Congrats to Richard Gale from RichardGaleFilms, which is YouTube’s “On The Rise” spotlight partner this October. Richard’s channel is featured today on the YouTube homepage, thanks to your support and his strong channel optimization efforts.

A three-time Emmy award winner, Richard has been writing, directing, and producing films and TV shows for decades. His work spans a variety of genres including documentaries, suspense thrillers, parodies and comedy, as well as horror. Richard’s most recent project, the comedic horror short film, ‘The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon,’ has received multiple film festival awards and driven his YouTube viewership as well. The short film’s legacy lives on in a YouTube mini-series about the main character, Jack, and you’ll just have to check out the channel to see how the story evolves.

Here are a few words from Richard himself:

I became a YouTube partner almost by accident–as a filmmaker making shorts for film festivals, I had a 10-minute comedy about a killer with a spoon (Horribly Slow Murderer) that had completed its festival run, and I uploaded it to hopefully give it some additional exposure. To my astonishment, the short went viral, and was seen by more people in one day than in a year of film festivals. So we expanded the story into a series, and it continues to develop a dedicated following. We are extremely grateful to all of our awesome fans and supporters, who voted for our channel and continue to enjoy our films. Thank you!!!!! We’ve got exciting things on the horizon, so stay spooned!

If you’ve enjoyed this monthly On The Rise blog series and want to see more rising YouTube partners, check out our On The Rise channel. Keep an eye out for next month’s blog post, as your channel may be the next one On The Rise!

Christine Wang and Devon Storbeck, YouTube Content Partnerships, recently watched “Please Move The Deer Crossing.”

On Monday, October 29th, the YouTube Partner Support team will be hosting a Partner Meet-Up in New York. The event is at capacity so if you’re not able to join us in person you can tune in at youtube.com/partnersupport.

During the meet-up, we’ll be live streaming the latest episode of ‘Partner Support Talks with…’ starring Charlie Todd of ImprovEverywhere. Additionally, we’ll be broadcasting a panel with other super popular YouTubers, and you’ll have a chance to hear from our product team. You can find a schedule for the stream below:

We want to hear from you! Throughout the stream we’ll be taking live questions from viewers around the world via comments on youtube.com/partnersupport.

We’ll also be soliciting questions in advance for our talk show with ImprovEverywhere. Want to know what inspires Charlie’s top videos? Want his advice on best practices? Submit your questions (and vote for others) here to be answered live: goo.gl/w4rZa

Can’t tune in? Don’t worry – we’ll also post the episode on youtube.com/partnersupport after the show.

John Brandt & Sofia Sheth, YouTube Partner Support, recently watched “CONAN Exclusive: World’s Shortest Freefall! – CONAN on TBS.”

YouTube creators are busy people. That’s why earlier this year we enabled creators to set defaults on new uploads for privacy, licensing, tags, and monetization. We also introduced an easier way to control how ads appear on your content by allowing you to set default ad settings for all newly uploaded videos.

To help you earn more money on YouTube, we’re going to be making some changes based on these default settings.

You can already easily set your ad format preferences consistently across all your new uploads.  On Nov. 9, 2012, we will  automatically enable ad format settings on your older monetized content in line with your current default ad settings. This change will only affect monetized videos uploaded before Apr. 20, 2012.

For example, if you have TrueView in-stream ads enabled as a default for your new uploads, we’ll go back and enable it on older monetized content. Conversely, if you don’t have in-video ads on by default for new uploads we won’t touch that setting on any video.

If you do not want to apply this change to your older videos, you can easily opt out.  If you use Video Manager, opt out at http://www.youtube.com/my_videos. If you use the Content Management System for your channels, you’ll see a notification when you login with instructions. If you wish to opt out, please do so by Nov. 9, 2012. After that date, the ad settings on all of your older monetized content will change to reflect your current default settings.

This change will give you more opportunities to make money from your videos, so we encourage you to check your default settings for monetization and ad formats at http://www.youtube.com/account_defaults.

Steve Stukenborg, Senior Product Manager, recently watched Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee

We’ve started adjusting the ranking of videos in YouTube search to reward engaging videos that keep viewers watching.  This is a continuation of ongoing efforts to focus our video discovery features on watch time, and follows changes we made to Suggested Videos in March, and recent improvements to YouTube Analytics.

The experimental results of this change have proven positive — less clicking, more watching. We expect the amount of time viewers spend watching videos from search and across the site to increase.  As with previous optimizations to our discovery features, this should benefit your channel if your videos drive more viewing time across YouTube.

Yesterday, we added new Time Watched reporting to YouTube Analytics, so now you have even more tools to evaluate the performance of your videos and channel.  So keep making great videos that your fans will love and share, and encourage them to discover more of what YouTube offers, and you’ll see your own fan base grow, too.

Understanding what your audience likes is key to building a successful YouTube channel, so we’ve created more tools to help you interpret the performance of your videos. Here are some improvements we’ve made to YouTube Analytics in the last few months.

Audience Engagement
Earlier this year we started focusing on the time users spend watching YouTube when we suggest videos. To give you additional insight into engagement for your videos, we’ve enhanced the “Views” report to show more time watched data.

You can see “Estimated minutes watched” from the “Views” report or choose other data options from the “Compare metric” drop-down menu.

Annotations are one of the most used features to drive audience engagement in YouTube. You can now use the beta version of Annotations report to view data on the performance of your video annotations, with insights on viewer click and close rates.

Making Analytics easier to use
Date slider is back and better than ever. Now you can quickly adjust the date range and see how your videos performed across different time periods.

You can average data across time with rolling totals for 7- and 30-day totals. Instead of seeing changes in weekend traffic and other cyclical data, rolling totals will smooth the trends to help you see overall growth without the distracting spikes and dips. 

The metadata section for your videos and channels instantly provides you with data such as lifetime views and video duration. 

The video hovercard helps you see a thumbnail of your video and basic information by simply hovering over your video link.

Compare metrics provides you with more ways to compare trends and patterns across two different metrics.

We understand the importance of having data and insights for your channel and want to continue improving our analytics to help you grow your audience. Please let us know if there are any other features you would like us to build, in the comments below.

Ted Hamilton, YouTube Product Manager, recently watched “Drone“.