YouTube just quietly released a feature that made me yell out loud when I saw it on my phone yesterday. It's called Your Custom Feed. This is where AI is integrated into YouTube directly. I mean, there's been AI on the platform for a long time behind the algorithm, but they've literally made a button on the feed to make it easier for you to find the content you want to watch. When I saw this on my phone yesterday, after being on YouTube since 2011, I'm like, oh my God, this changes everything. I often have a video I want to watch, but I'm just too lazy and search is too ineffective to try and find it.
The woman in Pakistan who proved it works
For example, yesterday when I saw this, I thought I want to watch someone in Pakistan talk about everyday life there. I don't know who else would think this, but I want to know what somebody's regular life is like in Pakistan. I told the custom feed, and I gave it exact descriptions. I want somebody that is a small creator in Pakistan to give me an average day in their life. Boom, it served me up a woman in Pakistan going through her daily life. I'm like, whoa.
Normally when you try and search and find something that detailed, it doesn't work very well. The search has been so bad and so frustrating lately on YouTube, with the changes they've made to try and get you to stay on the platform and watch more, that it's like, why even bother searching? This custom AI though goes through and delivers.
It found the one small creator I was looking for
I then had it search for something like, I want a small YouTuber. None of these channels that have like 200,000 subs trying to tell me how to do YouTube when literally they're just going on momentum and not creative at all anymore. Give me a small creator showing what's actually working. I found this guy, Lord Heck. I did a video about him recently, and the custom feed delivered one of his videos up immediately. I'm like, wow. Out of all the videos on YouTube I found about shorts, that was the best one, and when I used the custom feed it delivered it immediately. I don't think I'd even watched it on this actual channel. I have six channels, so I go through and look on different channels. I'm like, wow. That is so good.
So I tried some more custom searches, and what I found is that often the very first result would be shockingly laser exactly what I asked for. When I tried to make it ultra niche, like I asked for a very small creator, less than like 5,000 subs or so, with some exact details I wanted to watch, boom, it served it up. They had 6,000 subs. I was like, okay, this is pretty close. This is such a game changer.
What this means for the future of YouTube
What this means is that the future of YouTube is heading toward surfacing very niche content. That's why I've been mining all these YouTube thumbnails for gold. What you want to think about for the future is: how can you satisfy somebody? How can you give somebody a video that they will want to watch potentially 5, 10, 15 years from now? How can you make a video that, when someone custom searches for it, your video will be the only one they find? How can you give a video that has a unique value proposition that will get discovered? How can you give a video that's different than something else? I've never even seen somebody make a video about this feature so far.
To me, the feed and the search experience, compared to what they used to be, have really fallen off. I used to enjoy my subscriber feed a lot more, and I used to enjoy searching more. The feed has been one of the worst things on YouTube to me for a while because of how inaccurate it is at giving me videos I actually want to watch. It's focused on just constant clickbait junk. But to me, YouTube is a place where there are so many amazing niche videos. You can really enrich your life on YouTube if you could just get some help finding that stuff.
What enriches my life is to hear somebody in a significantly different life situation than me, like some woman in Pakistan, share what her ordinary day is like. Then I can come up with incredibly niche things. I want a full-time author in India to tell me how they released their latest book. It gives you the chance to easily just chat with AI and create, like, hmm, I'd like to watch a full-time game developer talk about their life creating their newest video games. This is an area of growth where, wow, I've got so much control over what I watch now. I absolutely am not interested in watching the garbage default feed anymore.
Why this is a huge deal for small creators
This is a huge deal for small creators, because this custom feed is set up to help small creators. What it does is try to give you exactly what you want first. But if you give it something ultra niche and it can't find it, or it only gave me one or two videos that very clearly matched, then it just started putting the usual fluff into the feed after that, videos with hundreds of thousands of views and clickbait garbage, which I seem to be almost immune to watching now. I don't want your mainstream thought anymore, because you're just wasting my time. I already know that stuff, and a lot of it's just crap.
So I'm so excited for this, because to me the custom feed is also set up for quantity in authentic videos. The main opposition people give me when I start talking to them is, well, I hate editing my videos, and I just don't have that much time. It's like, well, can't you just get your phone out, talk to your phone, and upload that? If you're trying to be a full-time YouTuber, this means that if you can just crank out a lot of videos and make them about some ultra specific situation, you've got a real shot. Like this: I've done a video specifically about the new custom feed feature in YouTube. This is probably one of the first videos ever about it. If you can make a video that's talking about something for the first time, this will likely have a place in custom feeds for a long time.
The more you get discovered, the more you get surfaced by the custom feed, then the more you're likely to get subscribers and show up in the regular feeds and subscription feeds. The standard on YouTube is to have people actually go into their subscriptions and look for your new videos every day, and the custom feed is in a position to give you those exact subscriptions. If you want to go deeper on how I think about all of this, I keep these conversations going in my YouTube Coaching playlist, and it ties right into why I believe no title or thumbnail alone will get your small channel views the way genuinely niche content will.
The one downside, and why I'm still excited
The only downside I see is that this is not something that's likely to just instantly blow up most channels. Although, if you've done a video about something before it blows up, and you have a bunch of people asking AI about it at the same time, your random video could all of a sudden get huge amounts of traffic from people's custom feeds. And the more people use custom feeds, the more they'll see that it allows you to take control back of your viewing experience on YouTube.
I am really excited to see how this surfaces so many more quality videos that have been sitting there unfound.