If you haven’t noticed yet, YouTube has made some changes to the way channels are laid out. Some of these changes are pretty significant, so it’s important to review your channel to make sure it is looking the way you want it to. I am using examples from our channel for this, feel free to check it out to see what a completed channel looks like.
Cover Photo
YouTube has introduced a cover photo, similar to Facebook, and it displays at the top of your channel as shown in the screenshot below. The recommended size of picture for the cover photo is 2560 X 1440, which is a pretty large image, so you will want to make sure you have a high resolution image to use, otherwise it will look pixilated.
One of the tricky parts about the cover photo is that they use the same image for three different sized placements: TV, Desktop and Mobile. However, the way you edit the photo to fit these is in one single editor as shown below, so it’s very difficult to make one image work well. This is something that we have to customize for our clients before we upload the image in order for it to fit properly. If you want to try yourself, YouTube gives the guidelines here.
Here is how it looks on Desktop, TV and Mobile:
Unsubscribed Trailer
YouTube also added an “Unsubscribed Trailer” similar to their featured video before the changes. This video will automatically play when someone who isn’t subscribed to your channel comes to your page. This is a great opportunity to put a video about your company there and include a call to action to subscribe to the channel. We use ours (below) to highlight our Tip of the Day videos.
You can also customize the layout of what your subscribers see as shown below. So, once someone subscribes to the channel, they can go straight to what is new or featured, instead of having to watch the introduction video every time they come to the channel.
Sections
Below your trailer, you can add sections. There are lots of options for creating sections. They can be a playlists, your recent uploads, or favorite videos. It allows you to display them either horizontally or vertically. This gives the channel owner the option to customize how their video content is organized.
We like to organize our videos into playlists, and then add single playlists as our sections with a horizontal layout. This gives the visitor to our page an easy way to get to the videos they want to see. Instead of having to look through all of our videos (we have about 200 right now), they can click on the playlist of the topic they are interested in.
There are a few other small changes that were made, so take a look at your channel and make sure it’s looking the way you want it to!
Overall, I believe these changes are an improvement over the previous version. The only thing that is frustrating is the cover photo, which requires a bit of editing to fit it properly. Otherwise, these changes allow the channel owner to customize the channel more easily and control how the content is viewed.
Once you have made the changes to your YouTube channel, I would love to see it! Share a link in the comments below.
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