Creator Weekly: YouTube Studio, AdSense Ads, SEO

As we move into November, tech companies are pushing out a myriad of updates and they work to get changes out the door before the Christmas-New Year season.

If you are in the US or Canada, don’t forget to set your clocks back one hour!

Top news and updates this week

• AdSense is moving to pay-per-impression ads and a new revenue share model
• For YouTube Partners AdSense payment history will be available in the YouTube Studio app
• Meta is offering A/B testing tools for Facebook Reels thumbnails and titles
• SEOs are talking about an article that asked if they are ruining the internet
• Google Search is celebrating the completed move to mobile-first search indexing
• The new top level .ing domain lets you get creative with your website’s address (if you have the $$$$)
• On social media: LinkedIn has more AI tools, Threads added web features, and X won't monetize posts with Community Notes.
• Google Meet meetings available in “On the Go” mode, plus updates for Workspace meeting calls and viewer features

Read on for details and additional updates!

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AdSense is moving to pay-per-impression ads

This week AdSense announced that next year (coming soon!) they will be moving from primarily pay-per-click ads to pay-per-impression ads.

And along with that they are providing a more detailed breakdown of how the revenue sharing works for AdSense for Content (the advertising platform, like Google Ads takes a cut, then AdSense takes a cut). Currently there is just one revenue sharing amount that covers it all.

Google says that based on their tests, this change isn’t expected to affect publisher earnings. Hopefully that’s the case!

Read my overview of the update.

View AdSense Payment History in the YouTube Studio App

YouTube Partners will soon be able to view their AdSense payment history and progress towards their next payment in the YouTube Studio mobile app.

Detailed payment information and account management (like removal of holds) will continue to be available in your AdSense account.

Read my overview of the new AdSense payment history option in YouTube Studio.

Are SEOs ruining the internet?

The Verge published a provocative and somewhat snarky article by Amanda Chicago Lewis about Search Engine Optimizers (SEOs) titled “Did SEO experts ruin the internet or did Google?”. It included quotes from SEO professional Lily Ray and Google Search Liaison Danny Sullivan, both of whom felt the article didn’t fully accurately reflect what they told the reporter.

This, of course, riled up the SEO community.

Sullivan published a detailed and thoughtful response to the article on his personal website.

And Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz suggests that the premise of the article - that Google Search results are worse today than they were decades ago - isn’t true.

Reading it as an outsider, it looked to me as though Lewis started with a premise she was trying to prove, which is not a great way to report. The article focused on a number of colorful characters that made an interesting story, but probably didn’t really reflect how most SEOs work today.

The flip side of that, of course, is that SEOs do have a poor reputation, in part because there are plenty of people calling themselves “SEO experts” who churn out low quality websites, try to game Google’s search algorithms and post dubious advice.

And SEOs frequently grumble about Google being too opaque about their guidelines, when the answers to their questions are often “it depends”.

So it may not have been really fair, but I don’t think the article’s conclusions were surprising. I’m not sure what the legit SEO community can do about that.

More Video Creator Updates

Google Ads is making it easier for advertisers to exclude content themes from where their ads will appear on YouTube and the Google Display Network. Advertisers can exclude themes like sensitive news, politics, religion or content suitable for families. Google also touts its “brand safety” record across YouTube video formats. If you are a YouTube Partner, I think it’s useful to know what Google is telling advertisers.

YouTube is introducing more protections for teen viewers, including limiting repeated recommendations for some content, more prominent “take a break” and “bedtime” reminders, and expanding crisis resource panels when searching for content related to suicide, self-harm and eating disorders. And they explain their principles in making YouTube a place for kids and teens.

According to Social Media Today, YouTube is “ramping up” its fight against ad blockers.If you want an ad-free experience that supports both creators and the platform, you can subscribe to YouTube Premium.

Meta has introduced an A/B testing tool for Facebook Reels that lets you test up to 4 different captions or thumbnails.

Meta also has a new feature that lets you easily create Facebook Reels from your video posts or live streams. That’s in addition to new content tools, analytics and Achievement badges (complete the levels for increased visibility and weekly challenges).

StreamYard now lets you add Custom Markers to flag important moments in your live stream or recording.

Twitch is rolling out Featured Clips updates and Clips Analytics.

TikTok wants to “set the record straight” on how they are working to prevent the spread of hate speech and misinformation “surrounding the crisis in Israel and Gaza”.

Music and Podcasting

Tubefilter reports the stand-alone TikTok Music app is opening up to independent music artists via an agreement with music distributor DistroKid.

Web Publishers

Google Search is celebrating the completed move to Mobile-First site indexing. The Googlebot type information in Google Search Console is being removed, because “all websites that work on mobile devices are now being primarily crawled with [Google’s] mobile crawler.” Sites that do not work on mobile at all will still be crawled by Google’s legacy desktop Googlebot crawler “for the time being”. The take home message: make sure your site or blog is mobile friendly if you want it to appear in the Google Search results.

Google Search just released their November 2023 core update. Google explains this is an update to a different core system than last month’s update.

Google is offering a new .ing top level domain. It’s not through Google Domains, which was sold to Squarespace in September, but through Google’s “Partners”. Some examples: draw.ing and design.ing lead to Canva, edit.ing and sign.ing to Adobe Acrobat, not to mention dumpl.ing and ink.ing. Note that the registration isn’t cheap.

WordPress Site Profiler is a free tool that lets you find WHOIS and hosting information for any domain. You can try it at wordpress.com/site-profiler .

Blogger Product Expert Irsah has a tutorial on editing your Blogger theme to display widgets on only specific pages or posts.

Google Fonts has two new non-letter fonts, Linefront and Wavefront, that lets you type graphs. “Wavefont has a Weight, Round, and Vertical Alignment axes to render waveforms, spectrums, diagrams or bars. (sample)” and “Linefont has a Weight and Width axes for rendering small to medium-scale line charts (sample).”

Photos and Image Design on the Web

Photos for good: From Lens to Landscape: Flickr Teams up with The Conservation Alliance and Rivian for the Mobilizing for Monuments Road Trip. “The overarching objective is to urge President Biden to leverage the Antiquities Act, allowing the designation of federal public lands through presidential proclamations.”

Social Media

Alex Kondrad in Forbes reports X has a plan to sell dormant handles for up to $50,000 and is actively soliciting buyers.

X removed the Twitter Circle feature this week. You could use the Circle to post privately to a select group of other users.

X says posts corrected by Community Notes will not be eligible for monetization. It sounds good on the surface, but Notes aren’t expert opinions, but rather Community Notes participant-approved clarifications. Notes added to Elon Musk’s posts spreading misinformation have been removed, either because they were voted off by Musk fans or removed at the site owner’s direction.

LinkedIn is celebrating 1 billion members (most of whom probably aren’t active) with new AI tools for Premium subscribers. You can get a summary of your feed’s posts (taking on “the hard work of parsing through long articles, videos, and posts”), get more information on a topic from Bing’s AI, and help you find a job that is “a good fit for you”. That’s in addition to previously launched writing tools and messaging suggestions.

The EU’s Digital Services Act requires very large online platforms to disclose their monthly active users across the EU. Social Media Today is reporting on their disclosures, including LinkedIn (which up until now only reported how many people signed up) and TikTok.

The Mastodon for Android app now supports custom lists. That lets you curate posters without seeing those posts in your home feed.

Twitter alternative Pebble (formerly T2), never really gained traction and shut down on November 1. But it lives on, in a way, in the Pebble Mastodon community that launched just before the shutdown.

Instagram’s Threads has added more features for the web version, including adjusting alt text for photos and videos, copy-paste media into a post, add multiple posts to a thread before publishing, and click likes or views on a post to see quotes and reposts.

The Verge reports Meta wants Threads to be the ‘de facto platform’ for online public conversations.

TechCrunch reports on Why Mozilla is betting on a decentralized social networking future.

More AI Updates

Google Bard can now show its responses while they are in progress, so you don’t have to sit and wait for the generated answer.

If you are interested in Duet AI for Google Workspace, register for this free webinar with live Q&A on November 30.

Google is rolling out Product Studio, a set of AI tools for businesses in Merchant Center Next. It lets you use generative AI text-to-image to place your products in any scene you can imagine. This is available in the US only.

CNN Business reports How Microsoft’s AI is making a mess of the news.

President Barack Obama shared ”What I’m Reading on the Rise of Artificial Intelligence”

Communication and Collaboration

Google Meet has a new “On-the-Go” meeting mode for mobile devices. If it’s detected you are in motion (in a car or subway or walking) you’ll be prompted to switch to this simplified interface. Your video is turned off during the meeting, and you have the option to view presentations (which don’t display automatically).

Google Workspace customers can now call someone in their organization in the Meet app without having to create a meeting link. This is similar to calling in Google Chat. Note that this is not an end-to-end encrypted formerly Duo call (which are now called Meet Legacy Calls).

Meet meeting organizers and hosts can designate some meeting attendees as “Viewers” who cannot share their audio or video. Viewers can now send emoji reactions and meeting hosts can now promote viewers to contributors when in picture-in-picture mode. Viewer mode is only available in some Google Workspace editions.

Meet Product Expert Nina Trankova has a tutorial on how to change the background of a Google Meet meeting.

Microsoft Teams has a new Channels experience with conversation view, the ability to pop out or pin posts and an updated compose box.

More

Firefox accounts have been renamed Mozilla accounts, to reflect their entire family of products. (I keep forgetting that Pocket is a Mozilla product.)

Charlie Warzel reports for the Atlantic that Big Tech’s relationship with journalism is much more complicated than it appears: the Great Social Media–News Collapse.

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 the October 28 edition here.

Image: via Canva, free for commercial use.