YouTube as a video sharing platform is growing exponentially. The Google subsidiary recently revealed that about 1.9 billion logged-in users visit the website every month and more than 180 million hours of content from the website is consumed on TV screens every day.
Content discovery on YouTube is a big issue and new creators have to rely on the website"s algorithm to get their videos recommended to relevant audiences. This makes it tough for such creators to rise up in the ranks of YouTube stardom. Competing apps, like Instagram, already have a content discovery system in place and, with the launch of IGTV, YouTube now has some serious competition.
To counter this, and to provide an option to discover new content and creators, YouTube is testing the “Explore” tab on their iOS app which will let users discover new content that they might like. As this is an experimental feature, it is only available to a small number of users exclusively on the iOS platform.
With the addition of this new experimental feature, YouTube has moved the “Trending” section in the iOS app to “Explore” in order to eliminate confusion between both of these features. This makes sense because both of these features will work in a similar way. The Explore section will work based on the user’s watch history and videos similar to what the users watch will be suggested to them. This makes this section a lot similar to the content discovery explorer on Instagram.
Since this is still being tested, the company has not shared any details about the public rollout of the feature and its availability on Android.
Source: YouTube Help Forum via Creator Insider (YouTube)