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The new button.
Ron Amadeo
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The button snap makes this timeline interface appear on the right side. Choose 60 seconds of footage, name it and share it!
Ron Amadeo
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The URL works just like the normal YouTube pane and can be embedded.
Ron Amadeo
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This is watching a clip Clips are not new videos. Like linking to a timestamp, it’s just the full video with special search bar positioning data. Here the search bar gets a start and end point, and you can click on the “watch full video” link on the right to start from the beginning.
Ron Amadeo
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Clippings are not publicly listed and only appear in this new, private “clippings” section.
Ron Amadeo
YouTube is testing a feature popular from livestream platforms like Twitch: the ability of viewers and creators to make clips of longer videos, which can share short, bit-sized videos. The feature is currently being tested with a small group of channels while YouTube is getting feedback.
Clips have a maximum of 60 seconds and can be created by pressing a new “Share Clip” button. From there, users will get a drag-and-drop timeline editor to create a clip, name it, and share it via a new URL. This video has enabled tracks if you want to try it yourself. For now, the feature only works on a desktop on the desktop, but Android and iOS support is coming ‘soon’.
Unlike Twitch, which creates a new video from a clip, a YouTube clip links the original video with a start and end point on the search bar, and the ~ 60 second clip will be between these two points go. It looks somewhat similar to the ability to switch to a timestamp in a video, just 60 seconds long and on a loop. A large, blue “Watch Full Video” button to the right of the video will launch the full video, and since you’re already on the page with the video already uploaded, your browser will actually go nowhere.
Another big change from Twitch is that YouTube clips from a channel are not listed anywhere in public. One of the best features of Twitch tracks is a “popular tracks” section linked to each channel, which lists the most recently viewed recent tracks. The “popular tracks” section on Twitch serves as a constantly updated, rare highlight role and is a great way to get a feel for a new channel or to catch up on big events. YouTube tracks you create are only listed privately in your account settings, which makes them more like a shareable, personal bookmark.
It’s not clear how tracks will affect the YouTube ecosystem. Clips on a live streaming platform like Twitch work because Twitch streams are hours long and not very shareable. This certainly applies to YouTube livestreams, but you can also make clips from videos that were not sent by live streams, and here YouTube differs from Twitch.
YouTubers tend to make carefully crafted ten-minute videos designed to satisfy ‘The Algorithm’, YouTube’s recommendation engine, considered the best way to grow an audience. If someone makes a 60-second clip of a ten-minute video and goes viral instead of the video, is that good for the creator? A clip is a link with the timestamp to the original video so creators can still see the original video, but The Algorithm also scores creators on watch time and other metrics.
It’s also going to mess with ad reading. Larger channels often include integrated ad reading as part of the video, and clipping the videos and sharing a clip can hurt the creator’s revenue. Google says ads will appear on tracks “as long as the original video is at least 30 seconds long”, so there’s another way to make money, but it’s making YouTubers even more dependent on Google’s automated advertising program instead of third-party ads which they can do with ad reading.
List by Rego Korosi / Flickr