A better start for a young channel
If your channel has fewer than five public videos, Optimise My Channel now says so plainly instead of showing an empty grid: there is no median to score against until the fifth upload, and that is a fact about the channel, not a fault. The page gives three things to do now, starting with picking three competitors.
The connect-channel page says what connecting switches on, that it takes about twenty seconds and starts the 14-day trial with no card, and shows the ninety-second how-to of the Google screens inline. It also offers the free Lens extension for Chrome on a card you can skip: every YouTube video against its own channel's normal, no account needed, and the card steps aside by itself when Lens is already installed.
Three new pages beside Competitors. Competitor feed: what the channels you watch did, every upload, every title and thumbnail change with before and after, every removal, and their outliers. Idea alerts: a phrase and a floor, and an email the day a measured video on your subject clears it. Thumbnail search: the thumbnails that won on a subject, each with its multiple, and what they have in common.
No channel yet? You can start one from the connect page now. Tell VideoCore what you know or love, see what videos on that subject actually did (measured from channels in the database, with the smallest channel that won named), pick a lane, create the channel on YouTube in a minute and connect it. The channels that won your subject become your first competitors, so the field is measured before your first upload.
The post-mortem. Jake Trinder’s five decisions now run over every upload on Optimise: which of topic, packaging, hook, body and read held each video back, counted against your field with the number behind each verdict, and a card that names the decision holding your whole channel back this week. Nothing is predicted and nothing is guessed: a decision it cannot measure says so.
A new front page: the product on the right, real screens of Find Ideas and Lens, live counts of what the database holds, and a band on the five decisions a video is made of, with Jake Trinder and the psychology of the click one click away.
A guides page. Every public guide, article, comparison and free tool in one list at videocore.uk/guides.php, with the how-to videos and this page linked from the top. It is in the homepage footer and on the Academy page in the app.
The five decisions. Jake Trinder’s rule that a video is five decisions in a row, any one of which can sink it, is now a strip on the Feed, the project page and the brief: topic, packaging, hook, body, read. Each is a tick, a half or a dot from what you have recorded, with the receipt and the page that settles it, and Next names the first one not yet passed.
Acceptance criteria on every brief: Write from the title turns your working title into the conditions that must be true by the end for the title to be true, each broken into its smallest parts. In Script Studio, Check the script against the criteria marks every condition pass, partial or fail with the script line that meets it. The video is finished when every line passes. This is Jake Trinder’s rule from his new training, built in.
Two new articles: Jake Trinder’s fifteen-minute method written up as the five decisions a video is made of, with his video and how VideoCore measures each decision (how-to-become-disgustingly-good-at-youtube.php), and the psychology of YouTube clicks, twelve mechanisms with the evidence graded and the myths named (psychology-of-youtube-clicks.php).
Smaller things: the competitor box on Channel setup now takes a name, a link, a handle or any video link; the menu shows one New badge at a time, on the newest thing you have not opened; the Mentor can see what is on the page you are asking from; and Optimise says plainly that only public uploads are scored.
Two new reads under What’s Working: who owns which subject in your field (a table of subjects by channel, your column first, counted from settled uploads), and what is untried in your field (constructions and subjects that win on the channels around you and that nobody inside your field has used in the last year, with one example each and the base it beat).
Find Ideas is one question and a deck. Type what you want to make videos about, press the button, and the ideas arrive one at a time: who it is for, the promise, the hooks, the angle, then Save, Not this or Next. The eleven research tabs are still there, folded under one line until you want them. And the Mentor now ends every answer with one next step as a button you can press.
VideoCore now asks. Every email from us ends with one question you can answer by replying, two short check-ins arrive on day 3 and day 14 with three one-tap answers, and the Mentor in the app asks once how it is going. A person reads every answer, and anything that points at a fix joins the same queue as a bug report.