Peggy Ks Tips & Tricks

YouTube has launched a "Video Self-Certification" pilot program that allows some YouTube Partners to rate their own videos against the advertiser-friendly content guidelines when they upload. YouTube has also provided examples of non-advertiser friendly content, so all Partners can more easily determine if a particular video should be monetized.

Assessing Advertiser-Friendliness If your YouTube channel is in the YouTube Partner Program, you are expected to make sure that your content complies with the Community Guidelines, the AdSense Program Policies,  and also is "advertiser-friendly".

Some content may be allowed under the Community Guidelines, but might not be something advertisers want to be associated with. If that's the case, YouTube recommends you turn off ads on that video.

If YouTube detects that a video is probably not advertiser-friendly, you will see a yellow monetization icon in your video manager, which indicates it is probably not suitable for mos…

I thought December would be a quiet month, but people were talking this week about Hangouts and Google’s chat app strategy, Tumblr’s sudden ban on adult content and much more.
At the beginning of this week 9to5Google kicked off a storm by reporting that 2019 would be the last year you could use Hangouts, based on information from an unnamed source. This provoked a response from Scott Johnston, product lead for Hangouts, who called it shoddy reporting. Google subsequently released an article with an overview their messaging services strategy. The bottom line: “classic” Hangouts users will eventually be transitioned to Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet, which are designed for enterprise and are currently only available to G Suite users. There is no timeline for when that will happen, and “Google is fully committed to supporting classic Hangouts users until everyone is successfully migrated to Chat and Meet.” But while Hangouts will still be around, Google also announced that “smart messa…

I’m dreaming of summer here in the Northern Hemisphere! As we head into the last month of the year, there was a major announcement from Project Fi, plus some nice updates from YouTube and more.
The big news this week was that “Project Fi” - Google’s mobile network that launched in 2015 - has graduated to “Google Fi” and now officially supports most newer Android phones and iPhones. There is a catch: Fi’s unique technology to seamlessly switch between multiple cellular network and new enhanced network features only work with “designed for Fi” phones. If you are interested, you should check compatibility of your phone.And if you decide to give it a try, use my referral link and we’ll both get a bonus (click here).To celebrate the launch, Fi offered an amazing one-day-only promo: buy a new phone through Google, meet the other eligibility requirements, and you would receive the full value of the phone back in travel gift cards. It was so popular support was almost impossible to reach an…

Shopping? Visiting family? Enjoying the great outdoors? Whatever you are doing, take a few minutes to check out this week’s updates for YouTubers, business owners, Instagrammers and more.
YouTube is rolling out the Community tab to channels with at least 1000 subscribers. You can post text, polls, images, videos and more. Commenting is a bit limited, so it doesn’t seem like it’s ideal for discussions at the moment, but it seems useful for perhaps keeping your subscribers’ interested when you aren’t posting videos. You can see (and vote in) my first poll Creators can now @mention other users when publishing a Community post, in addition to @mentions when replying to video comments. Mentions are one of the things I miss about Google+ comments on YouTube, so I’m happy about this update. It would be great if mentions were eventually available to commenters other than the channel owner (although perhaps that’s too ripe for abuse). YouTube now shows a “Known issues” widget on your Studio d…

This coming week is Thanksgiving in the US, which means big sales and few updates. That means updates needed to be launched this past week, to get ahead of the holiday. There
While Google+ won’t be completely shut down until August 2019, other Google products and services will be disconnected before then. This week Google Photos removed the option to share images to Google+. You can still share a link to an image in your Google Photos account, or select a recent image from Google Photos when creating a new Google+ post. (Technically you can select an older image from Google Photos, but that requires scrolling through your photo library to find it.The Google contact cards that appear on mobile when you click a profile photo in Hangouts or Gmail, or the About button on a Google+ Profile have a new uniform look. Contact info is highlighted, and there are buttons to Hangout, Email, Call or Schedule an event (although some of those may be greyed out, depending on whether you have that per…

The air is cooling, leaves are falling, and California is burning. Some folks can see winter on the horizon. Nonetheless  updates are appearing.
This week in the official Google+ Aspire Community, I talked about how to get your Google+ followers to subscribe to your YouTube channel, tips for sharing your videos to Google+, differences between following someone on Google+and YouTube and so forth. The #CreateConnection conversation is over, but you can still read the discussion.With last week’s announcement that Flickr will be limiting free accounts to only 1000 photos and videos, there was great concern that much of the Creative Commons content shared on the platform would be lost. Flickr has now announced that any images shared under a Creative Commons license before November 1st will not be deleted from the platform, the Flickr Commons archives from governments, universities, museums and other organizations will remain, and they are working with nonprofits to get them set up with Pro…

This week I attended both the annual YouTube Contributors Summit and Google Product Experts Summit in California. I learned a lot and had an excellent time with my fellow experts. If you enjoy helping people with YouTube or other Google Products, learn more about the YouTube Contributors program and the Google Product Experts program. It also meant I didn’t have as much time to put this report together, so this week has fewer stories than usual, although I think I got the highlights.
Up until this week, once you had a fully approved AdSense account you could place your ads on any website. It was up to you to ensure it complied with the AdSense program policies. Now you must add any new site to your AdSense account before it can show ads. Once you do that, ownership of the domain will be verified, and the site reviewed for complain with the AdSense Program Policies.Flickr announced two major changes this week. First off, the will be moving away from Yahoo login. That’s unsurprising,Th…