Video has always been a unique storytelling tool, especially useful when reporting the news. From raw, citizen-reported videos from the streets of Tehran, to student documentaries highlighting under-reported issues in local communities, or investigative reporting done by professional news outlets, just about every type of news video can now be found on YouTube. Video is also tightly integrated into the Google News experience, providing users different ways to consume and enjoy news, while giving news publishers the opportunity to reach a greater and more diverse audience.

We are working to make it easier to get your video content indexed in Google News, but ensuring it’s found in a timely fashion is another matter. So we thought we’d share six best practices for how news publishers can increase the discoverability of their news videos.

1. Timely uploads
Videos should be uploaded as quickly as possible -- this will help them reach the news homepage faster and be grouped with the most recent articles.

2. One story per video
Instead of having one video that contains multiple segments covering several different stories of the day, it's a better user experience (and easier for us to index), when there is one story per video, and the video title is specific (not something generic like “Breaking News”). At the very least, the description of the video should match the first story in the video.

3. Categorization
If you are providing general news coverage, select YouTube category “News & Politics” (which is youtube_category_id 25) when uploading your video. If you have multiple channels, clearly identify each category (politics, business, entertainment, sports, etc.).

4. More detailed descriptions
Similar to the first paragraph of a news article, descriptions of the news video should convey the who, what, when, where, and why of the story in a few sentences -- the more detail you can supply, the better.

5. Rich tags
Another way to convey the content of the video is using the keyword tags. Providing keywords that might not be in the description gives us more knowledge of what the video is about. Especially helpful are proper nouns: the names of the people, places, companies, etc. mentioned in the video.

6. Make it Embeddable
Be sure your video is embeddable on other sites since this is currently a technical requirement for being displayed in Google News. Additionally, if your videos are geo-blocked in certain regions, they will not appear in Google News.

If your news organization isn’t already making its video content available on YouTube and Google News, we encourage you to get started. More information on how to submit your news videos to Google News can also be found in the News Publishers Help Center, and you can watch this video for additional tips on news search engine optimization.

Posted by Benoit Lafortune, Sr. Strategist Google News, and Olivia Ma, YouTube News Manager

We’re launching a new video series on the YouTube channel that brings you closer to the people and processes behind YouTube. It’s part of a larger effort to lift the veil, so you can ensure your voice is heard by the staff here and come to know the friendly faces that are as devoted to YouTube as you are.

This is how it works: each month, we’ll announce a topic of general interest, such as partnerships, ads, the future of YouTube, international, and engineering/innovation. (Feel free to suggest other ideas in the comments here.) We’ll open up a Google Moderator page, where you can submit questions related to the subject at hand and vote on questions asked by others. We’ll give you about a week to submit your questions; then we’ll put one or more employees who can best address them on camera, to respond to you in a video which we’ll then post to the YouTube channel.

First up, we wanted to focus on the YouTube Partnership Program, because we’ve heard from you that there’s some mystique around how it all works. This could include questions about Individual Video Partnership. Please submit your questions about partnerships here and vote on others’ until Tuesday, April 13, at 5 p.m. PT. Then, subscribe to the YouTube channel (if you're not already) to be sure to see the response video uploaded about a week later. We’ll also post it to this blog and send it out on Twitter and Facebook.

Sound good?


Mia Quagliarello, Community Manager, recently watched “Pink Terror.”

What *else* went down on the site, aside from people searching for "Tiger Woods"?

1. YouTube Direct: Now media orgs can easily rebroadcast UGC clips
As YouTube has become a global platform for sharing the news, media organizations have been looking for a good way to connect directly with citizen reporters on our site so they can broadcast this footage and bring it to a larger audience. Enter YouTube Direct, a new tool that allows media companies to request, review and rebroadcast YouTube clips directly from YouTube users. Built from our APIs, this open-source application lets media orgs enable customized versions of YouTube's upload platform on their own websites. Read more about it here.

2. 1080p launches
YouTube's HD mode now supports viewing videos in 720p or 1080p, depending on the resolution of the original source, up from our maximum output of 720p. For viewers with big monitors and a fast computer, try switching to 1080p to get the most out of the fullscreen experience. Compare the difference in resolution in this blog announcement.

3. Iraqi government comes to YouTube
On November 25, the Iraqi government launched a YouTube channel at youtube.com/iraqigov, joining other governments, heads of state, and leaders from around the world, including the Pope, the Royal Family, and Queen Rania, and presidents from the United States, France, South Korea and Estonia. Learn more in this video from Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

4. Auto-Tune it!
Auto-Tune is a proprietary voice processor that makes anyone sound like a smooth hip-hopper (T-Pain, to be exact) and it's become a huge phenomenon on YouTube. For the scoop on how it came to be, ROCKETBOOM recruited "Weird Al" Yankovic to provide this entertaining history of the meme. Speaking of which: subscribe to the Gregory Brother's "Auto-Tune the News" channel, a classic of the genre.

5. Gonzo et al. go gangbusters
Muppets + Queen = Viral hit. Enjoy the video already consumed 9 million times: presenting..."The Muppets: Bohemian Rhapsody."



Posted by Mia Quagliarello, Community Manager

Matthew Yeomans and Bernhard Warner, directors of Custom Communication, are the engines behind YouTube Brandwatch, a bookmark-worthy blog about how companies use YouTube and the effects those videos -- and the conversations surrounding them -- have on brands.

1. Why did you create the blog?

The blog grew out of a feature that we created for Social Media Influence, the conference and site we run. [Slate's] The Big Money liked the concept and invited us to turn the feature into a weekly blog/column.

2. What is Brandwatch's mission?

Brands spend millions each year managing their reputations and promoting their products using traditional media -- advertising and PR. However, the majority of major brands remain tone-deaf to the power and influence of a medium like YouTube despite the fact that it has a community of millions that interacts with it on a daily basis. The irony is that brands are having great difficulty getting consumers to sit through their 30-second spots on television while on YouTube vibrant communities have formed to discuss every creative detail that goes into the making of these ads. Advertisers ignore this feedback at their peril.

3. What generalizations can you make about the impact of online video on brands?

Online video about brands and the commentary that accompanies it is visceral and insightful into real people's perception of a brand (even if you have to wade through a lot of inane comments to get there). For the brands themselves, there's this very recent sensation that YouTube has become too important to ignore...never mind the the lack of control they have over how customers refer to them. From the poll results, it's evident that the public wants brands to be as sophisticated as they are. In other words, brands should be more daring and more creative with their advertising messages, and they should spare us the obvious gags.

4. What is the best use of online video by a brand to date, in your opinion?

Different brands use YouTube to great effect. For a small company like Blendtec, YouTube offered this amazing opportunity to tell an "extreme" narrative through video content. For a huge brand like T-Mobile, the "Dance" series of videos (which were accompanied by a TV advert and an advertising campaign on YouTube) offered an opportunity to show the online public that it understood how people like to share and celebrate common experiences. That said, we still have a soft spot for the "Where the Hell Is Matt?" videos...enabled by Cadbury's Stride Gum. We also like the brilliant editing in a longish, but much beloved video produced for the niche brand, Inspired Bicycles, that has amassed over 9 million viewers since April.

5. What do you think marketers don't get right often enough when it comes to using YouTube?

The marketers that use YouTube to the greatest effect are the ones who build it into their marketing strategy beforehand. It's exceedingly difficult to convey a compelling, entertaining, informative message in 30 seconds for a TV public with a limited attention span. On YouTube, marketers are now uploading the extended versions of their TV spots to provide the fuller story and to invite the public into a discourse. In effect, they want to know, "tell us what you think." That said, many marketers are still missing a big trick with this medium. They are putting the videos up, but providing so little detail about how it's made, who's in it, what's that music playing in the background. For now, the YouTube community is going in and filling in these holes in the detail, but we rarely hear from the marketers again after they post the ad. In effect, they are abandoning their most attentive followers. With our YouTube Brandwatch column, we're aiming to remind brands that we can have this conversation with or without your input.