YouTube's New "Handle" Service for Customizing a Memorable Personal Channel Address

YouTube, the online video platform beloved by streamers and influencers, has made another new move recently. To achieve better results in community support, it has launched a new “handle” service for the first time!

This time Google hopes that, through the handle feature, every channel owner can have a unique identity, making it easier for users to discover great channels and to interact and communicate just like tagging people’s names on Facebook.

In the design concept of this handle feature, users can obtain an exclusive name, with the standard format being the style of “@mountos,” consistent with the application mechanisms on most current social media, giving it relatively high approachability for internet users.

Previously, YouTube’s personal channel address specifications went through many generations, such as “https://youtube.com/c/mountos” or “https://youtube.com/user/mountos,” and because a very unintuitive subdirectory was inserted between the platform address and the account name, it wasn’t very friendly to human users.

What this author finds peculiar is that this time YT even directly applies this specification to the URL, turning the channel URL into a style like “https://www.youtube.com/@mizuc”.

YouTube + Follow Share Bell

This brand-new channel URL specification can be called a very flashy operation in the history of the internet industry — after all, how many internet companies have you seen directly putting the ”@” symbol into the URL bar?

Taking Twitter as an example, the concept of the ”@+account name” structure is very well known on this social media platform. But in fact, Twitter URLs still look like the very traditional format “https://Twitter.com/vedfolnir”.

As for whether putting the @ symbol into the URL bar has any great advantages, this author currently can’t be sure. But I can irresponsibly guess that this URL format is very likely to cause program problems (bugs) on other system platforms — which remains to be continuously observed.

For users currently eligible for the new handle, YouTube will gradually open settings and notify them, or you can click the quick link yourself: “Choose a handle” to check whether you qualify.

In addition, for those who previously obtained an easy-to-remember account name, YouTube will automatically reserve it for you. But you can still set a nice-sounding new handle yourself.

And let me quietly tell you — don’t tell others — that during the system transition period, there’s a chance to grab more aesthetically pleasing account names that you couldn’t get before. First come, first served.