YouTube says goodbye to Video Responses

If you’ve been surfing YouTube for a long time now, you would have noticed a small section called “Video Responses” right below the video you were streaming. Thanks to the abysmal response that the feature had been getting, YouTube has decided to give Video Responses a ditch and think of ways and means to create better interaction between content creators and fans.

In a post announcing the feature’s departure, the service’s team wrote on the Partners and Creators’ blog that this little-used feature was seeing a terrible rate of .0004 percent click-throughs. In other words, only four out of every one million users who saw the video response feature clicked on it.

Bye-bye!

This isn’t working out too well for YouTube. The video service has therefore decided to retire Video Responses on starting September 12. Instead, YouTube will be working harder on developing more effective tools for fan engagement.

One of the features YouTube is keen on developing is allowing users to share video links in comments. “Doing this in comments will let creators and viewers add more context to a video, and more context should drive more engagement,” reads the blog. Meanwhile, the team is urging users to upload videos with specific titles, hashtags or descriptions so you are able to search for these videos easily. For example, if you’ve covered a song by Daft Punk, you can upload the video with the title “Video Response to Daft Punk’s Get Lucky” and get hits. Content creators have been asked to help fans out by using playlists and channel sections instead of Video Responses to bring such cover and response videos to the fore.

Now for YouTube to develop a tool that will not just drive up engagement between content creators and fans but to also make it work as an effective one to rake in the money.