Time to follow the lead of YouTube’s hottest women. They may be pretty and popular, but they’re not stupid. 

If you have enabled playlists on your YouTube channel, turn them off immediately. Many popular YouTube creators (especially the hot women) have discovered this already — or never bothered creating and offering playlists. Disabling the playlists is the only way to make it easy for a viewer to sort your videos on their own.

Go immediately to your account page, select “edit” under the banner… then uncheck playlists.

 Only if you disable playlists will the user have the ability to instantly sort videos by various attributes like “dated added,” “most viewed” or “top rated” (per image below).

But if you show off your playlists, it takes a rocket scientist to figure out how to sort your videos by any criteria. So they may see that “best of” collection you assembled, but they’ll never find your recent videos. Or they may see your recent videos but not find your best videos. And they may not even find the search field.

Until YouTube solves this (and some of the other major UI flaws) in channel pages, you’re going to have to trust the user to sort by “most viewed” or “top rated” if they are trying to find out if you’re any good (“most recent” is top by default), because the playlist functionality is hostile. 

Also- if “most recent” videos aren’t first, your subscribers won’t want to return to your channel page to catch up, because the new ones are too hard to find.

I hope this helps. I’m puzzled why this isn’t solved by the technical folks, or communicated to people via YouTube. I went back to the original channel-page design for this very reason, and was really frustrated by the design.

For the record, I was working on a client project that required me to grab sample videos from prominent and attractive YouTube partners (iJustine, HappySlip, VenetianPrincess, HotForWords, CommunityChannel) and I saw that they’d all disabled playlists. What? You don’t believe it was a client project? You think I’m just cruising the list of the most-popular and prettiest girls on YouTube? You pig!

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