Our Favourite YouTube Power Ups

YouTube’s cool. But it could be even cooler with a little adjustments here and there. The experience is not custom tailored to marketers, and social media managers, or just a regular viewer. Whether you want to take your YouTube marketing, or just the experience of watching clips, to the next level, this is a comprehensive list of some YouTube add ons we use ourselves. We’ve got everything for analytics, themes, added features, removing restrictions. Check it out.

YouTube Video Deck

Video Deck is TweetDeck for YouTube. It allows you to create columns of content, and with a couple of premium features, it has even more power underneath its sleeve. While I’m not a huge fan of this, it adds a nice tool for this mix of YouTube power tools.

DarkTube

Black is chic. Even my operating system offers a “dark mode” now. Though many apps, and websites allow us to choose a dark mode, YouTube doesn’t. It always comes in its bright and shiny #F1F1F1 . Using one user created style, covers the entire page in a smooth and silky #0D0D0D .

The browser extension Stylish by userstyles.org allows users of various browsers to load webpages with a different styling — not just YouTube. They can be found at the website. You can find the DarkTube theme here.

Tampermonkey Scripts (YouTube+)

Some of our readers will recall Userscripts.org. It was the source where we were able to get scripts that added, or removed, features to websites. Sadly, Userscripts.org is not anymore. But the spirit is still alive and scripters create new scripts daily. Tampermonkey is a popular Chrome extension that is able to load such scripts. It also has a nice list of new sites, where to find Userscripts scripts. Tampermonkey can also sync scripts to other computers, but that’s an advanced option. Since this is a list of power pimps, though, it’s worth a mention.

Here are a couple of my favorites for YouTube:

I tried many but survived have only these. I was annoyed by a recent change YouTube made to the auto-play feature. Before the player would only advance to the next video in playlists, but not on single-video pages, or when watching videos off the Watch Later list. They changed this now, and it’s one of my least favorite additions.

Other userscripts allow us to download and convert YouTube videos easily. If you are living in a country where YouTube occasionally says that the video is country restricted, this might be a nice workaround for you. ClipConverter allows to download the video itself in multiple formats, and/or just the audio, or just a portion.

YouTube’s wide screen feature can be pimped with a little script too. With the script, the video scales to the entire width of the page.

Lastly I want to mention YouTube+, this script adds many features to YouTube, and comes with a ton of setting. Take screenshots, play frame by frame, pop-out video mode, and also the just mentioned “stop autoplay”.

Speaking of removing playing restrictions, there’s also ProxFlow. If the video doesn’t play, but the video is important for your research, ProxFlow is another option to try.

TubeBuddy

TubeBuddy is an immensely great and helpful app for YouTube. It has so many features for marketers, and creators alike, that I don’t know where to start. With TubeBuddy you can check out video stats, get access to metadata, and more tools that YouTube usually doesn’t offer, nor display. The great thing, with this part for TubeBuddy, is that it works on the videos you watch — the videos of your competition, for example. This way you can check out how they are doing their YouTube video marketing, and get some good ideas for your own YouTube strategy.

The extension also adds some shortcuts to the most important parts of YouTube. So instead of 5 clicks, it only takes 2 to get to where you often need to go as a creator. Really handy, really great.

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