Creator Weekly: YouTube Shopping, Third-Party Cookies, Beehiiv Apps

You might think that summertime means everyone is on holiday, but the reality is that tech and the world rolls on. The US presidential election is suddenly more exciting, and the Olympics kicked off in Paris. And there are updates for web publishers, video creators and more.

Also, if you are receiving Creator Weekly by email,you can now get a phone app for easy reading. Scroll down for details.

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Get the Creator Weekly Beehiiv App

I use Beehiiv for the email version of Creator Weekly (subscribe here).

This week Beehiiv launched a new option for newsletters to add a mobile app, which lets you get a push notification for new editions and get the “mobile optimized reading experience”. This is a Progressive Web App, and so is pretty much just a nice mobile web version of the newsletter with (optional) notifications.

This is in contrast to the Substack app, which lets readers engage with multiple newsletters (and their posts, notes and other content) and promotes other newsletters to your readers.

To add the app:

Open peggyktc.beehiiv.com in your mobile web browser (Android or iOS)
Sign in with the email you used to subscribe to the newsletter (or subscribe!)
You should then see a prompt asking if you want to install the app

If you install the app my logo (the nice orange flower) will appear on your device’s home screen

I don’t have comments enabled for the newsletter. If you want to comment, you can do so here.

And I don’t see the appeal for myself - I certainly wouldn’t want a separate web app version of every newsletter I subscribe to.

But if people like it, I’m happy to provide this option.

To Do & Try

If you need some beats, YouTube has a curated playlist of DJ sets with more than 24 hours of music. Plus, this weekend, the Tomorrowland festival in Belgium is live, and you can watch (and listen) on YouTube.

Last Sunday OnEBoard’s Bob Danley shared how he uses Google’s NotebookLM to write informative and accurate descriptions for his nature videos. Watch the video and try NotebookLM.

The Olympics

Here’s a thing you probably don’t know about me - I love the Olympics. I know they are a financial drain on host cities, and have other issues. But I love the spectacle, and the parade of athletes from all around the world, and cheering for swimmers and runners and gymnasts and skateboarders and other athletes I mostly only notice every four years.

One of the striking things about the opening ceremonies is that they were made for the screen, with performances across the city, and many of those without spectators. People standing along the river Seine only see the boats and performances within eyeshot, but could watch the rest on big screens. And much of it seemed to be designed for the massive audience watching on TV. I look forward to seeing what Los Angeles does in 2028 (my suggestion: a fleet of convertibles carrying the athletes up PCH then onto the freeways to the stadium. That would be so LA.).

In the US Google is partnering with NBCUniversal for coverage, with plenty of ads (of course), and commentators using Gemini and Search AI to find information, and Google Maps in 3D to show locations.

Unfortunately there aren’t many free options for watching the games online. The Olympics YouTube channel will have highlights. And in the US, the NBC Sports app will show some events for free.

It does feel odd that such a massive international event doesn’t have social media and other platform tie-ins, but they really only want people engaging with the official accounts.

Google May Not Deprecate Third-Party Cookies in Chrome

In 2019 Google announced a “Privacy Sandbox” for the web that allowed personalization, while protecting user privacy.

Web services, advertisers and advertising use cookies to track users around the web, and allow advertisers to show users personalized ads. Google’s business is based on advertising revenue, and people blocking cookies threatened that.

The Privacy Sandbox is supposed to be a workaround that allows users to have their privacy, while still allowing advertisers to show people personalized ads. Along with the implementation of the Privacy Sandbox, Chrome would phase out support for third-party cookies. Firefox and Safari already block third-party cookies and cross-site tracking by default, and the main delay in Chrome seems to be Google’s work to protect its advertising business.

Google recently ran a test on the effect of not using third-party cookies as an identifier to serve ads on publisher revenue, and found:

Removing 3rd party cookies caused a 21% drop in AdSense revenue (34% drop in Google Ad Manager revenue)
Removing third-party cookies, but adding signals from the Privacy Sandbox, caused an 18% drop in revenue for AdSense publishers (20% drop in Google Ad Manager revenue)

So removing third-party cookies always causes a significant drop in AdSense revenue, but if the Privacy Sandbox is used, the drop isn’t quite as big.

So this week’s announcement that Google is stepping back from the Privacy Sandbox came as a bit of a surprise. They are still working on it, it’s not abandoned (at least not yet), but they acknowledge this transition requires “significant work” on the part of advertisers and publishers.

So what is being proposed? Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, Chrome users would be able to “make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing”. Google will also enable IP protection (preventing websites from seeing their visitors’ IP address) in Incognito Mode.

What does this mean for web publishers?

People will still be able to turn off third-party cookies. This means features (like blog commenting) that require third-party cookies to work need to be updated. There are already issues for Safari and Firefox users. Blogger, I’m looking at you!
Privacy enhancements may decrease AdSense publisher revenue. People do like ads that are targeted to them. On the other hand, AdSense has moved from serving mostly pay-per-click ads to pay-per-impression ads, which may not be affected by the lack of personalization.
Advertisers may have a hard time ensuring their ads are shown to people who would be interested in them.

Note that Google did not share when these changes will go into effect, as they need regulatory approval.

Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates

You can now save music from any Short in the YouTube Shorts feed to any of your playlists. This is meant to make it easier to save music to create Shorts in the future. More info from Creator Insider.

YouTube Shopping Affiliates can use a new Chrome extension to save products and see the commission rate while browsing (get the extension). To join the Shopping Affiliate Program, your channel must have at least 10,000 subscribers, be in the YouTube Partner Program, and be based in the US or Korea.

YouTube has updated their Video Tips for Creators section of the help center with lots of information about building community, video production, policies, monetization and more.

The YouTube Creator Liaison has been posting a lot of informational Shorts on his channel. One thing you should know: “The algorithm is automated word-of-mouth”.

Videos in Google Drive can now have automatic captions. Videos uploaded prior to this update can have captions added manually. If you are using a free Google Account, you will always have to request the automatic captions after uploading a video to Drive. The generated caption file can be downloaded as a .vtt file (which is supported for upload to YouTube). This is currently only available in English, but will expand to more languages in the future.

Runway recently launched their Gen-3 Alpha AI model for realistic video generation. How did they do that? Samantha Cole at 404 Media reported that they collected videos from thousands of YouTube channels and possibly pirated movies as training data (non-paywalled report at The Verge). You can see a copy of the internal Google Sheet that lists channels with notes about the content. At the time the original article was posted, it was possible to pretty closely re-create specific creator content.

Lindsey Gamble reports that you can now upload a custom thumbnail image to your TikTok video during the publishing flow (so presumably not after your video has been published). This is interesting in light of YouTube’s announcement last week that they plan to add options to add text and effects to selected Shorts thumbnail frames, but they don’t plan on adding the option to upload a separate image as a thumbnail.

TikTok now integrates with Eventbrite, so anyone can easily promote and sell tickets to their event. This isn’t just for bands or other music artists - it’s for everyone hosting an in-person event. More details.

TikTok also now integrates with DistroKid so music artists can easily set up their official Artist Accounts.

Instagram shared a detailed guide to live streaming on the platform. You can invite up to 3 co-hosts and add filters, effects and images to share.

Twitch has clarified their sexual harassment policy. In particular they have expanded the definition of sexual harassment to include “unwanted comments–including comments made using emojis/emotes–regarding someone's appearance or body, sexual requests or advances, sexual objectification, and negative statements or attacks related to a person's perceived sexual behaviors or activities, regardless of their gender.” They have also added “sexual harassment” as an option for the AutoMod comment moderation tool. This holds possibly problematic comments for review.

Twitch is starting to roll out their new Clip creation tool. This is an easy way to create a portrait-orientation clip from a longer video.

Web Publishers and Search

This shouldn’t be a surprise: Google's John Mueller: Don't Use LLMs For SEO Advice

If you are using a block theme on WordPress.com you can now customize the footer credit. This is available on all plans, and does not have to mention WordPress.

Substack is updating their mobile app to include post creation. It’s early days, so in-app drafts don’t sync to the web, published posts cannot be edited in the app, and you can only create text posts. This is available for iOS, with Android coming soon, along with video and podcast posting.

Tumblr Premium is a new paid subscription that includes ad-free browsing, one free Blaze (which can be used to promote a post), a free item from TumblrMart (other than Premium), increased posting and liking limits, and early access to new features.

AI Search Summaries

AI search summaries are not only here to stay, but also expanding to more platforms. The big question is whether these will kill traffic to the source websites. That, and whether they will ever do a good enough job to trust the answers.

Google Gemini will now show links to relevant websites or Google services at the end of a paragraph, so you can more easily access source information. Note that this is not the same as Google’s Search AI Summaries.

Like Google, Bing is working on generative AI answers in Search. See a preview of the Bing AI Search experience.

And OpenAI is testing SearchGPT, designed to “give you fast and timely answers with clear and relevant sources.” They plan to eventually integrate this into ChatGPT. Sign up for the waiting list to try it.

Photos and Image Design

Adobe has released new versions of Illustrator and Photoshop, with Firefly AI-powered tools. In Illustrator, Generative Shape Fill lets you turn a shape into artwork in your own style and Text to Pattern lets you create seamless patterns with a text prompt. In Photoshop there are new Selection Brush tool, updated Adjustment Tool and Type Tool and taskbar to improve productivity.

Social Media

Reddit is now blocking many search engines from crawling the site. So while Google can crawl reddit, Bing Search is blocked and Reddit pages are disappearing from the Bing search results. Reddit says this is not related to their deal with Google, but they note they “have been unable to reach agreements with all of [the other search engines], since some are unable or unwilling to make enforceable promises regarding their use of Reddit content, including their use for AI.”

X has a new setting for managing whether GrokAI and xAI can use your posts and engagements for training. This is enabled for everyone by default. You can turn it off on the web (not in the app) by going to Settings & Privacy > Privacy & Safety > Data Sharing & Personalization > Grok or by going to x.com/settings/grok_settings.

This seems stupid: X Redesigns Water Pistol Emoji Back To A Firearm

If you are active on Mastodon and Bluesky, the OpenVibe app lets you read them as a single feed. You can also see Threads posts if you follow Threads users who have Fediverse sharing enabled. I’ve been using it and I like it (I also have too many social media profiles).

The latest version of Bluesky has a “Priority notification” option, that limits notifications of replies, mentions and quote posts to followed users only.

Communication and Collaboration

Google Sheets drop-down menus now let you select more than one option. This looks really useful for tracking information that isn’t easy to categorize. The example shows tracking dietary restrictions (select both “gluten free” and “dairy free”), but I think it would be good for doing things like tracking expenses or inventory that may fall into multiple categories.

It’s now easier to create and edit tables in Microsoft Word for the web.

AI Updates and News

Meta AI’s new creative tools let you tell it to “Imagine Me” as, well, anything. It takes several photos of you, and then generates a selfie image of you as an astronaut, in a video game, as royalty or (almost) anything else you suggest. You can also easily change and edit objects in AI-generated images. You’ll be able to generate images on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. Learn more about all the latest Meta AI updates.

Google is upgrading the free version of Gemini to Gemini 1.5 Flash, which is an improvement in quality and speed. Gemini will now show links to relevant websites or Google services at the end of a paragraph, so you can easily access source information. And soon free accounts will be able to upload files from Google Drive or their device. Learn more about the latest Gemini updates. Also new: rolling out Gemini in Google Messages in Europe.

Luke Wroblewski says Lorum Ipsum placeholder text should be replaced with Large Language Model-generated text, which is more realistic as a placeholder. Large Language Models are “AI” like Gemini and ChatGPT.

This probably isn’t going to be available any time soon: Mark Zuckerberg imagines content creators making AI clones of themselves

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