Product1 publisher3 min readPublished
YouTube puts its new prompt-built feeds in a tab above the homepage it still fills for you
At its Made on YouTube event the company showed Custom Feeds that a viewer has to write a prompt to fill, and gave Ask YouTube the ability to answer a product question and sell the product, with affiliate credit for the creator still unsettled.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- YouTube showed Custom Feeds, which turn a viewer's typed prompt into a feed that lives in a tab at the top of the homepage, demoed with a request for videos of tuxedoed cats playing jazz on pianos.
- The company expects Custom Feeds on desktop and mobile this Fall, before the end of the year.
- Ask Studio, a conversational editor coming to the mobile app, turned a collection of clips into a complete video in Kelli Erdmann's demo through prompts that built on each other.
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Why it matters
- exposure Product-review channels are the ones newly exposed here: the purchase can complete inside an answer, while the affiliate credit depends on a click the design does not require.
- decision Teams allocating next quarter's distribution effort now have to decide whether to write for prompt strings as well as recommendation signals, with no usage figure yet for the new tab.
- constraint A/B testing whole videos against live viewers moves the cost of an experiment from one thumbnail to a second edit, and those production hours come out of something else.
- capability A channel run by one person can get a first-pass edit, music selection and hook choice out of prompts, which is work some creators currently pay an editor for.
The prompt is the entry condition. A Custom Feed exists because a viewer typed a sentence, and underneath the new tab the homepage still runs on subscriptions and algorithmic recommendations [3]. According to Mina Le, the creator who ran the demo at the Pier 57 event, the feeds keep updating with the latest videos that fit the request [1][4].
So the recommendation feed is not being replaced. It is getting a tab at the top of the homepage that a viewer has to fill by writing something, and until YouTube reports how many people build one and come back to it, recommendations remain the larger surface for anyone planning where next quarter's views arrive from.
The change with money attached is in Ask YouTube, which Sundar Pichai first showed at Google I/O. It now handles longer conversations and can look inside videos, returning time-stamped answers and pulling material out of the comments [6]. The same conversation can run to product specs and a purchase [7]. TechRadar reports that for now, the creator who first talked about that product might miss out on affiliate revenue unless someone clicks from the Ask YouTube result through to the original video [8]. YouTube executives told TechRadar afterwards that they want to ensure the affiliate connection still works [9]. TechRadar's headline on the event quotes a YouTube exec saying "we only succeed when creators succeed" [10].
Neal Mohan cited the platform-wide numbers: over half a million full-time jobs supported, and $60 billion contributed to US GDP in 2025 [11]. Divide the second figure by 500,000 jobs and it comes to $120,000 of GDP per job, less if the real count is higher than that [12].
On the production side, Ask Studio arrives in the mobile app as a conversational editor. In Kelli Erdmann's demo, prompts stacked on each other without restating the original task and turned a collection of clips into a complete video [13]. She called it an "infinitely patient helper" [14]. YouTube says the tool will help edit a first draft, add typography, find the right music and sync it to the action, and pick the hook that follows the thumbnail [15]. TechRadar's account dates only Custom Feeds, to this Fall [5].
Custom Feeds need a viewer to type something, and Ask Studio waits for the creator to run the prompts. The shopping answer in Ask YouTube triggers on any product question a viewer asks, so it is the item I would plan against first. The cost of that choice is dull work. Someone on the team reads the attribution terms when YouTube publishes them, and checks whether a purchase made inside an answer credits the video that started the conversation.
What to watch
- Whether YouTube publishes attribution terms covering purchases made inside an Ask YouTube answer.
- Whether Custom Feeds land on both desktop and mobile before the end of the year, and whether YouTube reports how many viewers keep one.
- Whether Ask Studio gets a rollout date beyond the mobile app demo.