YouTube Experiments with 'Engagement Graph' Video Insights and Adds Member Acknowledgement Feature

YouTube wants to make it easier for viewers to identify the most interesting parts of video clips, and it's also introducing a new feature that will recognize long-term members during live-streams.

To begin with, when you scrub through the clip, YouTube's new 'Engagement Graph,' which is presently being tested with a small fraction of mobile and desktop users, will reveal peaks and troughs in engagement activity, as shown in this sample.

According to YouTube:

“We’re experimenting with showing viewers a signal to help them quickly see which parts of a video may be interesting. If you’re in this experiment, you’ll see a graph above the red progress bar while scrubbing - if the graph is high, it means that part of the video has been frequently re-watched.”

It's not the first platform to use interaction data to drive viewer behavior; Facebook tried something similar for live videos in 2016.

The difference is that Facebook also utilized Reactions and comments as a signal, whereas YouTube does not, according to the above explanation. This might make it a more direct indicator of content activity, allowing for interaction to be guided by direct interest rather than, say, controversial features or engagement-baiting activities.

Or perhaps YouTube is utilizing comments and Likes as proxies and hasn't described it well enough, but based on this description, it appears to be a direct depiction of pure viewer response, which could assist users identify the most relevant, engaging parts of each clip.

In addition, YouTube is offering ‘Member Milestones,' which allows those who have been a Channel member for more than two months to send a unique message during a live-stream that commemorates their membership.

Those words will then be highlighted for the broadcaster, allowing them to thank long-time members and increase community participation.

“Channel members can send one special highlighted message per month in a live chat each month they remain a member.”

It's yet another simple method to further maximize your community-building efforts, and for each channel's top followers, that small act of recognition might go a long way toward consolidating that bond and keeping them as a member for longer.

Membership Milestones were recently launched and are available to all channel members — which should be differentiated from channel 'subscribers,' who are non-paying channel followers.