YouTube’s ‘Hype’ Feature for Smaller Creators Goes Global
YouTube is giving its global fans the opportunity to help their favorite small creators go viral.
Discovery has always been YouTube’s biggest headache. With 500 hours of video uploaded every minute, the algorithm ends up deciding who breaks out and who fades away. And if you’re a smaller creator, the odds are rarely in your favour.
This week, YouTube rolled out a potential fix called Hype in 39 countries like India, Brazil, and Turkey.
Hype is a pretty much a button that sits right under “like,” designed specifically for channels under 500,000 subscribers. Fans can hype up to three videos a week, and every hype adds points. Rack up enough of them, and a video climbs the new Explore tab leaderboard. To level the playing field, YouTube even weights hypes for smaller channels more heavily.
YouTube also adds that fans can filter their feed to only see hyped content, get pinged when a creator they backed is close to the leaderboard, and even collect Hype Star badges for themselves. Soon, there’ll be category-specific leaderboards, gaming, style, and music, and ways to share the fact that you just hyped a video. Meanwhile, creators get a dedicated analytics card in YouTube Studio to track how their hypes are performing.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because YouTube isn’t operating in a vacuum. TikTok has built its empire on the promise that anyone, even someone with zero followers, can blow up overnight thanks to the For You Page—something YouTube has struggled to replicate.
Twitch, meanwhile, has flirted with fan-driven visibility tools like Boost This Stream, where viewers could pay to push a broadcast onto more homepages. YouTube’s Hype feels like a blend of both approaches: TikTok’s viral lottery combined with Twitch’s fan-powered boosts, but dressed up with YouTube’s own system of badges, leaderboards, and, soon, money.
YouTube has confirmed it’s already testing paid hypes in Brazil and Turkey, which could turn fan support into a literal currency. But if this happens, what happens to the small creator who can’t mobilize deep-pocketed fans? And wouldn’t it mean going back to the problem Hype was supposed to solve?
For now, though, Hype seems like a global experiment in letting fans play a bigger role in who gets seen and who doesn’t. Whether it actually helps smaller creators break through the noise… well, that’s the part worth keeping an eye on.
Ogbonda Chivumnovu
