Channel Bulletins, YouTube Gets Status Updates

YouTube has introduced an interesting new tool for channel owners enabling them to post small message updates to their channel. It’s called Channel Bulletins and you can think of it as Twitter for YouTube, but with a narrower focus and a more utilitarian purpose. It enables video publishers to add more details about one of their videos, share a YouTube clip they like, or just post their thoughts on anything they want. You’re probably thinking, ‘great, another way for people to post inane comments, that’s what we really needed,’ but the tool has some very interesting use cases, as long as it doesn’t get abused.

“A bulletin is an update you send from your channel page to your subscribers. You can tell your subscribers about a video you’re working on, or include a link to a video you love with a comment about it. When you post a bulletin, it will appear: on your subscribers’ recent activity module (on the homepage); on your channel page in your recent activity module,” the feature’s help page reads.

The new feature shows up on top of your regular channel page and you should probably see a notification message announcing it as well. It’s pretty intuitive, there’s a text box to write your message and you can optionally attach an YouTube video to it. You can also preview your message before you send it.

The ‘bulletin’ then gets posted on your channel’s homepage and also on the homepages of your subscribers and your YouTube friends. It gets sent by email if your subscribers opted for this type of notifications.

The feature will probably not appeal to the majority of YouTube users, the ones which just use it to watch a video they got from their friends or casually browse for interesting stuff. But for those who subscribe to a channel and the channel owners themselves, it enables a new form of communication which probably should have been available a lot sooner.