YouTube 'Hype' comes to India

YouTube is expanding its “hype” feature to India, enabling viewers to help smaller creators gain visibility on the platform. Introduced last year, the Hype feature on YouTube is now live in 39 countries, including India, the US, UK, Japan, Korea, and Indonesia. YouTube opines that the move aims to give fans a new way to actively support emerging creators and help them get noticed on a competitive platform. YouTube has also made hype easier to use and more interactive than before.

How does Hype work?

On YouTube, viewers can hype up to three videos per week from creators with fewer than 500,000 subscribers. Each hyped video earns points and has a chance to appear on a ranked leaderboard, which is accessible through the Explore menu.

The system is designed to level the playing field: the fewer the subscribers, the larger the bonus points a creator receives. This makes it possible for smaller, authentic channels to get a fair opportunity to rise in visibility. The leaderboard is not personalised, and will display the same list of videos to all viewers in the same country, so a user can discover fresh content that people near have endorsed with a hype.

With a dedicated hype card in YouTube Studio, creators can gain new insights into audience engagement. They can see exactly how many hypes and hype points each video has received, along with a recap in their weekly analytics, which will help them track growth and understand which content resonates most with fans.

YouTube also mentioned that the platform is planning to roll out leaderboards for specific categories, such as gaming and style, along with a feature that allows fans to share that they just hyped a video, giving creators even more exposure.