Peggy Ks Tips & Tricks

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…

Happy almost-Halloween everyone! There are some treats for creators this week.
YouTube Premieres are now available to all Creators. Set a date and time for your uploaded video to “premiere” and a video watch page is created with comments and live chat both. Your fans can then watch the premiere of your video together while they chat. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki posted her final update for 2018, with a plea to users that they "tell the world" how they will be impacted by Article 13 of the EU's new copyright legislation, and paints a dire picture about the possible outcome: it "could force platforms, like YouTube, to allow only content from a small number of large companies." She also gave an overview new features implemented over the past year, and announced the new "YouTube Learning" initiative to support high quality educational content. You can now follow businesses in Google Maps to see events, offers and other updates. Makes a lot of sense for bus…

With the announcement that the consumer version of Google+ will be shut down next year, some active Plussers want to be sure their Followers find them in their new home.

I've seen a few questions whether there is likely to be a way to automatically convert their Followers into YouTube Subscribers. While I'd love to have an additional million subs, I think it's quite unlikely that will ever be an option.

In my case, I gained a large percentage of my Google+ Followers when I was on the old Suggested User List shown to users when they created a Profile. I would bet that many of the followers I gained that way haven't used Google+ in years, if they ever did at all.

And the folks who follow you on Google+ may not specifically be interested in your videos.

So what can you do?

 Ask your Google+ Followers to subscribe to your YouTube channel! 

While Plussers are looking for a new home, life - and app updates - go on. There are improvements to video watching, live streaming and much more.
The YouTube embedded video player - the one you use on websites other than YouTube - got a redesign. It now displays the channel’s avatar, and there is no longer a way to hide the title or prevent related videos from appearing at the end. You can, however, limit the related videos to those from the same channel.And now you don’t need to stop watching videos while you are surfing on desktop. On YouTube, just click the mini-player icon on the bottom right of any video to continue watching as you browse the site. And if you use Chrome, picture-in-picture is now the default on Linux, Mac and Windows (and soon Chrome OS), so you can watch videos in a floating window whatever you are doing on your computer.There is evidence Facebook was aware that it was providing inaccurate video viewership metrics for over a year. Thos metrics not only mislead …

If you embed videos on your website or blog, and get the embed code from the video watch page, you may have noticed that YouTube no longer lets you choose to disable related videos from displaying at the end of the video.

YouTube has updated the embedded video player so you can't completely turn off related videos and you can't disable the video title or channel avatar from displaying. You can, however, limit the related videos that display to videos on the same channel.

This change was announced in the YouTube Developer documentation in August, but it was pretty much unnoticed until its implementation now.


The good news is that you can use the "rel" parameter to limit the related videos shown to those on the same channel as the embedded video. So if you watch one of my videos embedded on my site, I can set it so that the related videos you are shown are all mine too.

How to use the "rel" parameter to limit related videos to videos on the same YouTube chann…

This was a sad week for us avid Plussers, as Google announced the consumer version of Google+ will be shut down next year. There was good news too with new Google hardware with integrated AI and Assistant, new Photos features and shiny new look and name for the Google Product Experts program. This week’s update is a bit of a monster, so I've divided it into sections.

The shutdown of Google+

I am still working on a detailed write-up up my thoughts on the demise of Google+, but here’s an overview of what’s happening: on Monday, Google announced they had discovered (and fixed) a bug that may have revealed some user Google+ profile information to developers. Oh, and because of low usage and the “significant challenges in creating and maintaining a successful Google+ product that meets consumers’ expectations” the consumer version of Google+ will shut down by August 2019. The official Google+ Page didn’t make even a minimal announcement until the next day. There have been no details ab…