Google has many problems these days: Increasing criticism about how it integrates Google+ into the search engine, concerns from the company’s new privacy policy and Google+ poor user’s usage indications. But at least the company has one winning card that keeps growing: YouTube.

The online video site, which leaving dust to all others, has gone through some serious makeover at the end of last year alongside all of other Google’s products. However, while many of those products received lots of negative reactions due to excessive Google+ integration claims, it seems that YouTube got out from it clean and even stronger.

The new design made YouTube much more social (not just with Google+ connection but also with Facebook and Twitter) and it is pretty safe to determine that YouTube is Google’s largest social network. Well, at least from the engagement perspective…

The YouTube Team has shared that since the new design rolled out on December 2011, daily unique visits to channels rose by 60% and daily net subscriptions grew by 50%. With these kind of impressive numbers, there’s no wonder why YouTube is now taking another step forward and upgrading all the channels to one of the new four template layouts.

• Creator- Featured video on top with few selected featured playlists below.
• Blogger- Videos from one featured playlists will appear in reverse chronological order.
• Network- Featured video on top and few selected featured channels below.
• Everything- Featured video on top, few selected featured playlists below and few selected featured channels at the bottom.

YouTube additionally pushing more new engaging features like the user’s homepage Channel Feed that will show uploaded videos, playlists and “Liked” videos from the site. For more information about the new channels design changes you can read this channels checklist from YouTube Help Center and you can watch the following video:

Another significant news from YouTube is that the site is improving its most important feature, the player. More specifically, the player’s seek bar (the bar at the bottom of the video which indicates the relative time progress). Over the next few weeks the seek bar will receive the following improvements:

• Sneak Peek- When hovering with the mouse over the bar, it will generate a thumbnail from the exact moment pointing at.
• Scanning- When clicking and holding the mouse on the seek bar, it will generate a thumbnails filmstrip of the sequential scenes.
• Second Bar Of Zooming- Whenever watching more than a hour and a half length video and hovering with the mouse over the seek bar, a second bar will appear. The second bar is basically 1.5 minutes length of another seek bar which allows easier browsing through long videos.

You can play with all new player features in the following video: