YouTube Gaming Channel

Also, being into what I was doing more than documenting what I was doing I forgot to write down the link to my channel. Trying to find it in YouTube help is a problem. YouTube Gaming is new and the help pages… or maybe it’s the search algorithms… tend to take you to YouTube help, not YouTube Gaming help. Even clicking HELP from a YTG page takes you to the YT stuff.  So, how to find your channel ID…

My Main Channel ID/link is: https://gaming.youtube.com/channel/UCB4WLXGM10aLOxbw01-e5LQ

My alternate channel ID/Link is: https://gaming.youtube.com/channel/UCB4WLXGM10aLOxbw01-e5LQ

Custom YouTube Gaming Channel URL

You can see why you need to write it down or save a link. It is possible to get custom YouTube Gaming URL’s for your ID/link. That will make it easier to use and for people to remember. But, your account must be 30 days old and you must have 500 or more subscribers. Oooff! Plus a couple of other minor things you have to do for set up.

Fortunately, you can get a custom URL by linking your account to your web site OR +Page. That saves the 500 subscriber hurdle.

Once you know how, finding your YouTube Gaming Channel ID/link is easy. Go to YouTube Gaming: https://gaming.youtube.com/. Sign in, if you aren’t already.

YouTube Gaming Login

Once signed in, click on your ID picture next to the GO LIVE button(?) in the upper right.

YouTube Gaming – Going Live

Select My Channel. Your link and YouTube Gaming Channel ID is in the address bar. Easy, if not intuitive.

YouTube Gaming Channel Art How To

Once you have a channel you’ll want to add channel art to your page. As it is now, YTG doesn’t really let you change your channel art, as best I can tell. You add your channel art to your YouTube channel and then YTG uses the same image, which kinda sucks. YTG needs a bigger image than YouTube. If you look at my main YTG channel and then my YouTube channel you’ll see the problem as it is now, September 2015. I made my art for YouTube some time ago. Oh, and what you’ll see depends very much on which browser you use. YTG looks good in Chrome. Sucks in everything else.

At the time Google recommended an image with framing information so the text would work with desktop/laptop, tablet, and mobile. It doesn’t work well with YTG, unless you use Chrome.

Google tells us:

Your [YTG] channel’s sections and art are the same as those you created in the main YouTube site. The sections are built from the video shelves on the home tab of your YouTube channel. The channel’s border color is determined by the color in your avatar.

If you want to customize how these parts of your channel appear on YouTube Gaming, you’ll need to go to the main YouTube site and make changes. Find out how to make changes to your channel sections and art here.

Changes that you make to sections in your channel will be reflected in both YouTube and YouTube Gaming. If you’ve livestreamed before, YouTube Gaming will have sections for livestreams, uploads, and completed streams.

They recommend using a single 2560 x 1440 px image for your YouTube Gaming Channel Art. You can find several channel art templates on the web and YouTube. You can download the Photoshop files or JPG images of them. Be careful. Many of these are linked to adf.ly for the download. They encapsulate the PSD file in a program named SetupODM.exe. That is an executable program. I wouldn’t run it as I fear it will inject adware into my computer. Been there done that. Not with this one but others. Get a real PSD file or a ZIP file.

Also, many of these templates, even those at Google/YouTube, are the older style template, 2120x1192px. Not what I want.
More pages, links below…