YouTube is giving livestream communities more ways to play, pay, and participate
Livestream viewers have never been content to just sit back and watch. They chat. They donate. They subscribe. They clip. They make memes. They tell the streamer what to do next. Sometimes, they even feed cats thousands of miles away.
Barbara Macdonald remembers that last one particularly well. Macdonald, YouTube‘s product manager for Live, has worked on the platform’s livestreaming products for more than a decade. Years ago, after YouTube opened an API that let creators connect Super Chats and channel memberships to real-world effects, someone hooked a livestream to a cat-feeding station in Russia. A viewer could send money from their own home and watch as food was dispensed for the cats on screen.
“I would say Live has always been really focused on how audiences are able to participate and control the action,” Macdonald told Mashable. “That’s what makes live stand out from asynchronous video.”
Now, YouTube wants to give creators and their communities a lot more ways to do exactly that.
At its annual Made on YouTube event in New York City on Wednesday, the platform is unveiling more than 30 new products and features for creators and viewers, including a slate of updates aimed specifically at livestreaming. Among them are Live Showdowns, timed competitions between creators in which audience participation can influence who wins; an expansion of Watch With, which lets creators build live commentary around other YouTube content; and a pilot that brings YouTube’s Auto-Dubbing technology to live video.
The announcements arrive as YouTube makes a bigger push into a live format it has supported since 2011. But the company’s bet isn’t that livestreaming is suddenly becoming interactive. It always has been. Instead, YouTube is building more of the behaviors that already define livestream communities — collaboration, competition, fan funding, and audience participation — directly into its products.
And with more than 600 million logged-in viewers already watching live content on YouTube every day, the company now wants to give more creators a reason to go live.
YouTube wants more creators to go live
Credit: YouTube
Macdonald has watched YouTube Live change dramatically since she first started working on the product. Around 2019, she said, livestreaming began moving away from its more desktop-heavy, high-production roots toward something increasingly mobile and casual.
YouTube has responded by investing more in mobile live creation and discovery. Looking toward 2027, Macdonald said her team’s priorities can essentially be reduced to two things: reach and monetization.
“When you go live to an empty room, you’re there doing a stream so you can engage with an audience and riff back and forth with them,” she said. “We want to get you as many relevant eyeballs as we can.”
One way YouTube hopes to do that is by making collaboration easier. An update to Go Live Together will introduce smart matching, allowing creators who are live at the same time to find one another and link up. From there, they can choose to launch a Live Showdown.
Credit: YouTube
During a Showdown, activity from each creator’s audience contributes to a competition displayed on screen. Free participation counts, meaning viewers don’t have to pay to influence the result. But paid interactions — including Super Chats, Super Stickers, gifts, and gifted channel memberships — count more. That’s another potential revenue stream for creators. It also raises an obvious question: At what point does participating in a livestream start to feel pay-to-play?
Macdonald, who previously worked on YouTube’s fan-funding products, including Super Chat, said it’s a tension the company has considered for years.
“We do want to make sure that every viewer, no matter their means, is able to participate in some fashion,” she said. Showdowns are designed so everyone can contribute, she added, while viewers who want to financially support a creator can have a larger impact on the outcome.
YouTube is also expanding Watch With, which allows creators to react to and provide commentary around other content on the platform. The idea addresses another problem Macdonald said YouTube frequently hears from creators curious about livestreaming: They simply don’t know what they’d do once the camera turns on.
By giving them something to react to, YouTube hopes to make that first stream less intimidating. “We’re really hoping it will open up the funnel and allow more people to dabble and to try live,” Macdonald said.
Featured Video For You
What happens when viewers become stakeholders?
Creator and conservationist Maya Higa already knows what can happen when a livestream audience is given something to do. Higa began streaming in 2019, the same year she started bringing the wildlife education work she’d previously done in person as a zookeeper online. She quickly realized livestreaming allowed her to reach far more people without transporting animals to schools, birthday parties, and other events.
In 2021, she founded Alveus Sanctuary, a nonprofit wildlife sanctuary and conservation education center that isn’t open to the general public. Instead, viewers can visit virtually through cameras livestreaming from its animal enclosures around the clock.
And the community doesn’t just watch. Alveus is funded in large part through crowdsourced donations. Higa said her community has helped build the sanctuary from the beginning, creating a relationship she describes differently from a typical creator-fan dynamic.
“Not only are they a part of building it — I mean, they did build it,” Higa told Mashable. “That also makes them stakeholders in it in an interesting way.”
Sometimes that participation is financial. Alveus auctions paintings made by its animal ambassadors. Viewers can donate to activate an automated feeder that dispenses treats to the sanctuary’s cow and herd of emus. Another feature lets them turn on a splash pad for the emus. Fans who send toys or enrichment items to Alveus can later watch the animals encounter them on the sanctuary’s livestreams.
“I guess by definition, it is a little bit transactional, but it’s never felt that way,” Higa said. “It just feels really good and really special. It feels like we’re all doing it together.”
But money isn’t the only way Alveus has figured out how to turn viewers into participants. Higa recently launched a citizen-science project around the sanctuary’s pollinator garden. A pan-tilt-zoom camera lets viewers search the garden for insects and other pollinators, submit their observations, collect points and stickers, and compete on a leaderboard.
“It’s kind of like playing Pokémon,” Higa joked. Except that the Pokémon are real, and the observations could potentially become useful scientific data.
The idea came to Higa after attending an invertebrate conference where she heard about a citizen-science project that had collected roughly 400 observations from members of the public. Alveus, she realized, routinely has between 1,000 and 2,000 concurrent viewers watching its live cameras. “We could get 400 observations in half a day,” she recalled thinking.
On the viewer’s end, it’s effectively a game. On Alveus’ end, Higa hopes the project can generate information on which pollinators visit which plants at different points in the year and eventually share that data with conservationists.
“Our community is so invested in what we’re doing, they always want to do something,” she said. “They really want to make an impact, and they want to be involved in any way they can.”
Livestreaming is increasingly global, too
YouTube’s ambitions for Live don’t stop at getting more people to participate. It also wants creators’ communities to cross borders more easily.
Macdonald said more than 40 percent of watch time on YouTube Live comes from viewers outside a creator’s home region. Now the company is piloting Auto-Dubbing for Live, an extension of the Gemini-powered technology it already uses to translate uploaded videos into other languages. Since launching in 2023, YouTube’s existing auto-dubbing system now supports 27 languages.
For live video, translated audio will be made available as a separate audio track that viewers can select in the YouTube player while a broadcast is happening. Doing that in real time presents a much harder technical problem than dubbing a finished video, particularly when livestream conversations move quickly. Macdonald said YouTube’s infrastructure team is working to deliver the translated audio with the low-latency live video required.
Higa sees the potential for conservation, a subject whose audience is inherently global, but she’s also more cautious about what technology can replicate. Her ideal, she said, would be growing Alveus’ education team to include educators from different parts of the world who can speak directly to audiences in their own languages.
“There are things that they understand and things that they could say in a language that I could never convey auto-dubbed,” she said.
A viewer, a fan, or something else?
The question at the center of YouTube’s new features is one that livestreamers have been navigating for years: How much agency should an audience have? YouTube’s answer increasingly seems to be: quite a lot.
Showdowns allow audiences to influence a competition. Watch With turns watching someone else’s content into a communal event. Smart matching is designed to put previously separate creator communities in the same room. Fan-funding products allow viewers to financially affect what’s happening on screen. Auto-Dubbing could eventually allow those communities to form across languages.
But Higa’s experience with Alveus suggests the most meaningful outcome of all that participation might be harder for a platform to quantify.
Since Higa began streaming in 2019, she estimates her platform has generated around $8 million in crowdsourced and other fundraising. She’s also watched members of her audience decide to study environmental science or conservation biology and pursue careers dedicated to the planet. That experience has changed how she thinks about the people on the other side of the screen.
“I never say fans,” Higa said. “I sometimes say viewers. I almost always say our community.”
Some have been watching her since 2019. They’ve grown up alongside one another. Higa has watched their interests, values, and even career paths change. “It does feel like a movement of these young people that are growing up together,” she said.
And that might be the more interesting bet behind YouTube’s latest updates to Live. The platform doesn’t need to teach viewers how to participate in livestreams. They’ve been doing that for years. The opportunity is figuring out what creators and their audiences can build once they do.
From YouTubers and TikTok stars to streamers and podcasters, Mashable talks to creators about how they built their platforms, the gear they swear by, and the trends they see coming next. Read more of our creator coverage, sign up for our Trending Now and Top Stories newsletters or get Mashable push alerts to discover the internet’s most exciting voices.
