Feature a YouTube show on your Home tab: single or multiple shelf

How do you feature a show on your channel's Home tab?

In YouTube Studio, open Customization, then the Home tab, choose Add section and pick Single playlist or Multiple playlists under Playlists. YouTube's help says you can drag shelves to reorder them.

Single playlist suits a channel with one flagship show. Multiple playlists suits a channel running several, for instance a main series and a spin-off.

What the shelf needs from you

A shelf can only show what is in the playlist. If it holds three episodes and an empty season, the Home tab will look thin. Finish a block of episodes before you add the shelf, and lead with the strongest one.

For a Shorts series, keep the playlist Shorts only, as the series rule requires, and keep each Short portrait or square and no longer than 180 seconds.

Producing the block

On Sume, render the first block with one Timeline job per episode and a fixed template, so the shelf shows a consistent look. Plan each job first. The plan endpoint is unbilled and returns duration and estimated cost. A render is $0.10 per output minute, rounded up.

The custom thumbnail matters on a shelf, since a shelf is a row of thumbnails. For a Shorts series, YouTube lets each Short have its own, so make one per episode with a shared frame treatment.

• Finish several episodes before adding the shelf.
• One thumbnail treatment across the row.
• Order shelves with the flagship first.

Limits of the page

YouTube's page describes the steps but gives no figures about how a shelf changes views, so decide on your own analytics, not on a promise. After a week, look at where viewers of the show came from in Studio, and keep or move the shelf accordingly.

If you run two shows, put the one with more finished episodes first. A shelf with a full season invites a viewer to start watching, while a shelf of two episodes asks them to wait. You can reorder later by dragging, so the choice is not permanent.

Check the shelf on a phone as well as a desktop. Thumbnails shrink on small screens, so a thumbnail with small type will fail where a bold single word will work. Keep a copy of the thumbnail source for each episode in your ledger so a fix is one image edit, not a hunt through old files.