Product1 publisher2 min readPublished
Ask YouTube will answer product questions with comparison tables built from creators' videos
YouTube's expanded Ask YouTube search will compile videos and outside sources into comparison tables on the results page. The company's stated measure for what that does to creators is watch time, a platform-wide total.
The Product Desk · Product desk
What happened
- YouTube said its experimental Ask YouTube search will compile information from videos and outside sources into comparison tables when a viewer asks about a new product, with CNET citing the new iPhone Duo as the example.
- At Made on YouTube on Wednesday, the company also said viewers will be able to prompt YouTube in plain language to build multiple custom video feeds, each given its own tab on the homepage.
- Those prompt-built feeds roll out across desktop, TV and mobile in the US next month.
- A new Shorts series tool, which lets creators attach season and episode numbers to videos, will be limited at launch to creators in YouTube's partner program on web, mobile and TV.
Compiled by The Product DeskSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- exposure Channels that publish spec roundups and product comparisons are the raw material the tables are built from, so their work can supply the answer a viewer wanted without the viewer arriving on the video.
- constraint The click-side control YouTube shipped this week, multi-thumbnail and preview testing, operates in the feed; inside an answer the spokesperson's commitment is to display the video title and channel name.
- contradiction CNET flags the risk that AI answers remove the need to click, while the spokesperson expects watch time steady or improving, and both can be true if minutes move between channels instead of disappearing.
- decision Creators outside the partner program who wanted to label episodic work for a prompt-driven surface have to decide how to structure it without the series metadata, since the prompting reaches viewers first.
Someone shopping for a phone types the model name into YouTube search and gets a table back. Ask YouTube, still experimental, assembles it from videos and outside sources; CNET's example is the new iPhone Duo [3]. Tap one of the videos the tool surfaces and the questions continue on that video's watch page [4].
Teams building a surface like this assume the table sends people to the videos underneath it. A viewer who already has the answer can close the search and stop there.
YouTube's number for this is watch time. "Our goal is to connect viewers with the right video faster. With Ask YouTube, we expect watch time to remain steady or improve," a YouTube spokesperson told CNET [6]. The precedent offered for that expectation is chapters and AI-generated summaries, which the spokesperson said "showed no negative impact on watch time; instead, they helped retain viewers" [7]. Chapters and summaries appear inside a video someone has already opened, while the comparison table appears in the results, before anyone opens anything [14].
Watch time is also a sum across channels, so it can hold steady while the distribution underneath it moves: the minutes one viewer no longer spends hunting are minutes another viewer spends on whichever video the table pointed at [15]. A channel's own analytics are a different population. CNET's report does not say whether a creator will be able to see that a video was used to build an Ask YouTube answer [16].
Sorting a catalog for this comes down to whether the value of a video can be lifted into a row of a table, and whether the money on that video requires the view to happen. A spec roundup or a one-answer tutorial scores yes on both: extractable, and paid per view. A repair walkthrough where the hands matter, or a series people follow for the host, scores no on the first. To deliver that, an answer layer has to send the viewer over.
The videos to plan around are the ones whose value can be lifted into a table and whose revenue depends on the view. For those the planning assumption has to be that some share of the demand now gets satisfied in the results page. Only YouTube can measure how big that share is. The payout that survives a missing click is affiliate revenue, and YouTube is adding a new affiliate partnership with Amazon [12].
What to watch
- Whether YouTube Studio ever reports appearances in Ask YouTube answers separately from search impressions.
- Whether comparison tables graduate from the Ask YouTube experiment into default US search results.
- Whether the Amazon affiliate partnership pays creators on purchases rather than on views, and at what rate.