After 6 days on the new layout, the only conclusion I can draw so far is that viewers will click on the videos. Every single video featured on the new shelf system has seen a healthy increase in views per day. The nice part about that is you can see (on a 30" 2560x1600 monitor) 19 videos without having to scroll down as opposed to 5 on the old layout. So it should lead to a very slight view increase. Our subs and views have increased, but the change isn't big enough to attribute it to the new layout. The implementation of the new layout is still a major pain. You still can't simply choose a playlist to use a shelf. You have to tag the videos and then create a custom tag based shelf instead. For all the hype about playlists, it seems like it would be a good idea to just let us use a playlist without having to tag all the videos in that playlist that we want to use. You also cannot easily change the order of the videos on a shelf. So customization of the new layout is much more difficult than it needs to be. The biggest issues are the small size of the featured video for subscribers and the inability to choose what we are featuring. They could easily make the player a bit larger by eliminating the Recent Activity portion or the You Recently Watched portion (both are duped elsewhere on the page). It would also be nice if it auto-played, but that only happens for non-subscribers for the trailer video.
I don't have any issue with the way it looks. It hasn't hurt us at all, which is a very good sign. When the frontpage layout was unleashed, we suffered for about a month before figuring out how to take advantage of it-there seems to be no learning curve with this change. Setting up a page is very frustrating at times. It seems to be set up by someone who never ran a channel before. Hopefully the shelf issues get fixed by the time they roll out the new layout to everyone.
