YouTube launches ‘Hype’ in India to help creators get discovered: Rollout, how it works and other details

YouTube has officially rolled out a new discovery tool called Hype in India to support small and emerging creators. The feature, which was in beta testing in countries like Turkey, Taiwan, and Brazil, is now being extended to Indian users as part of YouTube’s larger push to promote creator growth across languages and regions.

What is Hype and how it works?
Hype is designed to help creators with 500 to 500,000 subscribers gain visibility for their content. Viewers can now “hype” a video in addition to the usual like, share, and subscribe actions. This can be done up to three times per week per user, and only within the first seven days of a video being published.

Each hype action gives the video points, and the more points it accumulates, the higher it moves on a special leaderboard under YouTube’s Explore section. The top 100 most hyped videos are showcased here, offering increased visibility and the potential to appear on users’ home feeds.

To make the system fairer for emerging creators, YouTube adds bonus points based on subscriber count — the fewer subscribers a creator has, the more bonus points they get when a viewer hypes their content. This approach is aimed at giving creators across India an equal opportunity to break through the noise and reach wider audiences.