About a decade ago YouTube was a revolutionary service that was rapidly becoming a place where content creators could find some kind of an audience and at the same time enable the world to communicate in a much more efficient way all in all. However, over the course of the past decade, several other entities started to make it clear that they were trying quite hard to compete with YouTube, and one company in particular was able to make quite a splash. We are, of course, talking about Twitch.
Twitch was different in the sense that it offered gaming creators, people that formed a big chunk of the YouTuber community, the chance to livestream their Let’s Plays to their fans and enable the fans to interact with as well as donate to all of their favorite streamers. While Twitch has started to see some opposition as well with similar platforms created by Amazon as well as other companies, it cannot be denied that Twitch had a huge role to play in shaping the way livestreaming worked in the previous decade, and it was only going to be a matter of time before YouTube was forced to start playing catchup.
Now, the thing about how YouTube did this is that it decided to straight up copy a few features that made Twitch popular in the hopes that these new features would entice users to stay on YouTube for all of their streaming needs even if the streaming in question was being done in a live capacity. Many would say that this was cheating on YouTube’s part but at the same time companies have been adopting each other’s products and services for a long time now so this was nothing new.
The latest feature that YouTube has added what it is calling Viewer Applause, as first spotted by VidIQ, something that is a pretty clear copy of the clapping feature on Twitch. Basically the way it works is that you can choose to “clap” or go for “viewer applause” which would result in a clapping animation being shown over your video of choice and it would cost $2 for you to do so, with this money going to the creator that you are attempting to support.
This seems to indicate that YouTube is actively trying to do more in order to ensure that all users are able to get the kind of donations generated towards their creators instead of forcing creators to rely on ad revenue which generally tends to be not nearly enough to fund all of the various aspects of content creation that usually need to be dealt with in this process.
Read next: YouTube Star Mr. Beast Gives Tips on Maximizing Views
Twitch was different in the sense that it offered gaming creators, people that formed a big chunk of the YouTuber community, the chance to livestream their Let’s Plays to their fans and enable the fans to interact with as well as donate to all of their favorite streamers. While Twitch has started to see some opposition as well with similar platforms created by Amazon as well as other companies, it cannot be denied that Twitch had a huge role to play in shaping the way livestreaming worked in the previous decade, and it was only going to be a matter of time before YouTube was forced to start playing catchup.
Now, the thing about how YouTube did this is that it decided to straight up copy a few features that made Twitch popular in the hopes that these new features would entice users to stay on YouTube for all of their streaming needs even if the streaming in question was being done in a live capacity. Many would say that this was cheating on YouTube’s part but at the same time companies have been adopting each other’s products and services for a long time now so this was nothing new.
The latest feature that YouTube has added what it is calling Viewer Applause, as first spotted by VidIQ, something that is a pretty clear copy of the clapping feature on Twitch. Basically the way it works is that you can choose to “clap” or go for “viewer applause” which would result in a clapping animation being shown over your video of choice and it would cost $2 for you to do so, with this money going to the creator that you are attempting to support.
This seems to indicate that YouTube is actively trying to do more in order to ensure that all users are able to get the kind of donations generated towards their creators instead of forcing creators to rely on ad revenue which generally tends to be not nearly enough to fund all of the various aspects of content creation that usually need to be dealt with in this process.
Read next: YouTube Star Mr. Beast Gives Tips on Maximizing Views
