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The change is designed to prevent inactive audience members from getting overwhelmed and unsubscribing altogether.
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YouTube announced that it will now enact variable limits for the push notifications that get sent to channel subscribers after testing out the feature over the past year. The change is intended to reduce overwhelm and stop channels from annoying their members with too many updates.
The update means that inactive channel members will get fewer notifications as YouTube looks to optimize its update frequency, maximize engagement and limit notifications.
As explained by YouTube: “Moving forward, to keep notifications relevant for your audience, we will stop sending push notifications to inactive subscribers — those who have not engaged with your content but have selected ‘All’ notifications. They’ll continue to get notifications in their Inbox (accessible from the bell icon on the Home screen in the YouTube app).”
If a subscriber hasn’t watched content from a particular channel for approximately one month, and hasn’t engaged with notifications, they’ll see fewer push updates on that channel’s activity, even if they’ve opted into receiving all notifications.
Though there are some important stipulations here.
First, if a channel hasn’t posted for a month, it won’t be eligible for this update because it won’t have sent any notifications for subscribers to ignore. YouTube’s system will be based on channel activity and subscriber response, not on time frames alone.
In addition, changes will only be enacted for subscribers who haven’t engaged with any content from a channel, including Shorts, posts and comments.
So the subscriber would have to be really unengaged to lose these alerts, since even incidental recommendations within the Shorts feed would keep them on the active notifications listing.
The idea of the update is that it will stop users from switching off all notifications entirely if users get annoyed with too many updates, which is a worse outcome for the channel.
Though this could also be a bit of a sting for channels that have worked hard to build their subscriber count. If a creator has put in a lot of effort to get members interested, losing push notifications could limit opportunities to keep subscribers coming back.
But YouTube said it has seen positive results from this long-running test, which is why it’s now expanding these settings within the live environment.
“By making push notifications more relevant, we found that fewer people turned off notifications for individual channels and fewer people turned off notifications entirely,” YouTube said. “Viewers are more likely to turn off all notifications when they feel overwhelmed by content they’re not interested in, so as less of your audience turns off all notifications, your channel’s reach will improve over time.”
As such, this update should ideally mean more relevant notifications for channel subscribers and more long-term engagement and interest for creators.
