Have you seen the new “YouTube Channels 2.0” yet? YouTube is redoing the way users’ channels look, to keep them more up-to-date with other social networking sites. Now they even have rounded corners on their tables. Rounded corners! You can’t call yourself “web 2.0” without rounded corners, man. Nicely done YouTube.

This is how my channel looks with the new style.

I tried it out for a while, but changed back because, as cool as it is, there are a number of things that make the old version more worth while.

AdSense

The goal of this new channel page layout is to make it so that the user doesn’t have to leave your channel page to watch your videos. This is a really good idea, and keeps YouTube up to date with sites like Vimeo and Blip.tv. However, we run into a complication with Partners like me, who have signed up with Google’s AdSense program. On some of my movie pages, I have a little ad in the corner. When all my movies are combined, I make a couple hundred dollars every month. Not much, but it is something. If, however, my viewers don’t watch my movies from my individual movie landing page, and instead watch them on my channel page, they wont see the add—and I lose money. In order for me to use the new 2.0 channel pages, YouTube needs to allow Partners to place AdSense squares on their channel pages.

This is how my channel looks with the old style.

Links

If you look at the old version of my website, you will notice that all the links to my social networking sites are linked, so that you can click on them and go directly to the site. The new channel 2.0 does not auto-link links, as you can see in the new version. If I learned one thing from working at Amazon.com right out of college, it is that people are much less likely to copy and paste a URL as opposed to simply clicking on it. This relatively small change has large implications for the channel owner, especially if he is trying to sell, oh, say, a brand new CD that he just released and which, I might add, is now available on iTunes and Amazon MP3. *Ahem*.

Branding

When “channel branding” on YouTube came out, I spent hours designing the super-sweet background with all my characters on it. The new 2.0 channel design obscures a good inch of my background, which just so happens to cover up seven of my characters. In order to fix it, I would have to re-design my channel branding. I could do it, but that takes time, and it is easier for me to simply not use the new channel style.

Over all, I think the new channel design is a step in the right direction and makes YouTube more competitive with other streaming video sites, but I think they need to tweak a few things before Partners like me will use it. I’m looking forward to seeing it when it comes out of Beta.

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