About YouTube

Founded in February 2005, YouTube allows billions of people to discover, watch and share originally-created videos. YouTube provides a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe and acts as a distribution platform for original content creators and advertisers large and small.

YouTube Glossary

Annotations
Video Annotations can be set when you upload a video. The are an overlay on videos that allows you to put text on a video and/or make parts of the video clickable links. You can add, edit and delete annotations to your videos, controlling the text, placement, timing and link URLs.

Avatar
The square image on your channel page that represents your channel across the site.

Channel or Channel Page
Your channel is the public page for your account on YouTube. It contains your uploaded videos, playlists, liked videos, favorited videos, channel comments and general activity. It can be found via this URL format: YouTube.com/YOURCHANNELNAME

Comments
These are user-written comments on videos, channels, playlists or in response to other comments.

Favorite(s)
You can add a video to your channel’s Favorites playlist. This action can also be broadcast to your channel subscribers.

Feed
The stream of activity for your channel. Feed activities include uploads, updated playlists, video comments, channel comments, new subscriptions, bulletins, likes, favorites and sharing. You can control what feed activities you broadcast and, by subscribing to other channels, what feed activities are broadcasted to you in your homepage feed.

Like(s)/Dislike(s)
A user action that shows appreciation for a video. This action can be broadcast to subscribers in your feed.

Metadata
The textual information that describes a video, channel or playlist. Video metadata includes title, tags and description. Playlist metadata includes title and description. Channel metadata includes a description.

Playlist
A playlist is a collection of videos that can be viewed, shared and embedded like an individual video. You can create playlists using any videos on YouTube. Videos can be in multiple playlists. Uploaded videos and favorited videos are default playlists on your channel.

Suggested Videos
Video thumbnails that appear in the right-hand column of watch pages and the homepage, or the tiled thumbnails that appear when a video has finished playing.

Subscriber / Subscription
By subscribing to your channel, users will see your channel’s activity in their homepage feed. Subscribers can also opt into email communication from subscribed channels on a per-upload and weekly digest basis.

Tags
Words or phrases used to describe the content of your videos. Added to videos at time of upload (see Metadata).

Transcript
Written transcripts of the audio content of a video that can be used to create video captions.

YouTube Analytics
A tool that provides information across various metrics for videos, channels and audience. Available in your user account.