Overview
- YouTube's 'Hype' feature aims to help small creators gain visibility by letting fans promote their videos up a leaderboard.
- Users can 'hype' videos from creators with under 500,000 subscribers, with each user getting three hypes per week.
- The feature includes a leaderboard that ranks the top 100 hyped videos, with special badges awarded to top-ranking videos.
- In initial beta tests, over 5 million hypes were cast across 50,000 channels in countries like Turkey, Taiwan, and Brazil.
- YouTube plans to allow fans to purchase additional hypes in the future, providing a new revenue stream for creators.