From Research to Inspiration...

YouTube is known for creating a lot of tools that seem promising at first before taking a dive right into the sand. There's the Test & Compare where we were happy to have a free tool for everyone, only for it to test the thumbnails on watch time instead of CTR. Or in our current case, the Inspiration Tab that used to be the Research Tab.

Research was a way to bring Google Trends directly onto Creator Studio and giving creators easy access to know what their viewers are interested in. It wasn't perfect, but it was on its way to becoming a good and a free keyword research tool. Then YouTube changed it from Research to Inspiration because they want you "to be inspired."

Now they're looking to separate Inspiration and Research entirely with the evolution of the Inspiration Tab.

Typing in a prompt is the new way to get inspired.

The new Inspiration Tab will live under the Content Tab instead of Analytics. You'll still see Inspiration in Analytics if you were selected in the beta. However, all of your saved topic from the old Inspiration aren't brought over to the new so keep that in mind. YouTube says they're working on transferring the saved topics.

We've seen this feature showed during the Made on YouTube event, and at the time, we were a little hopeful for this feature. The ability to create titles and thumbnails for free was immense. Unfortunately, the new Inspiration Tab doesn't work like the old one. You can't search up topics and check if it's heavily searched or not. You can prompt it, and HOPE it matches your interest. When you prompt it YouTube will come up with topics for you to select.

You'll still see if the topic is searched, but through our testing of this feature, it would suggest topics that aren't highly searched. YouTube wants you "to be inspired" but doesn't leave enough room for you to figure if the topic should be made if nobody's looking for it.

What should you do with the new Inspiration Tab?

If you're one of the lucky ones who got into the beta, give it a try and remember to provide feedback to YouTube! Once YouTube rolls this out to everyone and sunsets the Inspiration Tab under Analytics, here are some things you should consider.

It will still be a free title and thumbnail generator. Enter in your topic and Youtube will generate multiple titles and thumbnails for you to use or to get inspiration from. It's still a setback to have to go into the Inspiration Tab every time, but this can be a powerful tool if YouTube implements it into the upload and video edit page.

It can help you with the first step of creating. When you find a topic you want to create, the Inspiration Tab will create an outline of almost everything you'll need for the video. If you find something is out of place, you can fine-tune it to your needs.

Not all hope is lost for Research.

In the sneak peek video about the Inspiration Tab, the Product Manager mentions a "Trends Tab, formerly known as the Research Tab." So even though Inspiration will sunset, Research may live on in the form of Trends.

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It feels like a very long roundabout for us to get Research back, but we have to take a win somewhere! This might be a change we'll see during the beta or after. There's not a lot of information on this for now.

And if all fails, remember that Google Trends is available and there are browser extensions for keyword research (like VidIQ, Tubespanner, etc).

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