Subscriptions and Publishing: Updates and FAQs

We know there have been issues with subscriptions and publishing reliability for some time, and today we wanted to give you an update on the issues we're facing and where we are with resolving them. We know we haven't met your expectations with this, and here's how we're trying to fix that.

To start, here’s some background on how publishing works at YouTube. Delivering your videos is a two phased system—we process your video and then we deliver that video to your subscribers.

Processing your video
Our engineers are working hard to make video processing even faster, more reliable, and continue adding related features that make your life easier like resumable uploads. We have more to do here in 2012, and will keep you updated with our progress.

Delivering your video
Over the last few weeks we’ve rolled out a subscriptions delivery system that’s 20 times faster and more powerful, able to deliver your videos to even more subscribers as your Channels continue to grow. It’s like upgrading from a unicycle to a racecar.

Once our processing improvements are complete, all the pieces should fall into place to make publishing a seamless and uneventful experience (as it should be). Until that happens, here are some tips to avoid common problems.

The 0% Published problem
What it means: What this generally means is that the video is waiting on processing to complete, before attempting to publish. Until the video has processed in all formats, the status will stay at 0%.

What you can do: Don’t delete your video and reupload. Just wait for your video to become available on all formats you would expect--for a 1920x1080 video that means everything from 240p through 1080p--and then the 0% published should go away very quickly once all formats have processed.  

What we’re doing to fix this: We’ve removed the confusing 0% published notification from the new video manager.  The icon will now say “Sending to subscribers feeds” instead.


Published video isn’t appearing in feeds
What it means: In almost all reports of this problems, the issue isn’t that videos aren’t appearing in feeds at all, but it’s that the videos are not appearing at the top of the feed, in chronological order. This is because the position of videos in the chronology of the feeds reflects the uploaded time rather than published time. This commonly happens when you upload a video as private or unlisted, then make it public 48 hours later.

What you can do: If you expect to keep your video private or unlisted for an extended period of time before marking it public, consider using scheduled publishing to ensure it gets to the top of user feeds.

What we’re doing:  We’re looking at ways to make sure the order of videos reflects the published time rather than the original upload time.


As we are rolling out improvements, we’ll continue to provide updates through the Creator Blog and please keep sharing your feedback in the Partner Forum.

David Boyle, YouTube Staff, recently watched "Wham! - Last Christmas."