How to Share YouTube Videos Like a Pro
I doubt you thought much about how to share the latest and greatest YouTube videos you find, because you probably have the usual procedure: click or tap the video url in the browser address bar, copy and paste it into text message or group chat. Easy, right?
Absolutely. This is the easiest way to share a YouTube video with your friends – and it works 100% of the time – but there is a lot more you can do with YouTube than that. I don’t need to tell you how to insert hyperlinks into a conversation, but I bet there are a few tricks you haven’t tried (or forgot).
First, openyour favorite YouTube video . I’ll wait. Click the Share button to the right of the voting icons with your finger up or down.
To share a video with your contacts on YouTube – yes, that’s okay – just click on their smiling photos (or names). Even if you’re not a YouTube Friends yet, you can still share videos with people that YouTube thinks might be good candidates for online friendships. If you do, they’ll get a friend request first before they see a video that you desperately think they should watch.
If you click on the Copy text in the lower-right corner of the window, you’ll copy the video’s URL – a great way to get the shortest and simplest version of the URL if your browser’s address bar is filled with unnecessary text.
You will also want to check out the YouTube “Start With” button located in the lower left corner of this screen. Click on it and enter the time (by default, this is the time you paused the video before the search box appears), and the link above it will magically update. Copy and paste this to a friend and the video will start playing exactly where you want it .
You can also use the large social media buttons to quickly publish YouTube videos to your favorite sites . Don’t forget about the lonely little email icon you find if you scroll all the way to the right.
Click the Embed icon if you would like to add the raw HTML (and YouTube player) to the blog post you are working on, including any new additions you make to your website featuring the best cat videos …
As before, you can set a specific time at which you want the video to start. More importantly, you should click on Enable Privacy Enhanced Mode , which can be found by scrolling down a bit to make sure Google has no way of tracking users who visit your site ( if they are not playing the video, then this is fair game). … When you do this, your embed will link to the video hosted on youtube-nocookie.com and not on youtube.com. As Google describes:
“Privacy Enhanced Mode allows you to embed YouTube videos without using cookies to track browsing behavior. This means that browsing activities are not collected to personalize browsing. Instead, video recommendations are contextual and related to the video currently playing. Videos played in the built-in privacy-enhanced player will not affect your YouTube browsing experience. “
If you feel like rolling up your sleeves and digging into some code, you can also add additional options to the embeddable code that YouTube provides to do things like change the color of the video progress bar, disable keyboard controls, and end time for videos – so that name a few options .
Third Party Sites That Make YouTube More Fun
There are many other sites out there that can take YouTube videos and do incredibly funny or silly things with them. Here are a few of our favorites:
- YouTube Doubler : classic. Add two videos, set a start time, and let them play at the same time for fun and fun .
- YouTube Multiplier : This is similar to YouTube Doubler, but you can mix up to eight videos at a time. Power!
- Synchtube : Now you and your friends can watch the same video at the same time, and you can tell each other what it sounds like “lol” and “ftw” in private chat.
- Dragontape : Create a large list of clips to watch in one large continuous stream, then share this megamix with your friends. Who needs YouTube playlists?
- Gifs.com : Add a YouTube video link to convert what you are watching to GIF. Timeline controls let you specify exactly how your GIF should look.
- Astronaut.io : Watch an endless stream of videos with no views (or almost zero views). You’re in uncharted territory now, partner.