YouTube launches news-related features for Singapore users

SINGAPORE — With more people watching news on YouTube, its parent company Google has launched several news-related features on the video-sharing website.

The American-based technology giant announced the rolling out of these features in Singapore and Malaysia on Tuesday (Nov 13). These were first launched in July in 17 countries including the United States, United Kingdom, Japan and India.

For example, Singapore viewers would be alerted to breaking news events on the YouTube homepage as videos from news organisations on the event would be highlighted on the website.

These new features are part of a programme called Google News Initiative, which the company said aims to "help journalism thrive in the digital age".

YouTube announced in July that it was investing US$25 million (S$34.5 million) in establishing a working group with news organisations, providing funding to these companies to build video operations, and expanding its team that supports news publishers.

While the majority of videos viewed on Youtube still belong to the entertainment category, YouTube’s global director of news partnerships Tim Katz said that the “watch time” on news content has tripled in the last two years. YouTube declined to provide exact numbers.

Apart from introducing a new breaking news category, Mr Katz said that in the event of developing news where there is insufficient content from credible sources, a text snippet will show up in the search results to provide viewers with context and information, as well as links to text articles on Google News.

Viewers who search for a particular news topic on YouTube would also be directed to relevant videos from news organisations, which will be featured at the top of search results and labelled as Top News.

When watching videos from these new sections, viewers will also get suggestions from other credible sources in the Up Next section.

While engagement is usually a metric which YouTube uses to recommend videos for its users, Mr Katz stressed that “engagement is not a substitute for credibility” when it comes to news.

Hence, YouTube will only recommend news videos from credible sources.

So how would YouTube determine whether a source is credible? Mr Katz said it would use the same set of sources as Google News, which is an established product for news.

Google News use “human raters” around the world to look at local news sources in the local languages, and rate their credibility on a range of topics.

“YouTube will be aligned with how Google News create that set of sources, and we use the same raters that they do,” he added.

In a press release, YouTube reiterated that it has worked with publishers to “elevate accurate, quality content and stem the flow of misinformation and disinformation” over the past few years.

In Singapore, Google has trained more than 200 journalists in digital tools for storytelling and reporting.