YouTube’s testing a new way to help channels maintain engagement with subscribers, and avoid overwhelming their followers with too many notifications.
The problem, YouTube says, is that some users switch on all notifications from a channel, but they either don’t want every update, or they’re not as interested in the channel as they used to be. Which means that pumping all of your notifications to these users can actually prompt them to unsubscribe as a result.
As explained by YouTube:
“Viewers often opt in to receive “All” notifications from many channels. When they feel overwhelmed or are no longer interested in a specific channel, instead of updating their subscription and notifications to better reflect their preferences, they simply turn off all notifications from the YouTube app entirely. It’s common for users to have turned on All notifications for a channel, only to have turned off app-level notifications [Creators can see how this impacts their channel in the Audience tab].”
In order to avoid this, YouTube’s trying out a new notifications pipeline with a small subset of users, which will reduce the amount of notifications that it sends them.
If a subscriber has signed up to receive all of a channel’s notifications:
- Viewers who haven’t recently engaged with a channel despite having been sent recent push notifications will not receive push notifications in the experiment. Notifications will still be available via the notification inbox in the YouTube app. Channels that upload infrequently will not have their notifications affected.
- Actively engaged viewers with push notifications enabled on their device will continue to receive them. (No change)
So rather than keep sending seemingly unengaged subscribers the same volume of notifications, which can prompt them to unsubscribe, YouTube’s going to limit these prompts, in the hopes that they’ll remain engaged in their own way.
“When viewers turn off all notifications from YouTube, all creators are unable to reach even their most engaged viewers outside the app. The goal of this experiment is to help us find ways to reduce this problem.”
So it’s basically an effort to limit avoidance from notifications, while maintaining channel engagement. And it could work, using subscriber engagement as a proxy to determine what notifications to send them, even if they don’t update their notification settings.
It seems like a worthy experiment either way, and YouTube notes that it will only impact a small number of channels initially.
