We all know YouTube is amazing. However, there is just soooo much video on YouTube, it’s hard to keep up. Wouldn’t it be great if you could find all of the video related to one topic and have it all neatly organized like a channel a human being could create if that were the only activity they had during a 24-hour day. Wouldn’t it be great if those topic channels were organized in familiar ways like Playlists, Related Channels, etc.
Better than just searching YouTube with a keyword, this feature would allow you to subscribe to a topic channel so that every time you logged onto YouTube, you could see new or trending videos on that topic.
That would be great, wouldn’t it?
Well, in one of those things we discover all the time, not only does YouTube have such a feature, YouTube has been experimenting with it for several years. You can find out all about it via YouTube support.
How do you search for a YouTube “topic” page?
There’s no “search by topic” option on YouTube (that we can find), so you have to be creative in your search queries. Any YouTube search may present a topic channel page. (And remember, this is a search within YouTube, not a Google search.)
You’ll know you’ve found one when the channel’s name ends like this “– Topic.” In our tests, adding the word “topic” (not “topics,” but “topic”) after the search query, e.g. “small business topic” instead of “small business” (we didn’t use quotation marks, however), helps boost the odds of a topic channel being one of the result options. (That’s how we got the results shown above.) Also, the topic pages seem to appear more regularly if you are logged into YouTube. We say “seem to” because we don’t know the scientific word for “we’re not sure enough to say for sure.”
YouTube Channel vs. Your Channel
We thought an interesting test of the effectiveness of a YouTube Topic Channel “auto-generated” by algorithms vs. a channel created by “the topic, itself” would be fascinating. We chose a small business channel we know has lots of video (unlike, say, ours, that has none) to go up against the YouTube algorithms. We assumed YouTube would win as controlling the algorithms is an unfair advantage over an intern who isn’t “that into” math and stuff. So, you can see on the following two screen shots, the Small Business Administration – Topic Channel has more SBA video organized than the Small Business Administration Channel.
That said, we’d prefer hanging out with SBA humans than with YouTube algorithms any day.
Playlists on the SBA Auto-generated-by-algorithms Channel
Playlists on the SBA Human Being Curated Channel
Okay, so what?
Two take-aways about this feature:
- It’s a handy way for you to keep up with video about a topic related to your business.
- If you have a YouTube channel related to your business, it is important to include key words and well-written text descriptions to the video you upload.