YouTube has launched its ‘Hype’ feature in India that enables viewers to upvote videos by creators with 500 to 5,00,000 subscribers in order to help them reach new viewers and increase their visibility, said the company in a blog post.

The Google-owned video platform noted it had received feedback that smaller creators were finding it challenging to reach new viewers even if they already had dedicated fans. The ‘Hype’ feature allows viewers to help bring these videos to others, beyond the usual like, share, and subscribe options.

Viewers can “hype” a video for the first week after it is published and then “hype” it for free up to three times a week, leading to the video getting points. As the points accumulate, the video rises to the top of the leaderboard of top 100 hyped videos. It then appears in the YouTube ‘Explore’ section.

“When viewers hype, bonus points are automatically applied for emerging creators based on their amount of subscribers. The fewer the subscribers, the bigger the bonus, helping smaller creators get more visibility on their content. We want to make sure everyone has a fair shot at the spotlight,” said YouTube in its blog post.

In the first four weeks of its beta tests for ‘Hype’ in Turkey, Taiwan, and Brazil, users had “hyped” over five million times across more than 50,000 unique channels, per the company.