YouTube pages are getting a TikTok-like For You feed

A screenshot of the For You section on the Creator Insider channel.

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YouTube is debuting a new For You section for creators’ channels, personalized to whoever opens the page. It will start showing up on November 20th, according to a post from YouTube’s support account, which says the section will recommend “a mix of content from your channel to viewers based on their watch history.”

Creators can turn the feature on or off in the customization menu under channel settings. Alternatively, clicking “more settings” under the “recommendations for your viewers” section pops up more controls for the new section. Creators can then decide if they want only shorts, livestreams, or full videos there — or all of those or a mix of two. There are also options to include all content or just recent material.

The feature has been in testing for months; a video posted to the Creator Insider channel previewed it six months ago, and YouTube updated its test features and experiments page on August 8th discussing the test. The documentation says the feature was mandatory initially, but when it rolls out to everyone, creators can then opt out. (I was able to turn it off, so it seems as though that’s true now.)

YouTube has been sliding TikTok-like features into its platform for years now, and they’re often pretty blatant, like the entire Shorts feature and the (much later) addition of vertical video editing. But this one seems like a particularly clever adaptation of the TikTok formula. It’s a fun way to surface videos you might otherwise miss from some of the longer-running and more prolific channels — almost like having a “random” button for just one channel.

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