I purchase $2, $5, $10.
I spend it all at one place, but basically with Jules, uh, you can unlock a group and cluster, sprinkle it around as needed.
Um, so it, it allows your money to go a little bit further, right? So you’re, you’re not bundling everything and you unlock a variety of interactive gifts during the streams.
Memberships, uh, are another way for a longer tail revenue green.
Um, members only chats, members only live streams, custom badges, gifted memberships and emojis are ways that your chat and members of the community highlight.
Um, that they, that they really engage with this content, right? If you’re a seasoned streamer, uh, enabling members only is a great way to amplify member chats and while still making the content accessible to everybody else, right? Sometimes the chat can get really, really crazy.
Um, and one way to sort of reduce the noise is going, you know, I’m going members only mode.
So if you, if you’re a member and if you want to communicate, you either need to be a member or become a member.
Um, and you can gift memberships to people in the chat, to other community members, but you cannot do that on vertical live streaming.
Not yet.
Anyway, live shopping lastly is another way to, uh, that allows you to basically earn revenue by showcasing your products.
Um, you can tag products in stream, you can pin products, uh, to your video and you can launch products on stream as well.
So once you tie your shop to your Google YouTube account, um, you can then see all the inventory of your store available for you to pin on the stream for your viewers to engage with a lot of success stories with people launching lines of things and going live with, you know, their, their individual products.
So if this is something that you’re thinking about doing, I highly encourage you to, uh, at least test it out and see what it looks like, or go on streams where you notice other people using products in their chat, just to understand what it looks like for your viewers.
All right.
Anything there to recap with monetization? I was just chat like going crazy.
I think that we let’s, yeah, let’s go through this last section and just make sure we have enough time for the questions.
You got it.
Yeah.
Okay.
Lastly, we’re going to enhance live through interactions.
Um, one of the things that we want to call out is the amazing feature set on YouTube.
Like this is, I think this sets us up bar none against any, but any other platform in the space, um, 4k HDR, which not every platform can do 360 degree live streams, which not every platform can do.
Um, the ability to trigger mineral ads with Scuddy markers, uh, automatically or via the API, which not every platform can do.
Uh, we have the, we have a bunch of integrations with third party tools that allow you to go live from their platform.
So you don’t even need to come into YouTube to use this.
Um, but it, it, it is a lot to list out, but one of the things that I wanted to call out are highlights and clips up here.
And it’s really important to engage with highlights and clips via your archive, because it will allow you to create more content based off of that one stream.
Uh, so if you’re sending content to YouTube and you have about an hour and a half worth of broadcasts, I would venture to say maybe in there, you’ve got about 10 to 15 snackable moments that you can create smaller VOD uploads of.
It is really, really important that you incorporate interactivity into your broadcast.
Um, like I said, with the super chats, with the polling, um, with Q and a, if you’re going to upload something and not address your users, like why not just make it an upload, right? Like this is the only place where your community community can come together in aggregate and not just like, let the light of the computer screen wash over them while you just like talk at them.
They want to be a part of, uh, your content.
They want you to know how much they value you.
So please make sure that’s reciprocal and pull them on stream, uh, in the form of comments and by, by talking directly to the chat during the broadcast.
Um, sorry, basic moderation, um, of the chat can be kind of crazy, like I said before.
So if you need to limit the chat and incentivize people either to become a member or at the very least subscribe, you can make a live chat available only to your subscribers.
Um, and you could specify how long viewers must be subscribed before they can contribute, right? I, you need to be a subscriber for five minutes, for an hour, for a day before I allow you to talk into my chat.
Um, and that will help sort of keep things tame.
A similar thing happens with memberships.
As soon as you become a member, you can contribute to members only chats.
You don’t just get a, uh, uh, a widget.
You, you can, you get a widget next to your name in addition to show that you’re a member of the community.
And these options can be used for every stream on one-offs to the episodic streams.
Uh, or you can just enable it ad hoc when, you know, things get too rowdy inside your broadcast.
Uh, live polls is a really, really, really fun way to, uh, answer questions to your fan, whether you’re doing something interactive or watching, uh, a sporting event, right? You want to ask them who won, what rounds, who do you think is going to win the game or something like that? Live polls can be a great way to interact with your chat.
And even these need to be planned ahead.
In my opinion, people do a mad hoc and they, they work well, but if you know what you’re talking about, you can ask and incorporate certain polling questions into your run of show at certain points through your segment.
But, you know, a few things to keep in mind, uh, is that maximum is only four options for answers.
And when you ask a question to your chat, um, and minimum two, two answers, yes or no, or whatever.
Um, and it can only be seen on live.
Once your live stream, uh, finishes, the polls do not show up on the chat replay.
So it’s a great incentive to use during a live broadcast.
Uh, another thing to take advantage of that isn’t specifically live are your community posts, uh, community posts are a great way to get content ideas and set those anchors for your upcoming live streams.
Right.
And, and to also pull the audience, like, did you like that? What do you want to do you want to see more of that? What’s, you know, what should I do next? Right. Promote your products in there.
And also you have the ability to have members only posts, right? So it being a member doesn’t just mean you can speak in specific chats.
You can also engage directly with the community and the creator through members only community posts.
Um, and cross strategy promotion is, is one of the things that I think is a really, really good lever to help advertise your stream, your archive or your upcoming broadcasts.
And one of the things you can do is link, uh, content, whether it’s shorts or clips to your upcoming video, to your archive or to your live stream.
Like I mentioned before, uh, Coachella actually did this really well.
They had, uh, a broadcast of the main stage, but then they also had a mobile immersive live feed of another stage.
And that worked as a really good funnel to like drive people to the other stages and capture that audience.
So something to consider, uh, when you’re trying to determine, you know, what’s the best way to promote this content because not all eyeballs will be on YouTube proper summer on browsing the living room and some are on the immersive feed doing this.
But I think that’s, yeah, I think that’s what we had to cover.
I know it was a lot.
I’m sorry we did.
We might not have gotten to all of it, but hopefully we can help address them by getting to their questions.
