As the summer rolls on, updates are rolling out. This week there are new ad settings and metrics for YouTube Partners, updates for webmasters, and Google+ is finally completely gone.
YouTube and Video Creation
- If you are an educator with a YouTube channel, make sure your G Suite for Education account is not the primary owner of the channel’s Brand Account. You have until July 15 to transfer primary ownership. You can do that by opening your Brand Account list, clicking your channel’s Brand Account, then selecting Manage Permissions on the details page. You can check and transfer primary ownership there to a personal account if need be.
- There is a major update for YouTube Partners: videos that are 8 minutes or longer will be eligible for inserted mid-roll ads. YouTube will be inserting mid-roll ads in ALL monetized videos of that length starting at the end of the month. If you do not want your longer videos to have mid-roll ads, you need to indicate that on your monetization settings tab by July 27. Learn how to update your mid-roll settings.
- YouTube Analytics is showing a new monetization metric: RPM. RPM is revenue per 1000 reviews, and includes all types of YouTube revenue averaged over all your video views (monetized and non-monetized). This can be more informative than the old CPM metric, which is what advertisers paid per 1000 views of your monetized videos - that did not include non-advertising revenue, and was not the amount Partners were actually paid.
- YouTube Analytics will also start listing what other videos on other channels your audience is watching. You can see a sneak peek on Creator Insider. That will be available in the next few weeks.
- New YouTube Analytics for Artists offers Official Artist Channels new tools that show information about their music shared by fans and used in third-party videos. If you are a musician with an Official Aristi Channel, check it out in YouTube Studio.
- In an update aimed at the classroom, WeVideo is introducing real-time collaboration in the WeVideo editor. It will let people edit videos “side-by-side”.
Communication
- Microsoft Teams is introducing a new “together mode” that uses AI to create cutouts of meeting participants and place them on the same background. It’s like everyone is in a room together, sort-of. They are also introducing video filters, to adjust lighting and background blur, and Dynamic View, which gives you more control over who you are seeing on-screen.
Social Media
- Google+ is no more. This week all remaining Google+ links started redirecting to its successor, Google Currents. Google+ has only been available to G Suite users since April 2019. Currents is designed for communication within an organization.
- The Flickr activity feed has been updated to give you more control over what you see. You can filter your feed by content type, difference size views, and a second column with a stat overview for Pros.
- You can now pin comments to the top of your Instagram feed post. If your posts get a lot of comments, that can help set the tone for discussion.
Webmasters and Bloggers
- If you have been using the new Blogger interface, see the latest update on the image insertion technology.
- There are two new Google Analytics metrics to help predict future actions people may take on your website or app.. Machine learning models are used to predict Purchase Probability (“ the likelihood that users who have visited your app or site will purchase in the next seven days”) and Churn Probability (“how likely it is that recently active users will not visit your app or site in the next seven days”). Note that there is a minimum amount of traffic required for these metrics to be available.
- Google Webmasters Rich Results Test is out of beta, and the old Structured Data Testing Tool will be deprecated. Submit a URL or code snippet, and the Rich Results Test will show which Search feature enhancements are valid for the markup you are providing and will let you know if there are any errors.
- If you missed web.dev Live,check out the recap, with an overview of all Google’s announcements for web developers. There’s useful information for all website owners.
Productivity
- Dark theme is now available in Google Sheets, Docs, and Slides on Android.
- There are new chart text and number formatting options in Google Sheets.
- Google Calendar now more accurately displays events shorter than 25 minutes.
- When you search in Google Images, it now may show information from the Knowledge Graph related to the result. That lets you explore the topic more deeply. This is available when you search Google for an image on mobile in the US.
Upcoming
- Everyone is invited to submit video for “Life in a Day 2020”. Executive producers Ridley Scott and Kai Hsuing, and director Kevin Macdonald are asking people to film their day on Saturday, July 25. Submitted videos will be used to create a movie highlighting one day around the world. Watch the 2010 film.
- Google Cloud Next on Air begins July 14. The first week’s sessions: Industry Insights.
- That’s all the updates for this week. Subscribe to get the Weekly Update in your email inbox or favorite feed reader every week. Miss last week’s update? Get it here.
I must now plough thru years of blog posts to delete the dead links to G+
ReplyDeleteI did that last year. It was a major project :(
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