On August 13th, 2020, YouTube permanently disabled email notifications to subscribers. Unfortunately this means that your subscribers will no longer receive emails when a new video publishes, and instead will need to rely on other forms of notification. YouTube states that there are a variety of reasons that went into this decision, and there are still multiple ways your subscribers can get notified when a new video releases which we will outline here.
The main reason that YouTube decided to discontinue email notifications is because less than 0.1% of messages were actually being opened. YouTube was also receiving a lot of feedback from creators and users saying that there were too many different types of notifications for when a new video publishes. As an effort to decrease the volume of communications YouTube sends out, they decided to move away from emails in favor of other methods of notification.
Before YouTube made this decision, they ran an experiment for 3 months to test if channels of all sizes experienced any negative impact from having email notifications disabled. From this experiment YouTube found that there is "no measurable loss of views" from not having email notifications. In fact, they found that there was a small increase in views, possibly because those subscribers enabled pushed notifications on the YouTube mobile app and subsequently spent more time watching videos on the app.
Even though email notifications have been disabled, subscribers can still get notified via 3 other methods:
- Notifications on the YouTube mobile app, or on desktop via your Chrome browser (which can be turned on in notification Settings).
- The subscribers feed.
- The notifications inbox.
The most valuable form of notifications are the ones sent through the mobile app, so we highly suggest that all creators encourage their viewers to enable mobile notifications on their YouTube apps to get notified as soon as they release new videos.
In related news, YouTube has introduced two new analytics features to give more insight into subscriber notifications. The first is a channel level card, that shows the percent of subscribers that have also turned on notifications on your channel.
The second is a video level card, which shows how many notifications were sent for that video, the CTR for those notifications, and how many views came from the notifications.
If you haven't already done so, now is the perfect time to start asking your subscribers to enable mobile notifications so that they will be alerted about every new video you release as soon as it's published. As always, please reach out to us with any questions!
