UPDATED: December 30, 2016
I remember the day back in 2010 when I was extremely excited to get an email from YouTube informing me that my videos are eligible for monetization. In short, it meant that, I could let YouTube run AdSense on the watch page for each of my videos. The next challenge was to get more visitors coming from search engines who are more likely to be interested in those ads.
As a result, I've started to optimize the titles of my videos and grouped related tutorials into relevant YouTube playlists, hoping to gain an edge and give a boost to my YouTube marketing efforts. It turned out that while I was working away at optimizing my earnings from AdSense, there were tons of developers working just as hard to block those ads.
Here I'd like to introduce you to some of the really cool Chrome extensions that you can download to enhance your YouTube viewing experience. Spoiler alert – no ad blocking extensions allowed. 🙂 I recommend checking out YouTube Red instead.
Chrome Extensions for YouTube
Many of the developers who make add-ons for Google Chrome are focusing on creating extensions for watching YouTube. As a result theses developers have come up with a few that allow you to by-pass any ads or other distractions like comments and annotations, when we're watching videos on YouTube anyway.
Lucky for you guys, my love for sharing awesome Chrome Extensions far exceeds my love for Google AdSense earning from my YouTube videos! Therefore, here's a list of the top ten extensions available to customize your YouTube video watching experience.
Recommended: Top 5 YouTube Channel Tips
10 Tools to Customize How You Watch YouTube on Chrome
MediaPlus – Parashuram Narasimhan is such a cool guy, that he stopped by and commented on The Best Chrome Extensions for New Twitter to share his terrific extension. This extension is not only for Chrome, but it works with Firefox and Opera as well. Click the image to watch the introduction video and learn how you can use MediaPlus to:
- Move and resize media content on web pages.
- Darken everything on the page except the media content.
- Block that annoyingly loud advertisement on the page.
- Popout the content out of the page.
- Download certain Media content.
YouTube Extension Suite – YouTube Extension Suite is a really simple extension that helps you find the total play time of a YouTube Playlist.
Magic Actions For YouTube – has too many features for me to list them all in this post. One of my favorites is the mouse wheel control of the video volume! Magic Actions also works with Vimeo.
Smart Video for YouTube – provides “Smart Buffer” for slow connections. The SmartVideo extension “provides better control over YouTube buffering, quality and playing options”.
Turn off the Lights – get turn off the lights and you'll see the rest of the page go dim so you can watch the video as if you were in the theater.
PIP Video – “Docks your favourite stuff in a floating mobile-view window! Including Facebook chatting, Youtube videos and Hangouts calls” Use PIP Video to watch a tutorial video as you perform the task you're learning.
Popout for YouTube – takes the concept from Picture-In-Picture a step further. With Popout for YouTube you can resize the video and move it around to the desired location on your screen. I don't know about you, but I need to enlarge the video as much as possible and I really love the flexibility of moving the window around.
Enhancer for YouTube – The Enhancer for YouTube extension is pretty robust. It allows you to “Control volume level and playback speed with the mouse wheel”, loop videos, turn off autoplay and a lot more. This one might be a keeper.
Stop Autoplay – does just what the names says and prevents videos from playing until you hit the play button. Stop Autoplay is crucial for slow networks.
vidIQ – This extension allows you to see detailed stats for any YouTube video.
“vidIQ is the first YouTube audience development and management suite that helps brands, networks, and agencies grow their views and subscribers. vidIQ’s end-to-end YouTube marketing solution provides Actionable Analytics, YouTube SEO, Influencer Identification, Audience Insights, Listening Tools, Comment Moderation, improved video management, and a collaborative workflow.”
Get the vidIQ extension here and watch vidIQ in action in this video
YouTube SEO Tip: vidIQ Extension for Chrome
Create your own YouTube Video
With all this talk about YouTube, I hope it has inspired you to start creating some videos and uploading them to your own YouTube Channel. So I'll leave you with a quick screencast that I recorded a few years ago before I started this blog, (time really flies) but the video is still relevant today! Remember that using YouTube is a great way to generate traffic back to your blog.
You can create short videos to demonstrate how to do something online, use software you have installed on your computer, or simply record yourself talking into your webcam I use this Logitech HD Pro you can see what it looks like along with the other video creation tools I use in this video.
Recommended reading and additional resources:
- Follow These Ten Blogs to Improve Your YouTube Results
- TubeBuddy: Is it Really a YouTubers New Best Friend?
- YouTube Channels For Dummies
