Testing Program Launch: A New Perk for YouTube Premium Subscribers
After Google, YouTube, the second-largest search engine, enabled its users long ago to try out its new features and products before the platform makes it live to a broader audience. However, recently YouTube introduced a recent change, where only the users who have subscribed to YouTube Premium service will be able to test its latest sets of experiments. Meaning, the platform has restricted the ability to test some of its new features to the paid subscribers only. These features include the one which lets iOS users watch videos on YouTube directly on the home screen.
However, we would like to clarify that this feature is nothing like the PIP option (picture-in-picture) that has been provided to the app developers with the release of the new iOS 14. YouTube says that this feature instead allows the users to watch videos with sound on while they continue scrolling through YouTube’s homepage.
Besides this, YouTube is running two more experiments that are related to the search. While one experiment allows users to filter the topics they search for on the home screen in 3 newly-added languages, including French, Portuguese, and Spanish, the other experiment allows the users to utilize voice search to bring up videos in Google Chrome.
However, all of these tests will be running for a short time span only. For example, two of the three current experiments are going to wind up on 20th October 2020, and the remaining one winds up a week later, on 27th October 2020. And these experiments have been live for only a couple of weeks.
In the past years, YouTube had introduced a dedicated dubbed website, “TestTube,” that lets all the users test the new experiments that they were working on before making it available for everyone publicly. However, in recent times, the platform started using YouTube.com/new to navigate the interested users to its upcoming features before they were released officially. For example, back in 2007, when YouTube launched its redesign, people could visit the same site to engage with the preview before its release.
As of now, the platform is utilizing this website to promote its other limited-period experiments.
YouTube highlighted this option to try out its new upcoming features to its Premium subscribers a couple of weeks ago within the app. Moreover, this is the first-ever time when YouTube is running an experimentation program limited to its paid subscribers only. Even though the platform didn’t officially announce this addition to the public, several famous bloggers noticed it.
However, contrary to a few reports, this doesn’t seem to be the company’s intention at all to make its experiments accessible to only its paid subscribers and shut it off for everybody else. YouTube’s own help section clearly states that this restriction is applicable to just a few of its experiments. Moreover, the tests featured on the platform are only a small fraction of the experiments that the company is running across YouTube.
Besides all this, the premium users can choose to get notified regarding any additional opportunities for participation in any ongoing research studies by the platform. Users can find this option at the end of the YouTube.com/new site.
With this new experiment, there are benefits to both sides. Firstly, it lets the product development team acquire feedback on its latest upcoming features and premium subscribers to be their early testers as per their wish.
Users who decide to take part can individually opt-in and out of the new features, but they can only test one experiment at the same time. The company is also somewhere hoping that this new update might influence more YouTube users to subscribe to the Premium tier of its service as there is a little bit of prestige involved with being able to try new products and features before it is made available to the normal public. You can think of it as another perk associated with being a Premium user – apart from the ad-free service, background, downloads, and much more, paid subscribers will now enjoy this benefit too.
Today, this video streaming platform, YouTube, enjoys more than 2 billion users every month, and it has successfully converted approx 20 million users to paid subscribers.
Conclusion
YouTube is leaving no stone unturned to make its premium users feel special than the general public. Other than the rest of the perks that come with being a paid subscriber, these users can now enjoy trying out new experiments ahead of the other users. Although it seems like an excellent strategy to encourage its vast user base to subscribe to their paid service, let’s see how this works out for the company.