TubeBuddy Review - Introduction
YouTube is the number 1 platform sought by content creators to promote their videos and brands. With a global subscriber base of 2.5 billion, it is second to only Facebook in terms of subscriber volumes. Youtube's advertisements and affiliate based commissions lure influencers globally for monetizing their content.
YouTube’s advertising revenue in 2021 was upwards of $28 Bn. An increment of nearly 46%, from the previous year. For anyone marketing their brand or product, YouTube is one advertising source you cannot ignore. In the last decade, YouTube has become a highly lucrative option for anyone seeking to earn income, whether primary or passive. YouTube pays 55% of the ad revenue it earns from advertisers based on clicks and impressions, to the content creator. It is a win win situation for both YouTube and creators where the latter upload videos that attract views and in return YouTube promotes advertisements to its viewers and earns revenue.
While earning through YouTube definitely has its charm, efficiently managing your YouTube channel to ensure continued success and channel growth is a whole different ball game. Manually managing your channel, optimizing videos for search, and reaching out to channel subscribers takes up a considerable amount of time. Time that could be better used for creating quality content that grows your subscriber base and expands your earnings.
Off late several tools to help YouTube content creators to manage and scale up their channels for success have cropped up. One such tool is TubeBuddy - a browser based extension aimed at guiding and assisting you in growing your channel by providing you with tools that help you optimize your content in the fastest time possible.
In this post we will cover the TubeBuddy review for 2023, in an effort to fully evaluate if it is still the right tool for content creators to grow themselves on YouTube.
What is TubeBuddy?
TubeBuddy was launched in 2014. The company has actively been working in and around YouTube for over 15 years (even before it was owned by Google) by developing and optimizing tools for better productivity and success for content creators.
While technically a browser extension, TubeBuddy is actually more of a YouTube plugin, as it adds tools directly on top of the YouTube overlay. The tool comes in three pricing tiers - Pro, Star, and Legend - but also comes with a limited (but still useful) free version - more on that later.
What is TubeBuddy Used For?
TubeBuddy is primarily used for end to end management of your YourTube account. Starting from analyzing and finding topics to making videos on, to creating content, from organizing and optimizing videos for your viewers, to content monetization, TubeBuddy offers an end all solutions for content creators. TubeBuddy is known for its extensive list of features, grouped together in 5 sections - productivity, bulk processing, video SEO, promotion, and data & research.
Key TubeBuddy Features:
Below are some of TubeBuddy’s most popular features from each category.
Productivity Tools
Advanced Video Embed:
Embedding YouTube videos on your own webpage can increase your Google rankings, make your page seem more reliable and people friendly, which in return translates to more views and conversions. As YouTube’s own video embedding options are fairly limited, TubeBuddy allows you to create your own embed codes which give you the freedom to customize the appearance of your embedded videos, disable play controls, insert force-closed captioning, make your videos loop automatically, and more.
Scheduled Publish:
Most content creators create multiple videos in 1 sitting and then try to publish them at regular intervals. This keeps the audience entertained and also boosts the Youtube algorithm. However this can be time taking and the manual effort required to publish at given intervals can be taxing on your other work committments. This is where TubeBuddy helps automate the entire process. You can just upload your videos once and have them publish at your defined intervals. Once set, TubeBuddy will publish it for you. This is also helpful if you want to target 2 separate populations at different intervals. For example, you want the video to go to your list first or internally in your organization and then Youtube; this can be done throughTubeBuddy. With Scheduled Publish, you can even schedule an unlisted video to get added to a playlist in the future.
Playlist Actions:
As a content creator, you could be somebody new who is trying to make it to the YouTube partner program by getting your first 4,000 hours of view time, or maybe you’re a YouTuber who is looking to expand their ad earnings; a proven way to get more view time on your videos is to allow people to binge-watch your content by offering it through curated playlists. Once in a playlist, videos will play automatically, one after another. However, if your playlist is not sorted out properly, there are chances that users will stop watching the first chance they get. The “Playlist Actions Tool” aids you in optimizing and organizing your playlists in a manner which allows you to put your best-performing videos at the top, for minimal user drop off.
Canned Responses:
Inviting and answering comments is a great way to build a thriving community around your content and channel. But as your presence grows, so will the amount of comments from users asking repetitive questions. Making the effort and taking the time to answer the same thing over and over again can prove to be cumbersome. TubeBuddy’s canned responses give you the ability to answer FAQs with response templates, and it also allows you to personalize each template with a placeholder for a viewer’s username.
Card Templates and End Screen Templates:
Youtube info cards and end screens are a brilliant way to attach and link four different types of content into your videos - YouTube videos, YouTube playlists, YouTube channels, and approved external links. Info cards and end screens have long been used to house Call to Actions, vital to any online business. Unfortunately, YouTube by default does not give you the option to replicate your cards and end screen into other videos at the click of a button. Luckily though, TubeBuddy optimizes the infocards and provides users with the facility to link their videos to different content types.
Video SEO Tools
Keyword Explorer:
This super helpful and important feature enables you to discover keywords, associated keywords and related topics that offer the best chances to rank better on YouTube search. This is an indispensable tool that can help keyword optimize all your videos and help you identify and chart out your future content. Keyword Explorer helps users save a good amount of time that they would otherwise spend researching video tags manually.
Best Practice Audit:
Audit is an A simple but powerful feature that puts automated checks to ensure you are following all of YouTube’s recommendations for your content to get the traction you desire. Ensure your video is set up correctly, scan for broken links, double-check if the right cards are up there, get a reminder for adding specific words or phrases in your title/tags/description, and more; keep the best practice checks that you need and disable the rest. This is an essential tool that helps you make sure that your content is all set to go live.
Opportunity Finder:
A straightforward and effective tool where TubeBuddy provides you with advice on what next steps to take for channel growth, based on video performance and analytics. This tool will help you save a fair bit of time by providing you with more promotional opportunities, which you would otherwise have to research manually.
AB Testing:
Having the right thumbnails, titles and tags can go a long way to improve your video click-through rate (CTR) and get you the video watch time you require. You may already have some ideas about how your video thumbnails should be, what tags you need to choose, and how your video titles ought to sound. Through this feature, TubeBuddy enables you to put your ideas and theories to the test. Split test which video title, tags, and thumbnail imagery fetches you the best results, and back up your choice with real data.
Promotion Tools
Best Time to Publish:
As with any other platform that is centered on user-generated content, there are times during the week which are more opportune than others to publish your content on YouTube as well. Data suggests that for video content, the first 48 hours are crucial. YouTube’s algorithm will recommend your video to users if your content manages to gather a good amount of initial views and watch time. This feature will help drive initial view velocity on uploads quickly, identify when your audience is most active, and will inform you of when is the best time for you to live stream.
Share Tracker:
Cross-platform content sharing is a proven way to enjoy better visibility and user engagement for your content. With Share Tracker, TubeBuddy lets you not only share your content across other social media platforms, but also allows you to keep track of which of your content has been shared on what platform.
Vid2Vid promotion:
As mentioned above, it is imperative for a video to gain traction early for YouTube’s algorithm to catch it and recommend it to others; one way to increase the chances of your newest uploads gaining early momentum is to promote it on your older content. This is precisely what Vid2Vid promises to do - it adds your newest videos to the description of your older videos. The tool is also great to promote contest videos and showcase an older video that is relevant to trending topics.
Publish to Facebook:
Facebook penalizes you for directly posting YouTube videos on your feed by not sharing the content to people ahead; it does so to ensure that their traffic does not go away to another platform. Unfortunately, this means Facebook is a no-go for when it comes to generating social traffic to your video content. Fortunately though, TubeBuddy’s Publish to Facebook feature allows you to publish any YouTube video content as native video onto Facebook directly. Republishing your videos as native videos on Facebook is a good way to get more views.
Data and Research
Click Magnet:
For anyone looking to get the 1000 subscriber milestone for their YouTube channel, the ClickMagnet feature is indispensable. By utilizing YouTube Analytics and AI, it smartly compiles CTR statistics for your videos and categorizes each of your video titles and thumbnails into different categories; by doing so it helps you understand which of your videos are doing best and how small tweaks to them can get you even better results. It also enables you to group, sort, view and export your most important video performance data to get a sense and feel of how your content is performing and what should be your next steps.
Retention Analyzer:
The longer a video manages to retain its audience, the likelier it is for the YouTube algorithm to push it to new viewers. This is the reason why viewer retention for your video content is so important. TubeBuddy’s Retention Analyzer tool gives insight into which video intros and opening sequences are causing viewers to drop off, allows you to test various end screens to identify which one performs the best, and gives you an overall idea of user behavior for every video by telling you how much of the video did they watch and whether they watch another video after.
Competitor Scorecard:
YouTube is the most popular streaming service available, and hence it is also highly competitive. It is natural and logical for you to be concerned about how your content stacks up against your competition; this might be so for the purpose of keeping up with the competition or to learn more from them. Either way, the Competitor Scorecard feature helps you compare your content with that of your competition, in terms of views, subscribers, uploads, and engagement.
Demonetization Audit:
Owing to the vastness of media that YouTube houses, its policies around content monetization can be strict. And thus, a tool that helps you make the most money out of your content is a huge plus. TubeBuddy allows you to make certain that you have not included words in your title, description or tags that could cause demonetization, with the Demonetization Audit feature.
Bulk Processing
Processing Multiple Tasks in Bulk:
As with uploading and optimizing multiple videos in bulk, TubeBuddy also helps in processing the below tasks in bulk:
- Bulk Copy Cards - Automate the process of imitating Cards across few or all of your videos.
- Bulk Copy End Screen - Automate the process of imitating End Screens across few or all of your videos
- Bulk Delete Cards - Delete Cards from few or all of your videos with just a few clicks
- Bulk Delete Comments - Bulk delete a user's comments with ease.
- Bulk Delete End Screen - Automate the process of remove End Screens Elements across few or all of your videos
- Bulk Find, Replace & Append - Find & Replace, Append or Remove from video titles and descriptions across your entire channel
- Bulk Thumbnail Overlays - Add (and optionally remove later) a graphic overlay to some or all of your video thumbnails
- Bulk Update Cards - Automate the process of updating Cards across some or all of your videos
- Bulk Update End Screens - Automate the process of updating End Screen across some or all of your videos
- Demonetization Double-Check - Quickly find demonetized videos on your channel then bulk submit them for manual review
TubeBuddy Pricing:
One of the things that makes TubeBuddy popular is its free version. While the free version does not include many of the features discussed above or gives limited access to some, it is still a great choice for anyone starting out with content creation for YouTube.
TubeBuddy’s cheapest paid offering is the Pro plan which, at $7.20 a month, will give you access to features centered around productivity and Video SEO. In the middle, comes the Star bundle which costs $15/month and gives you everything that the pro bundle offers and several more productivity enhancing and time-saving tools, with the bulk processing section being the biggest addition here.
Finally, there is the Legend license at 39.20$ a month, which basically gives you access everything that TubeBuddy has to offer.
Below are the costs at the Monthly and Yearly subscription basis:
Yearly:
Monthly:
Comparative Summary of all TubeBuddy Plans:
Pros and Cons of TubeBuddy
Pros
Cons
Conclusion - TubeBuddy Review 2022
So is TubeBuddy Really Useful ?
The answer is Yes!!. As a tool that saves time and gives incredible and productive insights into your content and audiences, TubeBuddy is an excellent choice for anybody who is serious about creating content on YouTube, regardless of whether they are just starting out or have been in the game for some time now. The browser extension is an absolute must-have for the management, planning, and expansion of any YouTube channel.
