YouTube is adding a new For You section to creator channels. The TikTok-like feature will be personalized to each visitor, recommending content from a channel based on each viewer’s watch history. The company’s support account on X posted about the upcoming feature, which launches on November 20.
Creators can prepare for the For You section by confirming their options before its release date.
You can toggle the feature’s availability and change its settings in YouTube Studio by selecting Customization > Layout and then checking each of the prompts under the For You section. It allows you to toggle whether full-length videos, shorts and livestreams are available for the feature.
The company had already teased the feature in a May video posted to its Creator Insider channel, a hub where YouTube employees have “direct conversations” with YouTubers. In that clip, product manager Ann Katrin Kuessner framed the feature as an alternative to the static home page.
“You’re trying to find a configuration that is one-size-fits-all since the channel page looks the same today for every person that visits it,” Kuessner said, summarizing a problem creators face. She said the feature’s personalization “will be especially effective if your channel has multiple topics, languages, or content formats.”
YouTube has been sliding TikTok-like features into its platform for years now, and they’re often pretty blatant, like the entire Shorts feature and the (much later) addition of vertical video editing. But this one seems like a particularly clever adaptation of the TikTok formula. It’s a fun way to surface videos you might otherwise miss from some of the longer-running and more prolific channels — almost like having a “random” button for just one channel.
