YouTube Creator Studio has long been the one stop shop for YouTube creators to check out the latest metrics on their work and manage their creations and page, but will now begin taking a backseat to the more recent YouTube Studio, which will be coming out of beta and rolling out as the default to all YouTube uploaders over the next few weeks. For the time being, YouTubers who want to stick with the classic Creator Studio can choose to do so, and Google has yet to announce when or if that will no longer be an option.
YouTube Studio’s main highlights include three new metrics to see how your channel is doing; impressions, impressions click-through rate, and unique viewers. Your number of impressions is determined by how often your unique thumbnail is viewed on the home page, in the subscription feed, in search results, and in the “Up Next” section. The metric is meant to tell you your potential reach, if you optimize your content to drive clicks. That relates to the next metric, your impressions click-through rate. This tells you what percentage of total impressions turn into views. Finally, the unique viewers metric is exactly what it sounds like; rather than accounting for repeat viewings by the same users, this metric tells you how many unique users are viewing your video, something particularly useful for creators whose videos may be viewed multiple times by the same person, such as musicians. The new dashboard for YouTube Studio will also give you the latest platform news and an at-a-glance overview of your overall creator metrics.
YouTube Studio is still very much under active development. Leading up to today’s big move out of beta, the feature has been continually improved by collecting and incorporating feedback from creators actually using it. This process will continue indefinitely, allowing YouTube to zero in on what’s important to the largest possible swath of the creator community, and craft YouTube Studio and its dashboard to cater to these data points. While the feature is now out of beta, you can still expect big changes in the coming months as the number of users getting to use it and leave feedback expands.
