YouTube rolling out Hype Points feature to more users, here's how it works

For anyone poking around YouTube lately, you might’ve spotted a fresh little icon urging you to “hype” a video. If you blinked and missed it, it’s not just another badge in the endless game of platform tweaks. It might actually shake up how folks support smaller creators on a platform that has been constantly pushing popular creators on the screen. While the feature rolled out earlier to a limited audience, reports online suggest that many more accounts have been bagging the Hype feature in the past few days or so.

Hype Points are basically YouTube’s new way of letting fans boost creators they genuinely care about. Instead of quietly dropping a like and moving on, you now get a small stash, currently three free “hypes” per week, according to the help page. You can sprinkle them wherever you think someone deserves a bit more spotlight. Unlike the universal thumbs up, these hypes have a twist: they’re limited per user. So people will have to use it wisely and only on actually deserving creators in their eyes.

You can use all three on one creator or spread the love around, but once they’re spent, you’re out until the weekly reset. YouTube also allows users in eligible regions to pay to hype videos, but the purchase limit also varies based on the user’s region.

There’s now a new leaderboard tracking which videos are getting the most hyped each week. Only videos from channels with fewer than 500,000 subscribers and less than seven days old are eligible, so big established creators can’t crowd out everyone else. The whole idea is to give up-and-coming channels a fair shot at going viral, driven by genuine fan hype instead of runaway algorithms or sheer subscriber numbers.

So, what’s in it for creators? Obviously, cracking the leaderboard could mean a huge spike in views, and possibly subscribers too. But on the other side, it seems some viewers aren’t hyped (pun intended) about the feature at all. Just take a look at the comments under this recent post on Reddit for an idea:

Still, for smaller creators hustling for recognition, Hype Points might become a fresh lifeline. Fans who’ve always wanted to feel like a tastemaker can have a say while helping new voices climb out of YouTube’s long tail.

Will Hype Points turn into the next must-have metric or just another forgotten feature? Too soon to tell. But if there’s one thing YouTube is good at, it’s finding new ways to rope viewers into the action. Keep an eye on that little “hype” button. If nothing else, it’s proof that YouTube’s still tinkering with what it means to be a fan on the internet’s biggest video playground.