YouTube testing new 'For You' section on channel homepages

Google-owned YouTube has announced that it is testing a new ‘For You’ section on channel homepages.

“We’re starting to test a way to make the channel homepage more personalised to individual viewers by adding a new ‘For You’ section that will recommend a mix of different content types from that channel based on the videos they’ve already watched,” the company said on the ‘YouTube test features and experiments’ page on Tuesday.

Creators cannot opt-out during this experiment but when the company will roll this out to everyone, creators will be able to control whether the For You section will be shown on their channels and which content types will be shown.

Last week, the video-sharing platform started testing improvements to the channel page layout. The platform also announced that it was testing artificial intelligence (AI) auto-generated summaries. This feature will make it easier for users to read a quick summary of a video and decide whether it is the right fit for them. The company noted that these summaries do not replace video descriptions which are written by creators.

The Google-owned platform had also introduced new creation tools for short, vertical videos ‘YouTube Shorts’, including a Collab tool and Q&A sticker. While the Collab tool allows users to record a Short in a side-by-side format with other YouTube or Shorts videos, the Q&A sticker allows creators to ask their audience questions and get responses right in the comments.

Meanwhile, YouTube has completed 15 years since the launch of the localised version for India. “YouTube’s journey in the country, in many ways, mirrors India’s own digital transformation journey. 15 years in, YouTube has taken on many avatars – a place of discovery for trends moving the world, and a reflection of a curious, connected and vibrant India, that has embraced video as its language,” said Ishan John Chatterjee, director of YouTube India.

— Written with inputs from IANS