YouTube’s newest features for 2025 are designed to enhance your engagement, streamline your content creation process, and expand your reach. Here’s a breakdown of the recent updates.
1. Community Feed on YouTube Home
When users have been away from the app for a few days, they’ll notice a new “See all posts” button on your home screen. This button leads to a “Posts-Only” feed, similar to Instagram, allowing you to catch up on all the latest posts from your favorite channels. This feature is perfect for keeping your audience engaged with updates, behind-the-scenes content, and more.
2. Thumbnail “Test & Compare”
Choosing the right thumbnail can significantly impact your video’s performance. With the new Thumbnail “Test & Compare” feature, you can upload up to three different thumbnails for your video. YouTube will test these thumbnails with different audiences and provide conversion data to help you decide which one to keep. This feature is available in YouTube Studio and allows you to manually select a thumbnail or rerun tests for optimal results.
3. Vertical Live Streaming
Vertical live streaming is now available for a full-screen viewing experience on the YouTube App. These streams will be visible when browsing YouTube Shorts, featuring a scrollable livestream feed and fan funding options like Super Chat and Super Stickers. This makes it easier to redirect traffic to your live content and engage with your audience in real-time.
4. 3-Minute Shorts
Responding to creator requests, YouTube now allows Shorts up to 3 minutes long. This gives you more flexibility to tell your story and share your music. The change applies to videos that are square or taller in aspect ratio and won’t affect any videos uploaded before October 15. YouTube is also working on improving recommendations for longer Shorts.
5. Automatic Dubbing
YouTube’s Automatic Dubbing tool is expanding. This feature lets you generate translated audio tracks for your videos in different languages, making your content accessible to a global audience.If your video is in English, it will be dubbed into French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. If your video is in any of those other languages, it will be dubbed into English.
6. YouTube Hype
YouTube Hype is a new feature aimed at helping emerging channels grow. If a video has been out for less than 7 days from a creator with under 500,000 subscribers, users can “hype” it. The more hype a video gets, the higher it climbs on a new leaderboard featuring the top 100 hyped videos of the week. Users can hype up to three times per week, and in the future, fans may be able to purchase additional hypes, providing another revenue stream for creators. It’s currently available in Brazil, Turkey and Taiwan.
7. YouTube Podcasts
On YouTube, a podcast is essentially a playlist, and podcast episodes are videos within that playlist. Your podcast should only contain full-length episodes, organized in the order they should be consumed. If your podcast has multiple seasons, include them in the same podcast. You can create a new podcast or set a playlist as a podcast in YouTube Studio. Sometimes, YouTube may automatically classify a playlist as a podcast. If this is incorrect or if you don’t want the playlist to be set as a podcast, you can easily remove the podcast settings.
8. AI-Powered Inspiration Tab
Generating fresh, engaging content ideas can be challenging. YouTube’s Inspiration Tab in YouTube Studio has been revamped with generative AI to help you brainstorm creative ideas and generate video outlines. This tool curates suggestions that you can mold into fully-fledged projects, complete with video ideas, titles, thumbnails, and outlines tailored to your style.
These new features offer more ways to engage with audiences, optimize content, and grow your channel. Stay tuned and make the most of these tools this 2025!
