Once a YouTuber hits 500,000 subscribers, the company has found that things often change. That half-million mark is something of a tipping point in terms of both growth and revenue, says Bangaly Kaba, a director of product management at YouTube. “We just saw disproportionate growth in revenue,” he says, “even though most of our creators are smaller than that size.” Larger channels also tend to get more views, which leads to more recommendations, which leads to more views, which leads to more revenue, and so on.

With a new feature called Hype, YouTube is trying to focus on growing its smaller channels and helping people discover and share new creators. Hype is a whole new promotion system within YouTube: there’s a new button to promote a video, and the most hyped videos will appear on a platform-wide leaderboard. It’s a bit like Trending, but it’s specifically focused on smaller channels and what people specifically recommend instead of just what they watch.

YouTube has been working on Hype since early 2023, when the company decided to focus more on building communities within YouTube. (At Wednesday’s Made on YouTube event in New York City, “community” was the buzzword of the day.) In talking to users, Kaba says, the YouTube team found that viewers wanted to feel involved above all else. “We’ve heard some research that tells us viewers want to influence the creative process,” he says. “We’ve also heard feedback that they want to contribute to the conversation.” People also wanted Cameo-style videos, they wanted to do Q&As with creators, and so on.

Fans especially wanted a way to more aggressively help their favorite creators succeed. There’s something enticing about getting in on something cool early, about being the one to share it with the world — it makes people feel invested in the things they’re promoting. In the age of duets, stitches, and remixes, viewers are creators and creators are viewers, and giving everyone a way to grow made sense for YouTube. “We really wanted to give fans the opportunity to lean in as community members, to help support their favorite creators,” Kaba says.

Meanwhile, more casual YouTube viewers kept saying the same thing: “They wanted to be able to discover things that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to discover, or that YouTube wouldn’t otherwise recommend.” Viewers want the content; creators want to grow; fans want to share. Hype is at the center of all of those things.

The mechanics behind Hype are quite complicated. A video is only eligible to be hyped within the first seven days of being published, and of course, if it was created by a channel with less than half a million subscribers. Each user only gets three hypes per week, and each hype is worth a certain number of points that are inversely proportional to the number of subscribers a given channel has. (The idea is that smaller channels should also be able to reach the leaderboard, so each hype to a smaller channel is worth more points — YouTube goes to great lengths here to ensure that the biggest channels don’t just dominate the leaderboard.) The 100 videos with the most total points reach the top of the leaderboard.

The rankings are specific to each country, and YouTube plans to personalize the Hype section for each user over time as well. The top 100 won’t change, but YouTube will suddenly have a lot of good data on which small videos people like across all topics. Kaba says Hype won’t affect the traditional YouTube algorithm, but the Hype section could soon have more filters and topic-specific rankings, and hyped videos will appear in a new section in the recommendations feed.

The goal of all this nuance and complexity is to ensure that the leaderboard changes a lot, and that people feel invested in each thing they’re promoting. “There’s a certain beauty in showing the things that people are willing to spend hype points on above and beyond their means,” says Kristen Stewart, Hype’s interaction designer. “There’s a signal there: This is the stuff that really matters to people, that they really want to advocate for.” It’s also to try to prevent the system from being rigged. (It’s just a fact of the internet: If you give people a leaderboard, they’re going to try to rise above it.) By limiting users’ hype, each hype point is a much stronger positive signal than a typical like — and it’s no coincidence that there’s no undo hype button.

You’ll start seeing the hype button after you like a video, as a way to boost your content even further. When you hype a video, you’ll see how many points it has and whether it’s on the leaderboard. At the end of each week, you’ll get a Spotify Wrapped-style summary of the videos you hyped and how they performed in the end. There are also badges for the first few people to hype a video, or if you hype five videos that end up on the leaderboard, for example. “We’re thinking about all the things we can do to celebrate the people who are impactful hypers,” Stewart says.

For creators, Hype is meant to be all positive: a way to connect with their biggest fans, offload some of the promotional work, and monetize their most dedicated viewers. When you promote a video, the creator also gets a monetary bonus, but you don’t get to hear how much. And both Kaba and Stewart mentioned the possibility of paid hypes, allowing users to earn more than three per week for a fee that’s split with the creator. “The default is always free until you run out of hypes,” Stewart says, showing off a mock-up of what a paid hype might look like. “And then we show you that you’re going to hype for $2.”

To start, Hype is mostly a thing on its own within YouTube, but don’t be surprised if it permeates the platform. YouTube is a massive, practically flooding platform, and it’s harder than ever for a new creator to break through. Ensuring that new users can grow and succeed is crucial for YouTube if it wants to be home to the next MrBeast, not just the current one. But you can’t just take the algorithm away from the big channels. Hype gives YouTube a chance to do what works while also figuring out what’s next.