YouTube introduces Twitter-style handles to help you interact with channels
YouTube does everything it can to suck you in, and keep you engaged. Not only is it intentionally easy toget started as a YouTube creator, looking up your favorites is equally simple: just hit up the search bar to find the channel. However, some folks at YouTube apparently think that simple wasn’t the way to go here, and now they’re complicating things up a bit. Perhaps picking up a trick or two from Twitter’s playbook, YouTube is introducing personalized, unique handles for creators.
The video platformexplainsthese creator handles are intended to help foster the community of creators, theirbrand, and their interactions with viewers on YouTube. Not to be confused with the channel name, An “@” will precede handles, just like on Twitter. This name will show up on channel pages and Shorts uploads, while viewers and other creators can tag the creator in comments and shoutouts. Essentially, it just looks like one more way to identify a channel and the people behind it.
Invitations to create handles are starting to roll out, and should continue over the course of the month. Personalized channel URLs will automatically become channel handles, but Creator Studio will notify the creators if they can change their handle to be something different. For instance, LinusTechTips could set the handle to be “@LTT” instead of the potential default “@LinusTechTips”. YouTube makes it clear it will factor in the channel’s subscriber count, activity, and YouTube presence before giving creators first dibs at their handles.
Although the existing channel URL and handle are two different things, YouTube says a new URL to match the handle “youtube.com/@handle” will be created for channels. This new URL will co-exist with your usual channel address on the web, which will now redirect to the one with the handle for consistency. Channels with personalized URLs will default to the handle-based URL, though.
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