In what will come as a blow to video marketers who seek to boost engagement with their digital audience through conversation sparked by an attention-grabbing video, YouTube has made the decision to get shot of video responses.
A post at the end of August for the Official YouTube Partners & Creators blog confirmed that the change would take effect from 12 September.
The post describes video responses as a “little-used feature” adding that they currently have a click-through rate of 0.0004%. Put simply, this means that only 4 out of every one million users who sees a video response actually clicks on it.
However, fans of the video sharing website can breathe easy as YouTube has promised to replace the floundering feature with a brand spanking new function that will “drive more engagement”.
The change is a reminder of the constantly changing digital landscape and highlights that adaptability is crucial among marketers, who cannot expect their favourite tools to see them through their career.
It might even be the nudge you need to revise your video engagement strategies and hit the refresh button on your content marketing.
Below is a snippet from the original blog post:
“Helping you connect with your fans is extremely important for you and for us. This includes replacing little-used features with better ones.
“Currently video responses have a click-through rate of .0004% — in other words, only 4 out of every 1 million users who sees a video response clicks on it.
“So, on September 12 we’re going to retire this little-used feature as we work to develop more effective fan engagement tools for creators.
“The team is focused on enabling you to share video links in comments. Doing this in comments will let creators and viewers add more context to a video, and more context should drive more engagement.”
Jenny Maclean
