Oct 30, 2019

YouTube test features and experiments

What are YouTube experiments?

YouTube product teams are constantly testing out new tools and features to help you find, watch, share and create content more easily. These test features (sometimes also called “betas” or “experiments”) are usually available for a short period of time and only for a small group of people.

If you ever notice that YouTube looks a bit different for you than it does for your friend or family member, you’re likely seeing one of these experiments. Be sure to give YouTube feedback and report any potential technical issues – our teams use this information and experiment results to help us decide if, when, and how to release these features more broadly.

Learn more about some existing feature experiments

To help you keep up with these test features, our TeamYouTube Community Managers will pilot keeping this forum thread updated with cool and interesting ones that we think you’ll want to know about! While this post won’t include every experiment, it’s a good place to start if you’re curious about what we’re testing out, or whether or not you’re currently seeing an experiment. To learn about previous experiments, check out this post.

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Last edited by Meaghan - TeamYouTube Jul 24, 2024

All Replies (48)

Jensen - TeamYouTube

Google Employee

Mar 10, 2025

[March 10, 2025] Testing improvements to ad suitability reviews: To improve the accuracy of our yellow icon decisions and get your videos monetizing faster, we are experimenting with automatically sending videos that receive a “Limited or no ads” rating for an additional review. This means that in some cases, we may review a newly uploaded video, even if visibility is set to private, and some monetization decisions may take up to 24 hours. We’re rolling this out to a small percentage of creators at first, but we’ll keep you posted on our plans to expand it to all creators that monetize with ads.

Rob - TeamYouTube

Google Employee

Mar 18, 2025

[March 18, 2025] Testing the Ability to Hide End Screens: We’re currently testing a new feature both on mobile and desktop that allows viewers to hide end screens. If you’re part of the experiment group, you’ll see a "Hide" button in the top-right corner of the video when end screens start to appear. If you tap it, the end screens will be hidden on a per-video basis, giving you more control over your viewing experience. If you want to make the end screens re-appear, just tap the “Show” button! This will also be located in the top right of the video.

Rob - TeamYouTube

Google Employee

Mar 26, 2025

[March 26, 2025] Testing improved notifications experiences: We’re running a small experiment that will impact viewers who are subscribed to a channel and have set the notifications to “All” for the channel. Here’s what we’re testing:

Viewers who haven’t recently engaged with a channel despite having been sent recent push notifications will not receive push notifications in the experiment. Notifications will still be available via the notification inbox in the YouTube app. Channels that upload infrequently will not have their notifications affected.
Actively engaged viewers with push notifications enabled on their device will continue to receive them. (No change)

Viewers often opt in to receive "All" notifications from many channels. When they feel overwhelmed or are no longer interested in a specific channel, instead of updating their subscription and notifications to better reflect their preferences, they simply turn off all notifications from the YouTube app entirely. It’s common for users to have turned on All notifications for a channel, only to have turned off app-level notifications [Creators can see how this impacts their channel in the Audience tab].

When viewers turn off all notifications from YouTube, all creators are unable to reach even their most engaged viewers outside the app. The goal of this experiment is to help us find ways to reduce this problem.