Late last year, YouTube started testing a "new" way to share videos directly with friends, without having to leave the app. Now, the video giant has announced that is now rolling out a revamped direct messaging inbox, which lets you share videos, Shorts, and live streams and have conversations about them, directly on YouTube. The platform limits this feature to 18+ users who are signed in to a verified channel and use the latest mobile app version.
Direct messaging on YouTube first became a thing back in 2017 inside the mobile app (later renamed to "Messages"), where users could chat one-on-one and share clips directly, but all that came to an end on September 18, 2019, when Google decided to shut it down after giving users a month to download a .zip file archive of their past chats.
No one really knows why YouTube killed the feature, but users were encouraged to migrate to the public Comments section, on Community tab posts, and via YouTube Stories. The previous incarnation suffered from moderation challenges, prompting Google to implement stricter safety guidelines and age verifications for this new iteration.
Here"s a list of the countries where the re-launched feature is currently available, though note that Brand Accounts do not have access to it, at least for now:
|
| Countries |
|
|---|---|---|
| American Samoa | Austria | Belgium |
| Brazil | Bulgaria | Croatia |
| Cyprus | Czech Republic | Denmark |
| Estonia | Finland | France |
| Germany | Greece | Guam |
| Hungary | Iceland | Ireland |
| Italy | Latvia | Liechtenstein |
| Lithuania | Luxembourg | Malta |
| Netherlands | Northern Mariana Islands | Norway |
| Poland | Portugal | Puerto Rico |
| Romania | Singapore | Slovakia |
| Slovenia | Spain | Sweden |
| Switzerland | U.S. Virgin Islands | United Kingdom |
| United States |
|
|
Before you can use the feature, you first have to send an invite link to your contact. Invite links expire exactly seven days after you create them. If the person on the other end accepts the invite, you can exchange videos directly and text back and forth inside the app.
To delete a message, just long-press on the message and tap unsend to remove it for both users. You can also delete entire conversations by long-pressing the thread and selecting delete, but the other person will continue to see the chat history on their end. To make sure everything remains safe, YouTube monitors these messages to ensure they follow Community Guidelines.