10 Years of Creator Tutorials and News!

It’s hard to believe it, but 10 years have passed since I launched what is now Peggy K's Creator News.

I set up the blog originally as a place to post easily linkable tutorials on the integration of Google+ and YouTube. It was pretty confusing and the ins and outs were not well docume,nted in Google’s help centers, so this started as a reference guide.

The first post on peggyktc.com was a tutorial on how to unlink your YouTube channel from Google+ and how to create a channel using something other than your real name.

What’s in a (domain) name?

I chose the peggyktc.com domain for this blog to give my main Google+ Page a memorable custom URL, which was based on the linked domain.

PeggyK(dot)com was sadly already taken, and no, that Peggy K is not me.

The “TC” referred to the fact I was a “Top Contributor” in the Google Help Communities. And I still am, although it’s Google Product Experts now.

I eventually added more tutorials about using Google+ (even without YouTube), and other Google products like Blogger and Hangouts.

Weekly Creator News

At the beginning of 2015 I started my weekly review of tech news and tutorials. Those first roundups were just links back to my Google+ tech-related posts over the previous week. It was a way for me to keep a record of my Google+ posts, long before the launch of Collections.

You can read the skimpy first edition here: Week in review - January 3, 2015: 2014 in review, disabled AdSense accounts, Google account security

It started out as very brief links to mostly Google-related news, but over time it became more comprehensive. Instead of just a list of links, I started writing summaries of the week’s top stories. And I started including updates for other social platforms, and non-Google sites and services.

That shift was fortunate, as Google announced the unlinking of Google+ as a social layer across Google in 2015.

Changing the site name

Over time became clear that “YouTube-Google+ Integration” was not a great name for the blog. Admittedly it was never a very good name, but it got steadily worse as Google shifted emphasis away from Google+.

In March 2017 Blogger launched new “modern” themes, and that was the kick I needed to both refresh the design and change the name to “Peggy K’s Tips & Tricks”.

Read about that update: New name, new look - same great content!

It wasn’t a particularly clever name, but it at least was broad enough to include all the topics I wrote about.

If you are a regular reader you may have noticed I changed the name again in July to “Peggy K’s Creator News”, as I think that better reflects my current emphasis and maybe sounds a bit less spammy than “tips and tricks”.

Platforms Come, Platforms Go

Ten years is a long time in the tech world, and I’ve seen a lot of changes.

Google not only unlinked Google+ from other products and services, but shut it down completely. It spawned Google Photos in 2015, which is still going strong.

Google Chat followed Hangouts, but just isn’t the same.

So many trends have come and gone.

The golden age of blogging was over by 2013, but the rise of newsletters that you can read on the web (and comment on) is a very blog-like revival.

There were the live streaming platforms launched in 2015 (Meerkat, Periscope, Blab, YouTube Gaming).

Social media stories (YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter Fleets) and live audio (Clubhouse, Facebook Live Audio Rooms, Spotify Greenroom, Twitter Spaces) in 2020 and 2021.

The email version of the blog moved from Google’s FeedBurner, to Twitter’s Revue, to Beehiiv. I really hope I don’t need to move it again any time soon.

I’ve been sticking with using Blogger (it turns 25 next year), and I hope I'm still here a decade from now. 

By the numbers

As of this writing, I’ve published 796 posts at PeggyKTC.com.

In addition to 50 or so issues of the Creator Weekly news every year since 2015, 

I have also published roughly:

• 158 YouTube Tutorials
• 52 Blogger Tutorials
• 46 Google+ Tutorials
• 32 AdSense Tutorials
• 22 Google Photos Tutorials
• 20 Hangouts Tutorials
• 16 Meet Tutorials
• 3 Google Chat Tutorials

Plus posts on a smattering of other topics.

Those posts have 3.2 million views and more than 1500 published comments.

This year I launched Creator Weekly Live on YouTube, to complement my posts and email newsletter, which I’m hoping brings more people over to the blog too.

On to the next 10 years!

Thank you for reading and your continued support!

I’m proud that I’ve helped so many people find answers to their questions and kept folks informed of the changes that affect their activity online.

There’s no way to know what the next decade will bring. That’s part of what keeps things interesting.

But here are some trends I expect to see, with a pinch of wishful thinking:

• The continued fragmentation of social media. While not all the “Twitter alternatives” available today are likely to still be around a decade from now, I think it’s a sign that massive platforms for “everyone” don’t work that well.
• But the fragmented social platforms will have more options to talk to each other. It may not be the “Fediverse” of today, but there will be more options to move your data and follow content on multiple platforms.
• Social media will be less “social”. There will be more platforms like TikTok and YouTube and Pinterest and various newsletters and blogs where you will follow content creators and comment, but there isn’t much of a social graph.
• People will continue to socialize online, of course, but private communities will predominate. Young people will continue to want to hang out in different spaces than their parents and grandparents.
• There will be less dependence on advertising, with an ongoing shift towards subscriptions and small individual payments. Newspaper advertising revenue peaked in 2000. Increased privacy measures and the decline in advertiser spending is causing declining online revenue. Creators - and the big tech giants - will have to adapt or die.
• We won’t be hanging out in the metaverse (unless there’s a technology breakthrough that makes it possible to do that without a big clunky headset), X will not be a WeChat-like “everything” app and AI will not have taken over the world.

I plan to continue posting news and tutorials. I have a few ideas for new series I'd like to get going, such as tools for Chromebook users (like me!). 

The future is an adventure!

I'm grateful for your continued support, and I hope you'll join me on this journey.

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Header image created with Adobe Firefly generative AI tool. Prompt: Cake decorated with orange flowers and burning candles shaped like the number 10 sitting next to a laptop on a desk. There is a notebook and pen on the desk. Filters: Art, Bold Lines, Cartoon. (Allowed for commercial use with watermark for free accounts)