YouTube treads into social networking territory with Community

YouTube has finally reacted to Facebook becoming more YouTube by becoming more Facebook itself. Okay, lets explain that better.

The video portal is venturing into social media with YouTube Community, enabling creators to post text, live videos, GIFs and images between videos. Currently being tested with a handful of creators, users can spot the posts in the Subscription tab on their phones.

In a blog post, YouTube provides the name of the creators while adding, “Community is a special release for us because it represents the deepest product collaboration we've ever done with creators like you. We started by inviting creators in early to develop, in partnership with us, the tools they wanted to better engage with their fans.

These creators brought forward a diversity of backgrounds and content styles, fromJohn & Hank Green, to AsapSCIENCE, The Game Theorists, Karmin, The Key of Awesome, The Kloons, Lilly Singh, Peter Hollens, Rosianna Halse Rojas, Sam Tsui,Threadbanger, and VSauce3. We are launching the Community beta today with these creators, but we look forward to bringing more of you on board. This is a first step and, with creator and fan feedback, we look forward to rolling out new features and functions as well as including more creators in the months ahead.”

Facebook has recently been emphasizing on video a lot, which wasn’t a cause for concern to YouTube, until recently, when Facebook announced revenue sharing models for original content creators, positioning itself as a rival to YouTube.

Content creators primarily preferred YouTube as they had a revenue sharing model in place and prevent duplication and copyright infringement, being a friendlier platform for them.

Referring to statistics provided by YouTube themselves, more than a billion people are on YouTube. According to data from Statista.com, YouTube’s yearly advertising revenue from the United States alone, is more than $1.88 billion and projected to be almost $2 billion in the year 2017.

With Community, YouTube wishes to keep users on their platform, not just with their engaging content, but by facilitating communication between users and creators. The rivalry here is not to be the social network of choice, but gaining user attention and retaining them to their respective platforms.