Some creators on YouTube can now take advantage of a new tool to grab your attention

YouTube is testing a new tool that lets creators cut out popular parts of their videos and publish them separately as short 16:9 clips. Right now, only eligible YouTubers can get access to the feature: it’s available in YouTube Studio Desktop under the “Create a video highlight” button. Right now, this only works with English videos. YouTube has quite a lot of insights about your published videos, which help you view relevant metrics about how your content performs. You get to see audience retention graphs and other info making it easier to determine what your audience is interested in. Now, YouTube is rolling out a feature that lets you further take advantage of its insights and grab your viewers’ attention.

The tool to simply grab parts of your popular videos and turn them into separate clips is designed for long-form videos in English. The outputted videos will maintain their landscape orientation, so they won’t switch to 9:16 YouTube Shorts.

Right now, the feature is rolled out to a limited number of users. If you post your videos in English, you can check if you’re eligible on the YouTube Studio Desktop. If the feature is available for you, you’ll see a new button called “Create a video highlight” when you’re editing an uploaded file. The platform will then automatically highlight the popular parts of your videos and help you trim them, so you can then publish them separately.

This way, when a person checks out your channel for the first time, they can watch the short clips that highlight the funniest or most notable moments from your videos. This serves as a hook for your longer content, helping people determine whether your content is for them.

For now, though, it’s not clear if the feature will expand or if Google will decide it’s not going to stick with it. We’ll hopefully know more soon.

I personally think that this idea is great for highlighting your content when you get a visit to your channel. However, what I think would be more beneficial is the option to also make these short clips into YouTube Shorts. This would help your channel grow and reach even more. But for now, the highlighted vids seem to be in horizontal orientation.