Creator Weekly: YouTube Top Fan Leaderboards, Substack Shareable Clips, AdSense Fills Ad Spaces

With the US Independence Day holiday, this week’s creator news roundup is a bit more compact than usual. There are updates for video creators, live streamers, bloggers and other web publishers, and social media.

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🗓 Ten Years Ago This Week: Apple Music and Podcasts

To celebrate 10 years of Creator Weekly, I’m sharing highlights from 2015.
In 2015 Apple Music launched and Podcasts (Apple-style) turned 10.

Ten years later they are losing ground to Spotify and YouTube. Does that matter? Or should Apple create an everything app with both streaming music and podcasts?

Read all about it.

🔴 Creator Weekly Live: Sunday, 10:30AM Pacific time (6:30PM UTC).

Join me live or watch the recording.

✅ Take this week’s quiz

What do you know about YouTube auto-dubbing languages? Take this week’s quiz.
Bonus quiz: Test your knowledge of June YouTube updates.

New Tips and Tutorials

This week I joined Michael Daniels’ Tinkering With Tech to talk about passkeys and account security. Watch our discussion.

Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates

YouTube is making a minor change to YouTube Partner Program policy to “better identify mass-produced and repetitious content and better reflect what “inauthentic content looks like today.” YouTube notes “This type of content has already been ineligible for monetization for years” and is content “viewers often consider spam.” There have been some tech press headlines suggesting this is a major update that will remove monetization from reaction channels and other such content, but that does not seem to be the case. This goes into effect on July 15.

YouTube Analytics will now segment your audience by watch behavior, so you can compare new viewers, casual viewers (watching occasionally over 1-5 months in the past year) and regular viewers (consistently watching for 6+ months). This is rolling out over the next few weeks. YouTube notes that “some channels may see a lower percentage of regular viewers than they might expect” because it’s a “high bar to reach”. Learn more.

YouTube is launching the “Most Relevant” comment filter to all channels. You can manually switch the order to Newest if you want to see comments in chronological order.

YouTube is launching a Leaderboard for “Top Fans” in live stream chat to all creators.Viewers can earn points while you stream by adding a live chat (free) or paying for Super Chat, Super Stickers or gifts. There is a cap to the number of points that can be accumulated. The top 3 fans get a special badge in live chat for that stream. You can turn off your own participation at YouTube > Settings > Privacy. There isn’t any way for streamers to disable this. Learn more.

Sherwood: AI-created videos are quietly taking over YouTube

Media Matters: Racist AI-generated videos are the newest slop garnering millions of views on TikTok

Substack is pushing live streaming with two new features:

You can invite guests by email/SMS, and a guest doesn’t need a Substack account.
After the stream ends, short shareable clips “likely to resonate with your audience” are automatically generated and posted to Notes. The top 2 clips will be posted to a linked YouTube channel as Shorts.

If you invite guests to join your StreamYard livestreams, you can now manage them from the new People tab. That lists everyone in the studio (on stage, backstage, or greenroom), and lets you manage guest settings and audio levels. They’ve also updated the private chat between hosts and guests.

StreamYard redesigned the interface for adding backgrounds, overlays and videos making it cleaner and easier to manage. Plus they added a new collection of free backgrounds, overlays and videos for streamers to use.

Restream now lets you record without going live, with up to 9 guests. This does require a paid plan, which determines how long you can record. The Standard plan lets you record up to 6 hours, Professional plan up to 10 hours and Business plan up to 20 hours. There is no limit to the number of recordings you make. Learn more.

Web Publishers and Search

AdSense is exploring options for better using unfilled display ad spaces, such as adding related topics buttons to the empty space that lead to search plus ad pages. This is on by default, but AdSense publishers can opt out: AdSense > Brand Safety > Content > Blocking Controls > Manage Ad Serving > turn off "Fill empty in-page ads"

Google Search Console launched a new Insights report, which is rolling out over the “coming weeks”. It has:

An overview of Search clicks and impressions (and shows trending up or down)
A list of pages on your site with the most clicks
Top search queries leading to your site
It will still celebrate milestones, like reaching a new record (for your site) search clicks in the past 28 days.

Google Search is rolling out the June core update, which will take about 3 weeks to roll out completely. Google says: “In general, most sites don't need to worry about core updates and may not even realize one has happened.”

Last October, Google Search launched the Recipe Quick View experiment, which let people preview recipes before clicking through to the site. That experiment has ended, and food writers are relieved. Content creators in the experiment were compensated, but that compensation didn’t make up for lost ad revenue from decreased site visits. This seems like a win for creators.

Cloudflare now blocks AI crawlers by default. That’s significant, as Cloudflare’s services are used by roughly 20% of sites. They have launched a “pay per crawl” feature (in beta) that allows publishers to charge a fee for the AI bots to access their site.

Social Media

Threads launched private direct messages. You can be DM’d by people you follow on Threads or mutual follows from Instagram. There isn’t any way to turn them off but there should be more controls in the future. Group messages are also in the future.

Threads is highlighting - in bright yellow - trending topics. Meta says “the Threads highlighter elevates and emphasizes unique perspectives that lead to thoughtful conversations.” They will “soon” be highlighting other places (they haven’t said where, or how this is meant to spark conversations).

Facebook is rolling out (or testing) a copyright checking tool for Reels. If copyrighted content is found, “your reel will be held for 1 hour to allow you to correct any issues before your reel is shown to others.”

Bluesky fixed an issue with their verification application form, and reminds people that there is only one official form, and they never communicate with users via DM.

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