Millions of people use YouTube every day, but very few actually utilize all the features of the platform. In fact, many don’t even have an idea about any extra-features’ existence. We are used to the fact that updates of popular social networks, such as Instagram and Snapchat, for instance, are widely announced in the media as well as on the platforms themselves. Not learning about new filters for Stories or improved friend list management is almost impossible for everyday users of these applications. However, on YouTube, we rarely dispose of anything other than searching, watching videos, leaving video ratings, sharing, and adding to your playlist. But the world of YouTube features is richer and deeper than it seems, and today we are taking you on a journey to explore the hidden treasures!

AR Makeup Tool

YouTube beauty bloggers have some of the largest and most devoted followings on the platform, comparable only to the ones of the gaming content creators. Over the last decade YouTube became the go-to place for people to learn how to master a winged eyeliner, see if the new product worth the money, and even to keep up with the drama surrounding the beauty YouTubers. With such a broad and engaged “beautube” community, it’s not at all surprising YouTube started to step into AR starting with a beauty-related filter.

One of the biggest makeup brands, M·A·C cosmetics, signed on and launched a campaign to use the ‘ Beauty Try-On ’ feature that allows viewers virtually try each lipstick shade and shop it directly from YouTuber Roxette Arisa’s video . When watching the video through YouTube mobile application, viewer can see the ‘Try It On’ button. After pushing it, the screen is split in half, continuing to play the video at the top half and the image from a frontal camera at the bottom screen, letting viewers use AR filters to try virtual makeup samples of the products a YouTube creators demonstrates in the video.

Explore Tab

According to Statista , over 500 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute in 2019, which equates to approximately 30,000 hours of new content per hour, and 720,000 hours of new content per day, which is roughly 82 years of new videos. Let that sink in. Yes, we could quite literally spend our lifetime trying to consume just the new content alone! But of course nobody wastes their time clicking on just any video every minute of their day — we filter the videos ourselves before watching according to our needs, interests and mood, and YouTube algorithm does a decent job recommending something new we might like.

However, YouTube recommendations are heavily based on what we previously watched, and it’s not enough for actual discovery of new content, something out of our usual interests. The ability to pick intriguing topics ourselves, like we can on the Explore page of Instagram mobile application, was missing on YouTube. Luckily, YouTube Explore feature is not only in the works, but is already available to some iPhone users. It takes the place the Trending tab, making it into one of the many categories available within the Explore tab. Tap on the topic you like and see a list of videos about that.

Time Watched Stats & Break Reminder

Keeping track of the amount of time you spend on a particular application and on your phone in general, is not something uncommon in the digital age. It’s so easy to scroll the Twitter feed for hours or binge-watch YouTube videos for half a day and not bat an eye, we have to control our digital content consumption to not fall out of reality.

YouTube has made it easier to better understand how many hours we spend on the platform and to unplug when needed. To get the idea of time you spent on YouTube and set a watch break, open your profile within YouTube mobile application, tap on ‘Time watched’. Here you can see your watch time statistics over different periods of time. Scroll the page to find ‘Tools to manage your YouTube time’ where you can set a reminder to take a break, regulate autoplay and notifications.

Captions customization

YouTube captions have been helping viewers understand various accents and videos in different languages, as well as always were essential for the hearing-impaired.

We enable captions in one click, but we rarely dip into their settings to adjust them to our taste. Ever wanted to make the font size bigger when watching videos from your smart TV? Maybe had the urge to change the style or color? You can do all that, and get as creative as you want in the process! What’s even better, the ability to manage the captions is available on iOS, Android, computer, TV, game consoles and other devices that support YouTube. Learn how to customize captions on each with the help of the official Google guide .

Don’t forget that you can also watch captioned and subtitled YouTube videos offline and download captions and subtitles in all available languages using 4K Video Downloader .

Dark mode

The origins of the dark mode craze are unclear, but it’s definitely a thing — some people just prefer the look of a dark interface and down to use unofficial plugins to cast a shadow on all sites and applications they use. Judging by the YouTube screenshots used in this article, you might assume we enjoy being on the dark side too… and you wouldn't be wrong. If you like things dark as well, or just curious to see if it really reduces video glare and eye fatigue, you can try YouTube’s Dark Theme.

In order to enable the dark mode, open YouTube and click your profile icon at the top right corner of the page. Click the Dark theme option in the menu and slide the toggle switch over. Note that dark theme is not synchronized with your Google account, meaning you need to manually enable dark mode on each device you watch YouTube from to keep the background black at all times. Check out this guide if you want to know all Google applications that support dark mode and learn how to turn it on.