Search And Conversation are the New Focus of YouTube Redesign

YouTube began pushing out the site’s redesign Wednesday after testing the format since January. The cleaner, stripped-down version, which comes after a year of planning, more closely resembles the style and design of pages from parent company Google.

The changes might seem subtle at first, but that’s only because the site sports a cleaner look. Metrics from preliminary tests that YouTube ran earlier this year suggest that overall video playbacks with the redesign rose 6%. People stay on the site 7% longer to view and comment longer. The cleaner design also helps pages load faster.

The redesign also considers content owners. The site encourages conversation between the content owners and site visitors. People can now ask questions and have the person who uploaded the video comment under the Uploader Comments section. The best rated comment rises to the top.

Hover over the Views tab to reveal stats on the video. If a video owner creates multiple videos they now serve-up on the top of the page without cluttering the sides with links and thumbnails. The site also lets content owners brand videos with a profile and a logo above each video player.

Although the site encourages community and conversation, YouTube has yet to implement the open-source Salmon protocol, which would allow people to share comments across multiple social sites without leaving the page.  This would greatly help for their list management purposes.