Creator Weekly: YouTube monetization suspensions, WordPress in Perplexity Publishing Partners Program, Beehiiv Audio

This week has updates for YouTube creators, WordPress publishers and more. And some interesting tech-related articles about the Olympics. Plus some generative AI updates for Google Photos, Meta creator chatbots and more.

Listen to this newsletter

Beehiiv just introduced audio transcriptions. If you are reading this in your email, you can click the Listen Online link at the top to open a new page with the audio player, and audio is also available in the newsletter’s Progressive Web App. If you are reading this on my site, you can open the post here to have it read to you.

If you listen (the voice I chose is “Sarah”), let me know what you think.

Thoughts on the current state of my social media

One of the things I’ve been thinking about is the churn below the surface on social media. I recently set up Fedica (formerly Tweepsmap), mostly because it lets me schedule X Posts with polls. But one of the other things it does is monitor who is following and unfollowing me. Last week I had 3 new X followers (yay) and 18 unfollows (boo). But looking at the accounts that unfollowed me, 16 are “temporarily restricted” for unusual activity, and one account is fully suspended. The one possibly real person has hidden their profile.

It’s a lesson on how numbers alone don’t tell the full story, which, on X, looks like mostly spam accounts following. Of the 1200 or so accounts I follow on X, more than 300 have been inactive for at least 6 months, and an additional 100 or so have been inactive for at least the past 2 months. Many of the active accounts I follow just share links to their latest video or blog post. It feels like my corner of X is dying. And it doesn’t help that X’s owner is actively spreading misinformation.

I’ve been posting on Threads (me or Fediverse me @peggykolm@threads.net) and mostly lurking on Bluesky and Mastodon (using the Open Vibe app).

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YouTube Updates Monetization Appeal Process

YouTube will now send out some monetization suspension notices seven days before they go into effect. If the creator submits an appeal within 7 days, monetization will not be disabled while the appeal is under review.

Previously creators could only appeal after monetization was disabled. That meant lost revenue even when appeals were successful.

Note that this new process is not available for all monetization suspensions. YouTube Partners can find more information on the Earn tab in YouTube Studio.

Learn more: YouTube Partner Program scheduled suspensions improve the appeal process

Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates

In a new Shorts series from the YouTube Creator Liaison, you can learn how YouTube algorithm looks at viewer satisfaction.

YouTube is cracking down on potentially unsafe browser extensions. This is meant to protect users from account hijacking and data theft. If YouTube isn’t working correctly for you, try temporarily disabling all extensions.

There’s a stereotype that people just passively watch YouTube videos, and while that’s true for at least some people some of the time, YouTube also drives people to do things. Dan Frommer in The New Consumer (YouTube is the actual future of television) shares some interesting stats, including people who say that because of a YouTube video they’ve tried a new recipe (51%), learned something interesting enough to tell someone about (41%), repaired or assembled something (35%), visited a new place in their home city (18%) and more. It’s also worth reading the article for the surveys on what people are watching.

Vimeo introduced AI-powered translated video captions and audio. The generated audio uses a clone of the speaker’s voice. This is available for Vimeo Enterprise customers in supported locations (not Texas or Illinois). Learn more.

Web Publishers and Search

WordPress released version 6.6 “Dorsey”. New features include quick previews for pages, rollbacks for auto-updated plugins, customize and override elements in synced blocks, styles for groups of blocks, and more. See all the updates.

WordPress has redesigned and updated their Learn WordPress site for users and developers. Check it out at learn.wordpress.org.

TechCrunch reports that PerplexityAI will soon start sharing advertising revenue with some publishers when their AI chatbot uses their source material in an answer. Perplexity’s Publishing Partners Program includes deals with a number of major news media sites, as well as Automattic, the parent company of WordPress. Publishers at WordPress.com will be able to get a “piece of the pie”, although details of how it will work are not yet available. Perplexity has made it clear that they don’t expect to be sending much traffic to cited websites, so this may be the only bit of compensation available.

DocPop explains the Fediverse for WordPress users (YouTube video). To celebrate (or maybe promote) this, WordPress is offering 25% off hosting plans.

Photos and Image Design

Google Photos AI-powered editing tools are now available to everyone for free. That includes Magic Editor, Magic Eraser, Photo Unblur and Portrait Light. Availability may vary by device. Learn more.

Social Media

Threads now has 200 million monthly active users. That’s less than X or Pinterest, but usage seems to be growing.

Threads is adding a topic label to some posts. You can click the label to see more posts on the same topic. The topic labels are related to recent trending topics.

Buffer just added support for posting to Bluesky. Buffer is a social media posting platform that lets you draft and schedule posts to multiple sites. In addition to Bluesky they support X, Threads, Mastodon, LinkedIn.

The CEO of Reddit, Steve Huffman, wants Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity to pay to access the site’s data. Reddit already has deals with Google and OpenAI. He claims Microsoft has been using Reddit data for AI training, but the block means recent Reddit posts won’t appear in the Bing search results. The comments come after Reddit started blocking Microsoft’s Bing crawler (and others) in its robots.txt file. No mention of all the Redditors generating the valuable content. The Verge has the story.

LinkedIn now offers Page verification for businesses and organizations. Initially this will be limited to selected company pages.

Communication and Collaboration

Google Chat now shows the threads you are following on the Home tab.

If you have access to Google Gemini in Google Drive, you can now use it to interact with PDF files, including summarizing, creating new content (like a study guide), asking questions or bringing in more information. Personal Google Accounts must have a Google One Premium with Gemini subscription or Google Workspace Labs to access this feature.

You can use Google Lens or Google Circle to Search (Android only) to learn more about any image, including those sent in Messages. The “About this image” information includes details on how the image appeared on other sites, metadata, and a digital watermark (if it includes Google’s Deep Mind SynthID watermark).

And Google Lens will soon be available in the Chrome Browser for easy image searches.

In Microsoft Teams video meetings there are several updates, including webinar hosts controlling what viewers see and in meetings, a customizable meeting gallery.

Bending Spoons has acquired WeTransfer, a file transfer service. Bending Spoons has been scooping up a number of companies over the past couple of years, including Filmora, Meetup, and StreamYard.

AI Updates and News

Meta is reportedly shutting down its celebrity inspired AI chatbots, which were launched in September 2023. But if you are a chatbot fan, don’t despair, Meta just launched AI Studio (no coding required!), where you can design your own chatbot. If you are a creator you can use AI Studio to set up a chatbot that is an “extension of yourself” to answer frequently asked questions, share information, and the option to set certain topics as off limits. While AI-generated replies are labeled, I’m still not keen on this, as screenshots still make it seem as if the messages are in the creator’s “voice” and seem to be coming from the creators themselves.

Google shared steps it is taking to deal with sexually explicit deepfake images in the Search results. That includes making it easier to request content removal, and removing any duplicate images from other sites. They are also demoting some sites in the search results: “Generally, if a site has a lot of pages that we've removed from Search under our policies, that's a pretty strong signal that it's not a high-quality site, and we should factor that into how we rank other pages from that site. So we’re demoting sites that have received a high volume of removals for fake explicit imagery.”

Google ran an ad for Gemini during the Olympics and general consensus is that it missed the mark. It shows a little girl working hard and dreaming of being a star athlete (cute!), and then her dad having Gemini “help” her write a fan letter to her hero. A couple of takes I agree with Kyle Orland @ Ars Technica: Outsourcing emotion: The horror of Google’s “Dear Sydney” AI ad and Linda Holmes @ NPR: The antithesis of the Olympics: Using AI to write a fan letter.

404 Media reports Websites are Blocking the Wrong AI Scrapers (Because AI Companies Keep Making New Ones). Malice or incompetence?

Meta’s new Segment Anything Model (SAM 2) can identify and segment individual moving objects in video. This could be useful for video editing and for “mixed reality” platforms.

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