The Lights, Camera, and Action Kicks Off on Wednesday, December 6

Last year we celebrated with over 100 countries the release of YouTube Rewind. We help plan ahead and let users know the official release to help map out their schedule.

The YouTube headquarters is located in California, and they have announced the release of YouTube Rewind 2017 to take place live on December 6 at 10:00 a.m. PST. For those outside that time zone, timetable.com will help convert the timeframe for you. They even include international time zones for our worldwide audience.

Tune in on December 6 at 1:00 p.m. EST to see YouTube Rewind 2017. 

Each year YouTube releases a ‘best of’ clip of videos highlights the artists and producers that paid the most money to have their work seen by international audiences. It is very easy to get seen on YouTube when promoting videos with large sums of money. This level of transparency is vital to creating an honest viewing experience.

In 2016 the YouTube Rewind video brought in 203 million views as of December 5, 2017. The 2015 edition brought in 129 million views, and 2014 produced 120 million views. 

YouTube has had a rough year with content and advertising. They have made some small headway on working more with Nintendo, but still have a lot of transparency to release in the upcoming months to keep users engaged.

“Every year, I’m reminded of how unique and special our YouTube community is and 2017 is no different. This was a year of amazing growth and innovation, but I wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on what has also been a very tough year for our creator community. In the past months, we saw a significant increase in bad actors seeking to exploit our platform. In light of this, we’ve just announced new actions to protect our community from inappropriate content. We are planning to apply stricter criteria and manual curation, while also significantly ramping up our team of human reviewers to help creators thrive.” – Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube

A few pieces of transparency that I suggest is letting their producers know the working budget, similar to a television or movie project; it would be good to show the amount of revenue each channel makes to support the overall gross product in connection with the amount of advertising raised for each month. It is clear that some channels with more subscribers should be weighed differently in comparison to smaller channels. Also, YouTube can start helping channels partner more with larger companies to create sponsorship deals for producers. Those deals will also need to be release in the working budget outline that should be released each month. (These are only suggestions, and the only way YouTube will even consider these ideas is by having a representative read this article.)

Another piece to the puzzle that a lot of producers have been discussing is obtaining over a thousand views to achieve the right to object when a video has been demonetized. This problem should be streamlined for all channels moving forward in 2018.

Overall, YouTube will have to start creating more opportunities for producers to engage with to compete with Twitch and other streaming platforms. After producing videos on YouTube for over a decade, I still find the importance of the platform, but see a large amount of data they can release to create a better overall user experience.

Watch the YouTube Rewind 2017 trailer now, and check back on December 6 at 10:00 a.m. PST to experience the updated video.