Weekly Update - October 9, 2021: YouTube Policy, Chrome RSS Feed Reader, AdSense Ad Auction

This week there are updates for AdSense publishers, YouTube live streamers, folks using Google Calendar for business and more.

And in a nifty update, Chrome for Android now has a basic feed reader option.

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Top Stories

• YouTube announced several improvements to captions and audio features. Now all creators can enable automatic live captions for live streams in English. Previously this was only available to channels with more than 1000 subscribers. It will be expanding to all of YouTube’s captioning languages over the coming months. Future features include automatic translation of captions on mobile, multi-audio tracks and descriptive audio feeds (example), and channel permissions to add captions.
• AdSense publishers, YouTube creators and Google Ads advertisers are now prohibited from monetizing content or buying ads for content “that contradicts well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change.” Google says they have consulted experts on developing this policy and will consider the context of the content. Why the change? “Advertisers simply don’t want their ads to appear next to this content” and publishers don’t want such ads.
• AdSense is moving to a first-price ad auction. Previously AdSense used a second-price auction, where the winner of the auction was determined by the second-highest bid. This change puts AdSense in alignment with Google Ad Manager and Ad Mob and simplifies the ad space purchasing process. AdSense hopes this will “grow advertiser spending confidence”, and do not expect the change to impact AdSense earnings.

Upcoming

• On October 15 the Google My Maps app for Android will be shut down. Your maps can still be created and edited on My Maps for the web at mymaps.google.com.

Try This: Google Chrome as your mobile feed reader

• Google Chrome for Android now has a built-in RSS feed reader, making it easy to follow your favorite news sites and blogs. If you have Chrome 94 on your Android device, give it a try.

Learn

• Google Cloud Next is October 12-14. Registration is free. Learn about Google Meet, Chat, Docs and other Google Workspace collaboration and meeting tools. Plus get the latest on Google’s Cloud services, AI and machine learning, data analytics and more. Start with these sessions.

YouTube and Video

• You can now edit your YouTube channel profile picture and channel banner in the mobile app.
• YouTube is touting a recent study by Oxford Economics showing how YouTube positively impacts small businesses in the United States. You can see see “local impact” stories for every state on the US of YouTube sub-site.
• Twitter removed the option to invite a guest into a live stream, in order to “improve broadcast quality.”
• Facebook Gaming announced the launch of co-streaming. That allows streamers to stream concurrently, so viewers can easily move between the two streams to see each perspective.
• Twitch had a very bad week. Someone - a hacker? An inside job? - posted it’s entire source code, plus internal tools and creator payout reports since 2019.

Publishers

• The new Google Search Console integration in Google Analytics will help publishers better understand how Search drives traffic to your site.

Productivity

• A new feature in Google Calendar lets you easily create meeting notes documents directly linked back to the calendar event.
• You will now be able to access your Google Contacts on the sidebar of Google Chat, Calendar, Docs, Sheets and Slides on the web. This feature was already available in Gmail.
• You can now subscribe to Google Workspace Individual from Google Calendar. Google Workspace Individual is a paid account that adds premium features to Google Meet and Calendar to personal accounts. Features include Calendar appointments slots, Meet group meetings longer than 60 minutes and more.

Meetings

• Google Meet in Google Classroom has new features to make it more accessible and secure for teaching. Students will no longer be able to join a class before the teacher. Instead when they try to join they will be held in a waiting room until the teacher joins the meeting. Co-teachers for a class are automatically co-hosts in the meeting. And any guest not on the class roster will have to ask to join the meeting.

Security

• To celebrate Cybersecurity Awareness Month Google announced it will be automatically enrolling 150 million users in 2-step verification to improve their account security. Only accounts with “proper backup mechanisms in place” will be automatically opted in.

More

• Language learning: Do you know what the sparkles emoji ✨ means ? Emojipedia explains how it is used for sarcasm, emphasis, and mocking for those of us not hip to the TikTok talk. (That made me sound really old, didn’t it?)

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.

Image: Monday is Columbus Day or Indiginous Peoples Day. It’s a day to remember that most of us living in the United States are living on land forcibly taken from the original inhabitants. That’s a far cry from the celebration in my youth (which, admittedly, was decades ago), which celebrated how “Columbus sailed the ocean blue” and “discovered” the Americas. Photo by Photo by Lisha Riabinina from Pexels