Sections & Playlists

Curating Your Content

In addition to the channel trailer, we’ve enabled greater control over how your content is displayed to Channel visitors. This is primarily achieved through the launch of a feature we’re calling “Sections” of content.

Sections

The Browse tab of your Channel is yours to curate. For unsubscribed viewers, you may choose to enable a Channel trailer above the fold. You may also organize the rest of your videos and present them in groupings known as “Sections.”

You can think of Sections as a snapshot of a category or section within a Channel. Sections can contain a single playlists, multiple playlists, or videos. For instance, you might want “my music videos” and “my comedy videos” as separate Sections. Custom Sections are created by organizing content into playlists and using those playlists to populate your section. You might also set up Auto Add rules (detailed below) for a playlist that will ensure all uploaded videos with a particular tag or keyword in the title or description is automatically added to a playlist.

When you click on a video in a Section, you will be taken to the video’s watch page. From there, you may select your next video on-demand (via search, navigation back to Channel, related videos at the end of the player, etc.). Additionally, “More From” will appear on the left hand side of the watch page, with more videos from the Section from which you came.

Sections give you much more control over the order in which your content is shown on your Channel and how groups of related content are shown on your Channel. Sections have a few different layouts that you may choose from for how they are displayed on the home tab of a Channel. Regardless of the layout, the title of a Section can always be clicked on to take the viewer to the videos tab where they will see the full collection of content in that category or Section.

Setting up Sections

Sections put you in control of what content shows up where on your Channel’s “Browse” tab. Edit & Update: Login to YouTube > Navigate to your Channels Browse view > Hover over a module of content to expose the ‘Edit’ btn

Clicking the ‘Edit’ btn will open a screen that walks you through configuring that Section.

The first order of business is to determine what content you want to display on your Section. You may choose from predefined categories like “Popular uploads,” “Recent uploads,” “Likes” and other categories.

You may also select the layout for your Section. Toggling through the options in the “Layout” drop down menu will update the ‘Preview’ field below. You may arrange your content into a horizontal row or a vertical list.” Tip: Consider grouping videos for product families, promotions, videos featuring the same talent into their own Sections of content to create opportunities to highlight threads that run through your videos. You may also wish to look at the Comments report in YouTube Analytics to drill down into the word clouds for your most popular videos. These can highlight key themes of your videos around which you may wish to curate content into Sections based on user interest and sentiment.

Playlists

Channel owners will continue to have the option to curate content into Playlists. Playlists may exist as standalone entities, or they may be included in Sections of similar content.

Managing Playlists

Playlist management will still take place in Video Manager. You can also navigate to a Playlist you own and click the ‘Edit Playlist’ btn to access the editor for that Playlist when you are logged-in to YouTube.