YouTube also plays host to niches that get far less attention. Dr. Sophie Bishop, Teaching Fellow in Digital Economy and Society at King’s College London, has studied the beauty vlogging community. For beauty vloggers, she explains, features like being able to sell or link to specific products would benefit creators, but so far Google hasn’t provided them.
“What Instagram has provided that YouTube hasn’t is this shoppable experience… in a way that’s reasonably attractive and complies with different kinds of regulation. Because of the way the beauty communities make their money, there needs to be an ability to purchase or label products,”
says Bishop
Instagram allows its creators to sell products directly on its platform, complete with browsable photos and a full checkout system. Google has announced that YouTube will eventually get similar functionality as part of a broader update to its Google Shopping platform. While this might help product reviewers, YouTube’s algorithm can work against them. In recent years, the site has prioritized longer watch times, making lengthier videos more successful than shorter ones. Longer videos means better placement in the algorithm, more opportunities for mid-roll ads, and more money for creators. This benefits educators, video essayists, and other creators who relish more time to discuss topics at length. Yet it works against people who make tutorials or succinct product reviews.
“It takes as long as it takes to put makeup on your face,”
explains Bishop. To meet the length requirements, beauty vloggers have increased the number of products they review or the time it takes to get ready, which doesn’t always go over as well.
“Beauty bloggers are coming under quite a lot of scrutiny because of the environmental implications of literally ordering 30 dresses [just to try] them on.”
Then there’s yet another underserved YouTube segment: news outlets. Journalistic organizations don’t need to sell products with flashy checkout features. Instead, they’re better served by features that help users find context and more information about the story they’re presented. Google has demonstrated it wants to take news more seriously by adding some new features to YouTube to help users get more information on a news story. However, the problem is that these features only show up when a user actively searches for political topics. If users aren’t searching for news, these features are invisible.
Dr. Grant Blank of the Oxford Internet Institute suggests that better search tools could help keep viewers out of political echo chambers, but not if users don’t know about them. According to Blank’s research on the topic, users who seek out information on a topic tend to find a broader view on a subject and, in doing so, avoid falling into echo chambers. This falls apart when users don’t know how to find that information in the first place.
“Many people are reluctant to use tools like search, because they feel like they don’t know how to use them,”
Blank explains.
“So simple, basic search training on how to find things would be helpful for lots of people.”
Another Google product, Google News, has a better version of what YouTube has attempted to do. A feature called Full Coverage collects related stories from a variety of news sources so readers can get a clearer picture of the topic. The button to activate this feature is attached to most stories, right in the app.
“The [Full Coverage] button appears to pay more attention to the political slant of the particular new organization if there is one,”
explains Blank.
“It seems to me that would tend to reduce the possibility that people would find themselves in echo chambers.”
YouTube has no such feature. You can find related videos on the sidebar just like on any other video, but they might not be germane to the topic or represent a wide range of perspectives like the Full Coverage feature. Depending on your viewing history, you might not even get videos on the topic at all. If a viewer lands on a Fox News video about the president, there may be no way for that viewer to find any coverage from another outlet unless they’re specifically seeking it out.
This reveals the fundamental conflict within YouTube. By trying to be a music service, a gaming platform, a product review site, a news broadcast, and so many other products at once, it can’t excel at being any of them. Even Google’s other products are often better at serving the niches that exist within the video platform. The YouTube Gaming app may be gone, but it will live in the sidebar as a stark reminder that, below the surface, YouTube’s communities have needs that a generic, massive platform just can’t meet.