Creator Weekly: YouTube Advanced Analytics, Creative Commons Signals, Ad Manager Offerwalls

There’s no summer holidays in tech, at least not this week. There are multiple updates for YouTube, plus new features for Twitch, Threads, Facebook, Canva, Google Search, Google Ads Manager, Google Photos, and more.

I suspect it has to do with getting features out before June 30th, the end of Q2 and the start of the July 4th holiday week in the US.

Read on for this week’s details.

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🗓 Ten Years Ago This Week: Reddit in turmoil

To celebrate 10 years of Creator Weekly, I’m sharing highlights from 2015.

In 2015, policy changes and the firing of a popular staff member upset Reddit users. A few weeks later, interim CEO Ellen Pao stepped down, to be replaced by the former and current CEO Steve Huffman.

This seems to have been partially due to a focus on growth and commercialization. Ten years later, Reddit is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange, and is still pissing off its power users.

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✅ Take this week’s quiz

What do you know about the first YouTube video to reach 100 million views? Take this week’s quiz.

New Tips and Tutorials

If you are new to YouTube or just want a refresher, last week I presented a tour of the basic YouTube Settings and settings in YouTube Studio. Check it out.

To Do & Try

Google Earth turns 20 this week. To celebrate you can view cities changing over the past 20 years and take a quiz to guess city skylines.

YouTube Advanced Analytics Improvements

YouTube is improving the advanced analytics interface in YouTube Studio on desktop. Advanced analytics lets you take a deep dive into your YouTube channel’s stats, but it can be difficult to learn to use, and many settings are buried in menus.

New features include:

Sidebar with controls
Save reports you frequently run
Menu of popular reports
Easy to set up comparisons

It will be available in the next few weeks. Watch for a demo and details.

Updated AI Tools on YouTube

There are new features and expanded access to YouTube’s AI-powered dubbing, inspiration, search and exploration.

YouTube autodubbing is expanding beyond the YouTube Partner Program to 80 million more channels that have advanced features enabled. It's also expanding from nine languages to 20 languages. This can be managed in YouTube Studio > Settings > Channel > Advanced Settings. Get all the details from Creator Insider.

YouTube search is getting an AI-powered search results carousel highlighting clips from videos and topic descriptions by creators. It may appear for searches related to shopping, travel and things to do in a specific place. It's available to US Premium subscribers

The Inspiration tab in YouTube Studio is coming to the EU, UK and Switzerland (making it available in “all global markets”). It lets you brainstorm hooks, thumbnails and titles and can even generate an outline. Go to YouTube Studio > Content > Inspiration to try it out.

Dream Screen lets you generate 6 second video clips in the YouTube Shorts editor. It is available in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and now is coming to the UK.

YouTube's conversational AI tool lets you ask questions about videos ("get more info, recommendations, and even quiz yourself on key concepts in academic videos.") Just to give a sense as to how long it takes YouTube to develop these features, this launched as an experimental feature for Premium subscribers in November 2023. Only now is it expanding to some non-Premium subscribers in the US.

Creative Commons Signals

If you share your creative work online, you are probably familiar with the Creative Commons licenses, that let you specify how your works can be used. The new Creative Commons Signals takes that a step further, allowing "dataset holders to signal their preferences for how their content can be reused by machines based on a set of limited but meaningful options shaped in the public interest."

They are asking for feedback before launch in November and are holding a series of Town Hall meetings in July and August.

Why is there a need for a new license type? Creative Commons says:

“As artificial intelligence (AI) transforms how knowledge is created, shared, and reused, we are at a fork in the road that will define the future of access to knowledge and shared creativity. One path leads to data extraction and the erosion of openness; the other leads to a walled-off internet guarded by paywalls. CC signals offer another way, grounded in the nuanced values of the commons expressed by the collective.”

I like this idea, but I’m not sure if current AI companies will actually follow any license requirements. And most small publishers can’t afford to fight that.

Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates

YouTube is increasing the minimum age to live stream to 16. Live streams featuring 13-15 year olds must have an adult visibly present. This change goes into effect July 22.

YouTube is launching a new series, YouTube in Session, that brings policymakers to chat in front of a live audience.

If you have access to Flow, Google’s AI filmmaking platform, Google published a brief overview of how to get started.

Twitch now allows Partners to apply to appear in the Front Page Carousel. There is a FAQ with more details. If you apply, don’t get your hopes up - there are only 8 slots.

Joshua Benton, at the Nieman Lab, tested the new Sophiana app. The app was developed with British journalist Sopha Smith Geller to help “word people” like journalists, academics and authors turn written articles into short vertical videos. You tell it a bit about yourself and your purpose, then it uses OpenAI’s GPT-4o to help select a hook and create a short editable script (Benton’s 1100 word article was condensed to 150 words). The secret sauce is that it uses Smith Geller’s expertise to craft the AI prompts. It has a built-in camera and teleprompter to make it easy to record your video. It’s currently available for iOS, and creating an Android version is apparently a priority.

The updates to Instagram’s Edits video editing app keep rolling in. Now you can animate the position, rotation and scale of clips using keyframes (like zooming in on a person in the clip), updated Ideas tab, sticky notes on audio (for notes about why you want to use it later), and Voice Enhance to remove background noise in your voiceovers.

TikTok Community Fest 2025 celebrates live streamers on the platform, and is starting by highlighting TikTok LIVE creators.

Canva has a new “Create a Video Clip” feature powered by Google’s Veo 3 text-to-video (with audio) model. It is limited to paid plans, and those only include 5 video generations per month.

Lilly’s Tech Tips on YouTube has a great series of videos on how to use Canva to make documentary-grade animations. There are really useful tips, even if you don’t want to create a full-length Vox-style documentary.

Web Publishers and Search

There is a new experiment in Google Labs that lets you select “Preferred Sources” for Top Stories in the Google Search results. You can select blogs, news sites and other sources. Once it’s enabled, if you see the Top Stories section in your search results, you can click the Cards Star icon to add your sources. You will then see content from those sources more often. This is currently available in the US and India. Opt in to try Preferred Sources now. Learn more.

If you enable Google Search personalization, you will see more new content in Top Stories and your recent searches will show if there is updated information. You are also more likely to see sites you return to often in the search results.

If you are a publisher, and monetize with Google Ad Manager, you can use the new Offerwall ad format. Google has been testing this 1,000 publishers, and it is now generally available. This puts up an interstitial that requires readers to watch an ad, fill out a survey, micropayment, sign up for a newsletter or take other action to access your content. The publisher can choose which options to offer. Google says "it’s especially beneficial to smaller businesses that might not have the resources or infrastructure to set up diverse revenue streams".

If you use AdSense for Search some features will be designated “Restricted Access Features” (RAFs), with access determined on account status. These include serving multiple units on one page or more than 5 suggested search terms, and custom styling like height, width, font and icon. RAFs go into effect August 25th. If you don’t have any policy violations, you should be fine.

Ana Marie Cox thinks Substack may be a collapsing platform. Do the numbers make sense?

Photos

Google Photos can now edit High Dynamic Range (HDR) photos. If you use Photo Unblur, Magic Eraser or Portrait Light, HDR photos won’t lose crucial metadata and will keep their full dynamic range. The new Ultra HDR tool lets you change the brightness of HDR photos, and the original HDR tool has been renamed “Tone”, to better reflect the editing tool’s function. And you can also upgrade regular photos (SDR) to HDR. Learn more about HDR editing in Photos. Learn about the HDR photo editing technology from Google Research.

Ask Photos, the experimental AI chatbot in Google Photos, is getting more classic search features. The problem with Ask Photos is that it does pretty well with queries like “photos that would make nice phone backgrounds”, but terrible if you just wanted to do a basic search of your photo library (which is what I want to do 99% of the time). So they are adding “the best of Photos’ classic search features” and giving you results faster. It’s also rolling out to more US users.

Social Media

The Bluesky app now checks links in direct messages, either showing a warning or blocking the link if it leads to a malicious site. Bluesky is not reading your DMs, instead this is working automatically in the background.

Threads now lets you hide spoiler text and media (photos, videos, GIFs) in your posts. It’s probably obvious that this isn’t limited to actual spoilers - maybe you can build intrigue by hiding images in your posts. Viewers can click to see the hidden content.

In Threads you can now create custom word filters to prevent seeing that content in your feed.These are now Threads specific, instead of also applying to Instagram.

Threads is making it easier to switch between your Feeds in the mobile app.

Would you give Facebook ongoing access to your phone’s camera roll? Facebook is asking some users to opt in to allow cloud processing of unshared photos on your phone (“on an ongoing basis”) to create AI-generated story ideas. It isn’t clear if they use your private photos for AI training if you opt in. Seems like not a good idea.

Facebook Group admins are reporting mass bans, with seemingly innocuous Groups taken down. Meta says they are fixing the problem.

Social Media Today reports that LinkedIn is rolling out the option to add a video in the header image slot of articles. The videos will be playable in the main feed and may attract new readers.

Communication and Collaboration

If you use Google Chat and Github there are improvements to the GitHub app for Google Chat that let you set more types of notifications and create scheduled reminders.

If you have access to Gemini in Google Chat, you can now get summaries of more types of shared files. In addition to Google Docs, Slides and Sheets, it can now summarize PDFs, Microsoft Office files (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), CSV, txt and zip files.

If you have access to Gemini in Google Sheets you can now use the AI function to input a prompt and date range to generate text, categorize data and summarize information. Follow the link for sample prompts.

More AI Updates and Tips

Adobe Firefly now has a sound effects generator. You can type the description or use your voice to act it out (which you can use to get the timing right).

PetaPixel reports that Adobe is finally tracking generative AI usage credits. If you use all your credits, you may not be able to use Firefly or other tools. The number of credits you have depends on your plan and when you started your subscription. See the linked article for details.

Firefox is expanding AI-powered features, including automatic alt text generation for images, translation, and tab group suggestions. Mozilla says your privacy is protected because AI models are run on your device, so your data doesn’t leave your device.

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