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YouTube will test an ‘Explore’ tab to help users find new videos and channels

YouTube will test an ‘Explore’ tab to help users find new videos and channels

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It’s a way to introduce more variety to the average YouTube users’ video diet

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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

YouTube’s experimenting with a new Explore feature that will help users easily find new channels and videos on the platform while browsing on mobile. The Explore feature will pop up as a “tab” at the bottom of the app’s home screen for a select 1 percent of iOS users, according to Tom Leung, YouTube’s director of product management and host of the platform’s Creator Insider channel.

Explore will recommend videos based on what viewers are already watching, but with a “broader scope” than its home screen already does. “Explore is designed to help you be exposed to different kinds of topics, videos, or channels that you might not otherwise encounter,” Leung said, “but they’re still personalized — so they’re still based on your viewing activity.”

The new Explore tab, meanwhile, will be more similar to the Explore tab offered by, say, Instagram, which aside from the personalized “for you” channel, also offers up feeds dedicated to science, sports, art, and more for users to scroll through. Twitter provides a similar service, which lets users scroll through different types of feeds that aren’t necessarily full of people that they follow.