Weekly Update - November 23, 2019: AdSense, Stadia, Google Earth

Thanksgiving is this coming Thursday in the US, and I’m very thankful for all of you who read my posts! Now is the time we usually see the last flurry of updates before the end of the year. There are updates for AdSense Publishers, video creators, and webmasters; new productivity features for G Suite users; and new creative tools for storytelling, choreography and mapping.

This week AdSense sent out two email announcements to Publishers. If you are an AdSense Publisher,and didn’t receive them, check your email notification settings.
The first email from AdSense was a reminder that they will “stop supporting the AdSense mobile application over the next few months.” AdSense isn’t bad as a mobile website, so the best alternative is using www.adsense.com in your mobile web browser.
The second email announced new options to help AdSense Publishers comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which goes into effect January 1. The easiest way to comply is to restrict data processing for users in California, so they see non-personalized ads
AdSense also announced changes to improve performance of vignette ads: the will only show once per hour per site, and will show to users between page loads when navigating to a different site. Vignette ads are mobile full-screen ads that display between page loads and can be skipped by users. You can enable them when you set up Auto Ads in your AdSense account. I don’t have them enabled, because I find them intrusive, but YMMV.
Google announced updates to its political ads policy. They are limiting election ads audience targeting to general categories including age, gender, and general location. They also noted that it’s against their policy for any advertiser - political or not - to make demonstrably false claims. You can learn more about who is buying political ads from Google, and view the ads that have been running on Google’s Political Advertising Transparency Report page (Facebook and Twitter have similar transparency tools).
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki posted her final 2019 letter to creators. In it, she looked back at changes over the past year, and mentioned some updates they are working on: working to find advertisers who are interested in “edgier” content, so those video creators can earn more; expansion of the Self Certification program that lets Partners self-report how their videos comply with ad policy; a content policy update that better differentiates between video game violence and real-world violence and updating their harassment policy guidelines. If you are a YouTube Creator it’s worth reading the whole thing to get a better sense of where YouTube sees itself heading.
New for creators on YouTube: Improved “Known Issues” card on the YouTube Studio dashboard (now maintained by an international team); for new videos with copyright claims you can use “assisted trim” to more easily remove the claimed content; the automated “classifier” that determines whether a video is advertiser friendly has been significantly improved; and there is a new Community Guidelines Enforcement transparency report. In the last quarter YouTube removed 8.7 million individual videos and 3.3 million channels for Community Guideline violations!
It’s not only Google that removes features. Facebook is removing the option to ad friends to live stream broadcasts.
You can now create a design with a short video clip in Canva. Use stock video or your own, then add text and graphics. It’s not a full-fledged video editor, and you can’t add an audio track, but it looks useful for sharing to social media or creating a short intro to splice into your longer YouTube videos. You can use Canva for free, so give it a try.
Vimeo has a new and improved version of its iOS app, now with video capture, live streaming (Premium only), trimming and audio control. Plus there are improved analytics and account management. The news features should be coming to the Android app “soon”.
You can now create your own maps and stories in Google Earth. Add placemarks, lines and shapes, then attach your own custom text, images, and videos to these locations. You can organize your locations into a narrative and even collaborate with others. The creation tools are available in Google Earth on desktop, and the final project can be viewed on desktop or mobile devices.
Visit “My Storytime” to record stories that can be played back over Google Assistant on your Google Nest (formerly Home) speaker. You can also upload pre-recorded MP3 audio files. That way your loved ones can listen to you tell a story, even if you are far away. While it’s aimed at stories for kids, it looks like it will work for grown-up stories too, so you can get creative.
Living Archive is an AI-driven choreography tool. You can explore the library of poses or record your own to create your own choreography. Give it a try.
This week was the Google Cloud Next UK conference.There were a number of announcements of new features for Google Cloud and G Suite customers, some of which may eventually be available to consumer users. There is Smart Compose and improved grammar suggestions in Google Docs; Google Assistant-run features in Calendar, messaging, and on Hangouts Meet hardware; and more. Note that most of these are in beta and available in G Suite. (If you want to watch the keynote address or learn more, see the link roundup below).
The Wall Street Journal published an “exposé” accusing Google of manipulating the search results in favor of large businesses and advertisers (non-paywalled version). While the SEO community is often critical of Google’s actions, in this case they generally panned the article, with some saying they had been misquoted, or that they had given background to reporters that was seemingly ignored. See the articles from Barry Schwartz, Greg Sterling, and Sam Ruchlewicz for their take on what the Wall Street Journal got wrong.
Stadia, Google’s cloud gaming platform, launched this week with 22 games to play, and the reviews have been mixed. There were delays sending the access codes, reports of laggy play, and disappointment that not all the promised features are available yet. But there are also happy users, especially folks who aren’t hard-core gamers. If you have questions about Stadia, you can ask in the new official help forum or on Reddit. There’s also an official Discord server.
Twitter has introduced Topics you can follow. Topic suggestions will appear in your timeline. Early analysis shows that at the moment most of the topics are sports, music and video-game related.
And, just what you’ve been waiting for: a new social network! Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales recently launched WT:Social, where the feed is always chronological and the content comes from topic-based “sub-wikis”. It plans to be funded by donations. If that sounds interesting, sign up for the wait list.
Finally, for some silliness: Open this YouTube video in the mobile YouTube app, then click the “Try Now” button to take a selfie with Scooby Doo. It’s not available in all countries, unfortunately.

Read on for more news, updates and tips for video creators, live streamers, businesses, webmasters and more. Subscribe to get the Weekly Update in your email inbox or favorite feed reader. Miss last week’s update? Get it here.

Image: US Thanksgiving is Thursday, November 28. I’m very thankful for all of you who read my posts! On Thanksgiving we usually gather with family to feast on turkey, cranberries, sweet potatoes, veggies and pie. So delicious! And so lovely to share a meal with the people who are important to me. If you are travelling for the Thanksgiving holiday, Google Maps has information you can use to make it less painful. Photo by Wendy Wei from Pexels (free to use).

Comments

PenelopeNovember 24, 2019 at 7:24 PM
Love the post! So many changes (I hear the Stadia help community is run over by spammers though) on like Google Maps, new social networks opening up, etc.

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