YouTube Expands Text of Variable Subscriber Notifications

YouTube is expanding its test of variable channel subscriber notification frequency, which reduces the amount of push notifications that are sent to subscribers if they don’t regularly engage with a channel’s content.

YouTube originally launched its variable notifications as a test last March, with the aim of reducing overwhelm, which can often lead to people switching off push notifications entirely. And that experiment has obviously gone well, because now, YouTube is expanding it to more subscribers.

As explained by YouTube: “We’re continuing to run a small experiment that will impact viewers who are subscribed to a channel and have set the notifications to ‘All’ for the channel.”

In the experiment:

• Viewers who haven’t recently engaged with a channel, despite having been sent recent push notifications, will not receive push notifications. Notifications will still be available via the notification inbox in the YouTube app, and content will still be viewable on the Subscriptions feed on both desktop and mobile. Channels that upload infrequently will not have their notifications affected.
• Actively engaged viewers with push notifications enabled on their device will continue to receive them. (No change)

So, basically, if a subscriber doesn’t engage with a channel’s that they’ve subscribed to’s content regularly, YouTube is now going to opt them out of push notifications for their uploads, even if they’ve manually opted in.

Which could be annoying for channels who work hard to build their subscriber count, but YouTube says that the broader problem it’s looking to address is that users who opt out often end up switching off all notifications from YouTube entirely when they get overwhelmed with updates. Which is a worse outcome for creators.

“When viewers turn off all notifications from YouTube, all creators are unable to reach even their most engaged viewers outside the app. The goal of this experiment is to help us find ways to reduce this problem.”

And again, this experiment is clearly producing results, in alignment with YouTube’s goals, or they wouldn’t be expanding it to more users.

YouTube says that this is still a small experiment, but if you stop getting notifications from a channel you follow, this might be why.