The New YouTube: Everything you need to know for 2025 | Ep. 42

Is there really a "new YouTube" ?? If you've noticed some buzz about new YouTube features and changes on the platform, you're in the right place! In this video, I’ll break down everything you need to know as a business owner looking to leverage YouTube for growth and success.

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Transcript

42 The New YouTube: Everything you need to know for 2025 | Ep. 42
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You might've seen some announcements in the last few months and even some videos from creators talking about the new YouTube or the new features and new changes and how YouTube is working differently now than it used to.

I want to tell you what you need to know as a business owner on YouTube in 2025 so that you can take advantage of the. new quote unquote YouTube. This is video brand infusion. My name is Meredith. I'm here to help you infuse the best video marketing strategies into your business so that you can be the go to video brand in your niche or industry and generate consistent revenue in your business.

I do sometimes fall for a headline that's like new changes coming to YouTube. What you need to know. I've been seeing videos and headlines like that for the last six months or so. Now that we're a couple of months into 2025 though, I want to look back and see what exactly did we see change?

What features have come about? What is actually working? And Does it actually mean anything at all? Because obviously, if you're putting your time and effort into YouTube, you want to get the most out of it, right? You want to reach as many people as you can. You want your audience to grow. You want to generate leads.

You want to generate sales. You want to generate consistent revenue. So if something changes, you want to know about it if you're using YouTube to grow your business.

And you definitely don't want to get left behind in the algorithm and do, um, tactics or trends or things that are going to do the opposite And repel your ideal audience from finding you to begin with, right? So what brought this topic up for me is recently

I've been trying to watch fewer TikTok videos and do something a little bit more quiet, social. scrolling threads a little bit and the threads algorithm is almost like a little, It's like so specific that it kind of shows me the same thing over and over again. And it just happens to be that it shows me a lot of YouTube stuff, a lot of YouTube tips, a lot of people asking questions about YouTube. And what I keep seeing is People posting their YouTube tips, their YouTube strategies, their YouTube frameworks, and making these very blanket statements about how YouTube works and about what works on YouTube now in 2025.

So for example, I saw somebody say that, um, intros are out, logos are out, sound effects are out, fancy backgrounds are out, like they're like listing all of these things and some of them, yeah, like.

intros with music and your animated logo. Yeah, that is out. I wouldn't, I wouldn't put any time or effort into doing that in your videos these days. But like, what do you mean your fancy background is out? You mean to tell me my, my background back here with my lights and my books and my candles and my wedding picture back there?

You're telling me like, like the actual space where I sit and do my work and film my videos is? Like I'm somehow not on trend because of the space that's behind me in my videos. That doesn't make any logical sense.

And the more I scroll all of these tips, like, some are not wrong, they're not inaccurate, they're just not really telling the whole story. And I certainly am not going to sit here and tell you that I have the secret. To growing on YouTube. It's right here. I'm gonna reveal it in this video and everyone else is wrong,

but what I am going to tell you is that when you publish videos on YouTube, whether they are lives, whether they are long form content, you know, five minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes long, or shorts.

YouTube is either going to put your content in front of an audience or it's not. And the only thing you can do is look at your own analytics, your own metrics to figure out why it is or is not putting your content in front of your audience or putting your content in front of more of the people like your audience, in front of new people.

But when it comes to the new features that YouTube has actually put out there in the last few months, and some are still coming, like how long are we going to wait for this whole YouTube community thing that they talked about months ago?

A lot of the big hype and excitement around the features and functions and things like that have just sort of like died down without a whole lot of, uh, hullabaloo, ? For example, taking a look at some of the features that YouTube announced, like, um, the inspiration tab on YouTube, that's in your analytics.

You should, everyone should have access to that. It gives you some ideas for what to create on your channel in terms of topics. It helps you formulate an outline. It's completely AI Driven, right? But it's looking at the analytics of your channel, but then it's all AI driven. And you know what? It looks like it's AI driven.

I think you could totally use the inspiration tab for. what it's called inspiration, but you still have to have your own human touch for how you create your titles, how you create your thumbnails, what you say in your videos, how you say it in order for it to actually do well for you on your channel. Now the caveat to that is, and of course I'm going to say this because I put together a bunch of AI tools for my members inside Video Brand Academy, the caveat is AI works great when it is specifically trained on good tactics, good strategies that work, and not just tactics and strategies that the AI thinks.

Should work. We're talking about strategies that are proven to work. So that's how I trained my AI tools, my SEO optimization tools and brainstorm breakthrough and my, um, YouTube script hook generator. Like I trained those based on proven strategies that work for me that have worked for my clients, not just relying on the AI to pull something out of thin air.

YouTube also announced a communities function where the posts tab, so it used to be called your community tab on your channel, is now called your posts tab. So it changed that. But they said it would function a little bit more like a Facebook group where other people could post in your communities. And that hasn't quite happened yet.

And that's actually one of the things I'm most looking forward to because it's an aspect of YouTube that I just always wished that we had the ability to do something similar to a Facebook group, but on YouTube, and I'm still waiting for that to happen.

Now they released a lot of other features too, like hype and YouTube shopping and GIFs powered by jewels and, um, I guess they're, they either have, or they're going to redo how your channel shows up on a big screen, like on a TV, which is really interesting because Viewership on televisions for YouTube has continued to increase over time, which is just wild to me.

If you watch my videos on a television, please let me know in the comments because to me that is like totally bonkers. YouTube did recently announce that, uh, YouTube is actually the platform where podcasts are listened to the most above Spotify and Apple, which also blows my mind.

And when we think about YouTube in 2025, the new YouTube, Um, what I think is happening is it's not really new, it's just evolving. I think YouTube wants to be an, like essentially an all in one platform for creators who are creating content and for consumers who are consuming content.

And when it comes to using YouTube to build your business, using YouTube to build your audience, to generate leads, to generate consistent revenue in your business. That's the best news ever. Like, that is the ultimate thing that we could hope for, for those of us who are investing our time and energy and our content and our creativity into this platform.

To see that it is growing and to see that even in a world of TikTok and Instagram everything else that's Going on out there and whatever comes next, even in this world of high competition for our attention, YouTube is continuing to gain more and more of a share of that attention.

Now don't let all of these new features and functions and all of this good news sway you from the fact that what's happening inside of your analytics is the best. ball, the best way to read the algorithm for what is working or not working for your channel. Some thing you see on threads, even this very video that you're watching right now isn't going to have any kind of secret answer or secret solution or Really any information that isn't already out there because the way that you grow your audience on YouTube the way you find success on YouTube is by Publishing content and then looking at your own analytics to figure out What do I need to tweak?

What do I need to fix with your very next video? So I like to think of the way that YouTube works, the way the algorithm works is instead of thinking, what do I need to do or what do I need to, uh, like what tactic do I need to use to grow faster? I like to think about when you publish a video, what's preventing the algorithm for, from getting more people in front of your content.

What's preventing your video from reaching more of the right audience. It's like you're sending this video out there and if it doesn't get as many views or it doesn't bring in subscribers or it doesn't get comments or likes or, or whatever you're expecting to have happen.

The question is not what tactics should I have tried it's what is holding it back? You sent it out there. What's holding it back? Is it the topic? Is it the title? Is it the thumbnail? Is it the delivery? Is it the length? It could be any of those things. It could be a combination of those things. But if you're grabbing at tactics and trying everything, then you're never going to know what contributed to your growth or not. And then you're not going to know what to keep doing to move forward so that you can put Less time and effort to get more results instead of what we often see with new YouTube features, which is like, Oh good, now I have new stuff to do.

I have, now I have to create shorts. I'm going to add this to my to do list and you know, five, 10 hours every week is taken up by a new feature that may not actually be contributing to the growth of your channel. 

And yes, I'm calling out shorts on that. I don't think that shorts are the best way to grow your channel. If you're using YouTube as a business, I think if you go and look at your analytics and if you look at your own daily to do list, you might see that I'm doing an awful lot of work for not a whole lot of payoff.

I think there's a huge segment of creators who can find success on YouTube doing shorts, doing only shorts. Doing short form content that's made for short form viewers and continuing to do short form content. I think that works for a segment of people.

I don't think that's the best way to go for a business. If you're here to build your business, to build your email list, to generate leads and sales of your course program services, etc. I don't think shorts is the way to go for that because you have to put a lot of time and effort into creating videos so that you can just put more time and effort into creating videos.

Whereas long form content goes on and on and on, continues to get views down the road, continues to get leads and generate sales in your business down the road. It's a whole different algorithm. It's practically a whole different platform, shorts versus long form.

Another topic I see popping up quite a bit is this idea that YouTube is pushing smaller channels. And I did notice this happening, I would say, like, a year, year and a half ago. I would notice that on my homepage I would have videos being suggested to me from people I had never heard before and who have pretty small audiences.

But the topic would be relevant to something that I was watching recently.

And all that really means is. Keep doing what you're doing. If you have a small channel, then keep creating content that is topical to your audience.

Keep crafting titles that are juicy, that people actually want to click, that actually generate some intrigue. Keep creating thumbnails that get people's attention.

At the end of the day, it really doesn't matter what new features YouTube releases or how many people refer to YouTube as the new YouTube. Everything you do is always going to lead to, you have to get views in order to get any kind of result. In order to get subscribers, in order to get leads in your business, sales in your business, you have to get views.

And if you're focusing any of your effort on YouTube features that aren't helping you get views,

Then you really should evaluate what exactly your strategy is. Now there are a couple of tools you might want to look at, especially as a business owner. Like I said, some of them are like, okay, that's cool.

That's great. But that's not for me. Some that you might want to look at as a business owner, if you do sense that you have an audience that speak other languages, there's this automatic dubbing feature that YouTube has and they also have their thumbnail test and compare tool, which I've used a couple of times.

And I really recommend that you do this because thumbnails are sometimes the hardest part of creating a YouTube video. Thumbnails are a little bit art and a little bit science and not everyone has.

Both the creativity and the science gene, like, and able to mix them together. So, you can create up to three different thumbnails and publish them alongside your video and let YouTube figure out which one is best. Which one is actually going to get your videos in front of more and more people.

Lastly, even though it was like a couple of years ago that YouTube added podcasts as a feature, they haven't really done a whole lot since then. It's kind of like, here it is. It's podcasting. Good. Go for it. Put your podcast on YouTube. And especially with the recent announcement of how many more listens are happening on YouTube for podcasts over dedicated podcast platforms like Spotify and Apple, it's never been easier for your podcast content to be discovered and I know that podcasting is a separate topic than just creating regular YouTube videos,

but I also think that Talking head podcast type videos, sitting here, talking to a camera into a microphone like I'm doing right now is probably one of the easiest, if not the easiest yet most effective, the highest payoff for the time investment strategy that you could use to grow your audience on YouTube as a business owner.

It's a complete no brainer in my opinion.

The winning strategy for YouTube is, and has always been, and will probably continue to be, get views on your content, get people to stay watching your content, which is why long form content, long form videos, 5, minutes plus podcast content

is a really smart way to invest in content creation for your business to grow your audience and generate consistent revenue.

And if you want to stay up to date on what is working on YouTube, what are the trends so that you can apply them to your channel and be the go to person in your niche, we have discussions like that every month and really honestly, every day inside of video brand Academy. So if you're not yet inside video brand Academy, I officially invite you to join me there. I'll put a link down below this video so that you can be on the priority list for the next intake. And in the meantime, keep doing what you're doing, focus on what's working and don't start Frankensteining your strategy by trying every new feature and tactic that you see on social media.