Weekly Update - November 9, 2019: YouTube Monetization & Home, Adobe MAX

Pour yourself a big cup of coffee, because there are a ton of updates this week. From YouTube there is a redesigned home page and new ways to make money. Adobe announced a slew of new features, apps and tools. Plus there are updates for webmasters, businesses and much more.

Coming up this week is the Chrome Developer Summit, where you can learn the “latest techniques for building for the modern Web”. You can watch live on the Chrome Developers YouTube channel.
YouTube has rolled out a new home page design on desktop and tablets. The most noticeable change is that the thumbnails are larger. That allows display of the channel icon and full title, plus higher resolution video previews. There are fewer special content shelves, but you may see sections for breaking news, community posts, music mixes and more. You can help fine-tune what you see by clicking the 3 dot menu icon by any video and selecting “don’t recommend channel.” And “soon” you will be able to customize your home feed by selecting your favorite topics.
If you are interested in applying for the YouTube Partner Program there is a new monetization setup page in YouTube Studio.It is now clearer how close your channel is to meeting the watch time requirements, and you don’t have to set up an AdSense account until your channel is ready to be reviewed.You can see the new page at https://studio.youtube.com/channel/UC/monetization (note that if you already have monetization enabled, you won’t see a change).
If your channel is in the YouTube Partner Program, you most likely will be able to monetize live chats with the new Super Stickers, along with Super Chat. Viewers can purchase animated stickers during live streams and Premieres, with a large number of cute designs (not just for gaming!) in English, French, Japanese, Korean, and Portuguese. See the FAQ in the official YouTube Forum for more information.
In addition to the new home page design on desktop, YouTube added a new option to add videos to a queue. The new queue creates a list of videos to watch during your viewing session. This list is temporary, and disappears when you close your browser. For viewing in a later session, you can still add videos to your Watch Later playlist.
The YouTube video editor is pretty basic, but it’s not being neglected. You can now save edited videos as new videos and revert back to your original video file from the YouTube Studio editor.
Classic YouTube Studio will be going away early next year. YouTube has posted their end of year update on the state of the new YouTube Studio, and announced that 1% of channels - channels that have already “made the switch” - will no longer be able to switch back to Classic. If you aren’t using the new Studio (studio.youtube.com) the time is now to try it and submit your feedback.
YouTube’s new terms of service go into effect on December 10, 2019. You should receive an email from YouTube with more details, or see a banner when you sign into YouTube on desktop. It’s mostly just reworded and reorganized, but one significant change is that parental permission is required for all users under the age of 18. If you have questions, see this FAQ in the YouTube Help Center. Note that the terms for the European Economic Area and Switzerland were updated in July, so if your terms were updated at that time, you won’t be notified of new terms this time around.
Earlier this year, the European Union adopted a new Copyright Directive. Article 17 (Article 13 in the draft) requires providers that host user-generated content to employ measures to prevent users from violating copyright. Now EU member countries have until 2021 to pass laws to implement the new rules. How this will affect YouTube and other sites isn’t clear. This week YouTube posted an update on what steps they are taking to advocate for their own and creators’ interests. I’m following with interest, because this will not only affect European creators, but also any video - like mine, like yours - when it is shown in the European Union. And, of course, this won’t only affect YouTube. Twitch, Reddit, Patreon, WordPress, Medium and other content platforms have spoken out as well.
The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is asking for public feedback on how they should implement Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA). It’s this rule that requires YouTube to treat all content aimed at children as if children are watching. There will be significant changes for creators of kids content on YouTube in January to ensure YouTube (and the creators) are in compliance.There is some concern that the FTC wants to expand the criteria to include “child-attractive” content, that isn’t necessarily aimed at kids. Attorney Jonathan Katz and startup consultant Victoria Fener have an overview of the policy at Tubefilter, including talking points you can include in your feedback to the FTC.

Last week was Adobe MAX, where Adobe announced updates and showed off new features in its products and services.

Adobe Aero lets you create immersive AR experiences without having to code. The iOS app is available for free.
There’s a new Photoshop Camera app that lets you take photos, edit, and use creative filters, right on your phone. You can request access to the Limited Preview.
Full Photoshop is available on the iPad and Illustrator will be coming to the iPad in 2020.
Video editing app Adobe Premiere Rush can now share directly to TikTok. This is the first feature to come out of TikTok’s new developers program. Other apps and tools integrated with TikTok include PicsArt, Enlight VideoLeap, Momento GIF Maker and more.
Premiere Pro’s Auto Reframe identifies the action and keeps it as the focus when you reframe video clips.
There are updates for Lightroom on Mac, Windows, iOS, Android and ChromeOS.
The coolest announcements at Adobe MAX are in the #Sneaks session, where they give sneak peak into what’s happening at Adobe Research. Some of my favorites: Project All In can identify and add missing people in group photos. Project Sweet Talk creates dynamic videos from static images, making portraits come alive. Project Awesome Audio enhances amateur audio recordings so they sound professional. And there are more.
Adobe, Twitter, and the New York Times have announced the Content Authenticity Initiative, a new system for adding attribution to photos and other content. This should help identify the source of photos, make sure artists get credit for their work, and fight information. It sounds good, but there isn’t much information on how this will actually work yet.

It’s not only YouTube and Adobe updates this week. Also notable:

There is a new Speed report in Google Search Console. If you are a webmaster, check out the report to assess and monitor the performance of your website.
Last week Google held a Webmaster Conference in Mountain View. The attendees shared what they learned.
Google has introduced “Google Play Points”, a new program that lets you earn points for everything you buy through Google Play, including in-app items, movies, books, and subscriptions, or downloading free apps and games. Points can be redeemed for in-app credit or making purchases.
The Google Play News app now lets you read your news in multiple languages.
Pigeon is a new crowdsourced transit app out of Google’s Area 120 incubator. It provides real-time transit status information, provided by actual commuters. It’s currently available for iOS in New York City, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. If it works well, I can imagine this eventually being incorporated into Google Maps or maybe integrated with Waze.
Last week was also Microsoft Ignite, their annual conference for developers and IT professionals. A few highlights:,the new Chromium-based Edge browser has a new icon, and will be officially released January 15th (but the beta is available now). They previewed the new Fluid Framework for collaborative experiences in Office. And there a number of new features in Microsoft Teams - Microsoft’s answer to Slack. Plus learn how Microsoft is “envisioning tomorrow” with new technology out of science fiction.

Read on for more news, updates and tips for webmasters, Chromebook users, businesses and more.
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Image: Monday, November 11 is Veterans Day in the US, and Remembrance Day in the UK, Australia, Canada and some other countries. Many wear an artificial red poppy to commemorate military personnel who died in war, inspired by the poem In Flanders Fields.
30 million poppies are made by volunteers at the Royal British Legion Poppy Factory in Richmond, Surrey each year. (Image via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Open Government Licence version 1.0 (OGL v1.0))