What is the next big opportunity for Youtube? How would you go about designing it?

Clarifying questions:

Are We talking about worldwide or particular geography? India

Are we talking about any particular segment? Overall

Are we talking about particular demography? Overall

What is the main objective? increasing engagement

Describe the company and product

YouTube is the ultimate destination for online video sharing. The platform has established itself as a peerless social media website where modern video culture unfolds daily. Because of this, marketers have turned to YouTube to build brand relevancy and spur their video marketing strategies.  

SWOT Analysis

Strategic choices:

1.       Add another benefit in premium version apart from blocking ads

2.       Add paid subscription apart from premium version

Evaluation Criteria:

UX, Engagement, revenue, effort, competitive landscape

Evaluation of Strategic choice:

Here we will evaluate Paid subscription

UX: enabling users to purchase paid content will enhance user experience while in some rare scenario’s users will not get appropriate content. YouTube can improve the UX of its users by creating its own paid content which costs less to produce.

Engagement: from engagement perspective, paid content can increase engagement for the users if users are interested in content. It will incentivize content creators to invest more time and money in engaging with their users.

Revenue: from Revenue perspective, Paid content enables YouTube generate revenue from the share of the subscription or views. As YouTube pays content creator share of its revenue from advertising and views.

Implementation effort: YouTube has a large no. of channels and demographics from different countries which has different languages. As Google is a parent company which has huge technology resources but implementing of Paid content for one channel in 80 different languages will require significant investment.

Competitive landscape: Entering Paid content is good way to stay ahead of competitor such as Amazon Prime video or Netflix as it will add more userbase. However, entering Paid subscription will distract the YouTube from its free services model.

Recommendation:

By adding Paid subscription to YouTube, we can enhance the user experience and engagement among the users and generate additional revenue from enabling content creators to upload on YouTube. We can also increase userbase by attracting users from competitors such as Netflix and Amazon Prime. it is worth implementing Paid subscription. However, we should minimize the implementation effort and address the risks associated Negative content experiences with experienced and popular content creators.

Designing the Paid Subscription  

 Here we will design the Paid Subscription for YouTube for Senior Citizens.

User Journey:

1.       Senior wants to watch a video

2.       Search on Google

3.       Land on YouTube

4.       Choose Language

5.       Sign in

6.       Pay

7.       Browse/ search relevant content

8.       Read description of content

9.       Play video

10.   Finish or may not finish

11.   Come back again

12.   Wants to be reminded which show/video they were watching

13.   Start watching again

Identify problems in the journey & Features which would remove these problems

1.       Discovery on Google – we need directory sort of page for discovery

2.       Identification that user is a senior citizen

a.       Ask during Signup process itself

b.       For signup, seniors might not have Google account, so we rely on Username/Password Flow or face recognition or voice recognition.

3.       Choose preferred language

a.       A drop-down to select language with voice search.

4.       Payment: - we will have to depend upon Payment partner like Google pay or Free Trial or Voucher Code

5.       For Content discovery

a.       Search – Voice search

b.       Recommendations

c.       Programming solely focused on senior

6.       Read description: UI focused on seniors with large fonts/ thumbnails which are easier to read & comprehend.

7.       Play Video

a.       Remember subtitle preference

b.       Choose subtitle

c.       Choose resolution/quality

8.       Come back again: Deep linking

9.       Start watching again

a.       Continue watching

b.       Wishlist Feature

c.       Auto-login unless explicitly sign-out

10.   Other generic features

a.       Accessibility such as 2 to 3 settings for sizes of fonts and thumbnails which user can choose according to his or her choice

b.       Sign-out

c.       Video quality selection

d.       Forgot password

Feature prioritization

First, we will do all the mandatory features which will create the MVP, then pick features with High Impact, Low complexity features.

Summary   

We have to find the next big opportunity for YouTube. Which we found as Paid subscription. We evaluated it on the strategic parameters UX, Engagement, revenue, effort, competitive landscape and did recommendation. Then we have to design Paid subscription. We designed it for senior citizen. We described user journey, identified pain points and found features which will solve these pain points. Then we evaluated these features on the basis of complexity, impact and mandatory. We create the MVP first on the basis of mandatory features and then features with High impact and Low complexity.