Here’s an important note for YouTube channel managers – as of August 13th, 2020, YouTube will no longer send out email notifications to your channel subscribers whenever you upload a new video.

As per YouTube:

“If you’re opted in to get emails about new uploads, live streams, and premieres from channels you’re subscribed to, these emails are going away, though you’ll still get notified on mobile via the YouTube app, or on desktop via your Chrome browser if you’ve turned these notifications on.“

Why the change?

According to YouTube’s internal data, less than 0.1% of these emails are ever opened, while users have also complained that such notifications are an annoyance in their ever-cluttered inboxes. YouTube also notes that ‘important emails’ about changes to your account, service announcements, etc. will not be impacted by this update.

Given the low open rates, YouTube predicts that the impact of this change on your view rates will be zero:

“We didn’t see any impact to watch time when we experimented with turning off these emails. In fact, our tests showed that when we don’t send these emails, more people engage with mobile push notifications and their Subscriptions feed.”

So it should have no impact, but worth noting either way, as it will change how your subscribers are informed about your latest content.

It’s pretty rare for digital platform to reduce its email sends. LinkedIn made a conscious effort to stop sending so many email alerts back in 2015, and its posted steady increases in engagement since, so there may well be something to it. But don’t expect that to stop Facebook from sending you a random email alert every now and then that one of your friends has ‘posted a link’.

Seriously Facebook? A link. Who cares?

In this respect, I think we can all appreciate that YouTube has taken the time to look at its data, and stop cluttering people’s inboxes with updates they don’t read.

As noted, the changes go into effect from the 13th, which is this Thursday.