In addition to the recent release of new features for YouTube for Nonprofits (which include donate buttons, live streaming capabilities, and call to action pop-ups, to name a few features), this past week YouTube also released a way to embed channel subscribe buttons directly onto a website outside of YouTube.

I have been waiting years for channel subscribing to be possible outside YouTube and for good reason. As with any share, sign, donation, or subscribe, the fastest and simplest way a user can complete an action will always lead to an increase in actions taken. By having a subscribe button right on an organization's website, a user no longer needs to go to go through four or five steps to subscribe to a channel on YouTube.

Previously, a user would need to:

1. Go to YouTube.com
2. Conduct a search for an organization's channel.
3. Sift through the search results to find the real organization.
4. Go to the organizations channel and find and click the subscribe button.
5. If you aren't logged in at this point, you will be sent to a login form in which you will need to fill out and submit before your subscribe goes through.

Who has time to go through potentially five steps to simply subscribe to any channel? It's no wonder why an organization like the ONE Campaign has only 25,000 YouTube subscribers when they have 723,000+ Likes on Facebook and 710,000+ followers on Twitter. It will be interesting to track how fast organizations like this accumulate more YouTube subscribers with the release of the embeddable YouTube channel subscribe button.

The embeddable buttons themselves come in two different styles. The "default" style is solely a red button that says YouTube. The "full" style features a square image thumbnail beside a red button that says YouTube.

Instead of using an action word (ie; Facebook "Like", and Twitter "Follow") the YouTube subscribe button simply says "YouTube".  I predict that once this button becomes more commonplace along side "follow" and "like" buttons, that the YouTube button text will be replaced with a "tune in" or "subscribe".

Click the image below to download a vector (.ai) file of the YouTube channel subscribe button to use in your design projects!
 

To see the new YouTube button in action, check our one of our clients sites: www.us-ignite.org and click the red YouTube subscribe button in the header!

Check out the Google Developers page to learn more about how to embed the new YouTube button on your own site.

Click to Download YouTube Channel Subscribe Button (.ai)