How to Customize My YouTube Channel Page & Banner
Good news. YouTube is preparing to open its new channel features to everyone (see channels beta blog).
I wasn’t crazy about the early “channel page” beta, but it’s improved a lot in recent weeks. When I was at YouTube last week, they gave me a tour of the new functionality, and showed me how they’re dealing with early criticism.
Here’s my YouTube Channel page, with clickable links to my other websites. Now it provides easier access to my playlists and recently uploaded videos, and shows comments… it’s a little counter-intuitive to get out of the channel page view (click “show all comments”).
The primary benefit to creators is that it allows audiences to watch your videos (with ads) without ever leaving the channel page. This means (in theory, anyway) that audiences are less likely to escape to related videos. And perhaps more likely to watch more of your videos per session.
So here’s how you can glamorize your page, and I don’t believe you need to be a YouTube partner to do so now (or at least that appears to be the plan):
- If you’re reading this before public launch, activate the beta via this super_seekrit link.
- Create a banner as a jpeg 960 by 150 pixels. Mine is below if you want to mimic the navigation buttons, but don’t save the 60% version I’m displaying below. Click here, and save the full-sized one, which will be 960
