Settings of Your YouTube Channel That Harm Your Business. Part 1

Today, we will explore a very important aspect for every business channel owner on YouTube — its behind-the-scenes settings, or simply put, your "Studio." Of course, we believe you are familiar with the concept, but YouTube has many settings, and not everyone knows which ones are important and which ones are not.

If the sheer number of figures and letters makes your head spin, we don't blame you. But we will help you understand!

All the information mentioned in this article is based on our personal experience from creating a football news channel in collaboration with the smartphone manufacturer Meizu, so be sure to open your studios and check your settings along with us.

Exploring Uploaded Videos

Open your "Studio," go to the "Content" tab on the left side of the screen, and select any of your videos. Scroll down a bit until you reach "Audience," where YouTube will ask you: "Is this video made for kids?". This step is important for several reasons.

First, if you check "Yes," viewers won't be able to leave comments on your video, and you won't be able to monetize it, as monetization is disabled for such videos. Second, videos watched by kids, such as content about Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, aren't necessarily intended for them, even if they turn out to be interesting to young subscribers. Check "No," and let's move on.

In the same section but further down, there's another interesting option: "Automatic Chapters." To be honest, YouTube's artificial intelligence isn't good enough to divide the video into separate parts (for easier viewing and searching) without your help, so it's better to do this yourself. To do this, go a bit higher, to the description, and manually enter the data in the format: "0:00 Introduction, 3:00 History, 7:00 End."

Another interesting aspect here is the license. The standard YouTube license is set by default, but the second option is the Creative Commons license, which allows other users on the platform to use snippets of your video in their own content. From your position as a business owner, the second option might be preferable if you don't mind free advertising.

While we're in this section, we also recommend disabling anything marked as experimental. As the name suggests, this feature is not fully developed by the platform yet.

Getting Rid of Harmful Elements

Now let's talk about the reactions left by viewers under your videos, but not those written by real people. Instead, let's focus on spammers who ruin your statistics and cause your video to appear less frequently in recommendations to potential audiences.

In "Settings," under the "Community" tab, you can add certain words to the blacklist. Regardless of whether your channel is for kids or not, this is a useful feature. Firstly, because a large number of obscene words can damage the impression of your channel, and secondly, if you experience a bot attack, you can insert the entire bot message into the blacklist and forget about it.

Also, in the "Community" section, be sure to check the box next to "Hold potentially inappropriate comments for review." This will again save you from the headache of dealing with spammers.

Useful Details

When you're done with that, let's remember other, more obvious settings that channel owners often overlook.

Don't forget to set the correct country of residence in "Settings" — "Channel." This is necessary so that the monetization of your channel complies with the laws of your country. For example, if you set it to the USA, you'll have to pay American taxes.

In the same section, under the "Features availability" tab, we recommend enabling all the options provided so that you can create thumbnails for your videos. As you probably already know, thumbnails are essential for attracting an audience.

In another subcategory of "Settings," under "Video upload," it's crucial to add a description (and tags, but they are less important). Moreover, the description should be short — one-line — because it's displayed on the main page of your channel. Use it wisely!

With that, the first part of our exploration of useful and not-so-useful settings comes to an end, but there are still plenty of tricks to discover! We hope we've helped improve your channel and perhaps introduced you to settings you hadn't noticed before.

For professional assistance, you can always turn to us. The experts at "Lava Media" can help you effectively set up advertising or take care of promoting your channel for you!

In this article, we continue our series on managing business channels. You can check out the previous part, "How to Find New Clients on YouTube: Lead Generation Tips," by following the link.