YouTube Starts Delivering ‘breaking news’ On Its Homepage Across Platforms

For most, YouTube is a place to hop from one video to the next and
descend down rabbit holes, but browsing anything like a feed has become
less straightforward than other platforms, which makes the breaking news
section an interesting addition.

As the video sharing site has grown older, the content has grown more
produced with YouTube personalities mounting “celebrity” careers, while
commentary-heavy videos grow in popularity over the raw video that is
more common on Facebook and Twitter.

For YouTube’s part this has grown to be a very valuable distinction.
While Facebook’s has seen its video views increase heavily by way of
quick-and-dirty videos, YouTube seems to be somewhere where people
invest major time browsing, even if there seems to be just as much
noise. In June, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced that the site had
1.5 billion watching an hour of video each on mobile alone.

Breaking news may initially seem to be a bit of an unusual direction
for the site, but as Google works on courting publishers through special
programs with AMP, it may be interesting to see how YouTube treats
partnerships with 24-hour broadcast news publishers who already put a
lot of content on the site.

Today, my “breaking news” tab had a lot of news on Bannon’s exit from
the White House. Most of the stuff was an hour or two old, so it’s not
BREAKING quite as much as other locations but it offers a chance to see
stories evolve on YouTube in a much more packaged way. For now  it seems
that YouTube is mostly turning to traditional networks as the
sources. Going with established media might be a more straight-forward
start but it will be interesting to see how much it adjusts to people’s
viewing habits and whether more bombastic YouTube personalities find
their way into the tab sharing their thoughts on the day’s latest news
and begging you to like and subscribe for more.

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