Weekly Update - February 29, 2020: Conference cancellations, YouTube features, Webmaster updates

Happy Leap Day! February 29 is a nice bonus 24 hours this month. I know I can use it. This week there are updates and tips for webmasters, new YouTuber Studio features and more. Plus large international conferences are out, and video conferencing is in, hopefully reducing the spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).

At the top of the news this week is the worrying spread of COVID-19. A number of conferences have been postponed or canceled. This Mobile World Summit, scheduled to place this week in Barcelona, was cancelled. The Game Developer Conference, scheduled for mid-March, has been postponed. Some talks may be lived streamed or otherwise posted on the GDC YouTube channel. And Facebook cancelled their March global marketing summit, as well as the in-person portion of the F8 Developer conference, scheduled for the first week of May. However, as of this writing, Google is going forward with Google Cloud Next in April and Google I/O in May.
With more people limiting travel and working from home, there has been a boom in video conferencing. Zoom has seen a huge increase in active users, and has removed the 40-minute meeting time limit for free users in China. GoToMeeting is offering 3 months of free service to eligible health care providers, educational institutions, municipalities and non-profit organizations. BlueJeans is adding network capacity to make sure customers don’t have any service interruption. And both Google and Microsoft posted tips for video conferencing and working from home.
YouTube now has a Creator Liaison. Matt Koval has been a YouTube creator since 2008, and so can bring his personal experiences to his new role, which includes advocating for Creators internally at YouTube, and explaining YouTube’s inner workings to Creators. You can follow Koval in his Creator Liaison role on Twitter.
There are new video level notification metrics in your YouTube Analytics. For each of your public videos you can see how many bell notifications were sent, how many views the bell notifications generated, and stats for other types of notifications. Check it out!
Now when you view comments on your channel in YouTube Studio, public subscribers to your channel who commented have a special badge next to their channel name. Make sure you give your subscribers the attention they deserve.
If you have Memberships enabled on your YouTube channel, you can now create a members-only live stream. Memberships are currently available to non-gaming channels in the YouTube Partner Program with at least 30,000 subscribers (gaming channels only need 1000 subscribers).
There are new tracks in the YouTube Audio Library. Consider using one of these free-to-use tunes in your next project.
AdSense has updated the appearance of Anchor Ads to improve monetization performance. If you have Auto Ads turned on for your site you can enable Anchor Ads in your AdSense account.
Google Lighthouse is “an open-source, automated tool for improving the performance, quality, and correctness of your web apps.” Originally available as part of ChromeDevTools or as a Chrome extension, it’s now available as a Firefox browser add-on.
Google Search Console now lets you more easily export and download report contents.
If your website promotes events, Google Webmaster Central has a guide for how to get your events on Google.
If you report the news on your website or blog, Google Webmaster Central has a guide for marking up your content so that it can optimally appear in the Google Search results. Consider adding article structured data to your site’s AMP pages and marking up your live-streaming video content so it’s eligible to be displayed with the “Live” badge in Search.
Byte - the successor. to Vine - announced they will start reaching out to up to 100 US creators to join their new Partner Program.
Vimeo Create - Vimeo’s video creation tools for businesses - are now out of beta and available on desktop, Android or iOS devices. You can try it out for free, but you will need a paid Vimeo Pro (or higher) plan to save or publish created videos.
Google is testing public search profile cards in India. These “Google+-like” cards can be edited by individuals to add their name, location, occupation and other fields. Google says they have no plans for a wider launch
Google Image Search now shows new icons on desktop to indicate if an image in the results leads to a page with something for sale, video or recipes. To see the image dimensions, you now need to select the image, then mouse over the image in the image display.
The Smithsonian has released 2.8 million 2D and 3D images into the public domain. They cover a wide range of subjects from history, science, art, archaeology and more.
Finally, for some fun, Google Trends has a nifty tool that lets you visualize what emotions and actions are most popular on celebrity GIF searches. People look for Ariana Grande with a kiss, Jackie Chan confused, and Harry Potter happy. You can explore more for yourself.

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Image: Life Beauty Scene by Foundry on Pixabay. Free for commercial use.

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