Creator Weekly: YouTube Hype expansion, YouTube Create templates, Google Vids for all

It’s Labor Day weekend, the unofficial end of summer. Here in the Bay Area we’ve only just started getting hot days, so I feel a bit off kilter. Or maybe it’s the times we’re in.

This week there are updates for video creators on YouTube, Google Vids, Google Photos, StreamYard, and Twitch; web publishers should know about the latest updates to Google Search and Typepad, and there’s updates on social media for Threads, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and more.

📨 Subscribe to get Creator Weekly by email.

🗓 Ten Years Ago This Week: YouTube Gaming is a Win for All Live Streamers

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

In August 2015 YouTube Gaming launched with a new stand-alone app and dedicated hub on the web with both live and recorded gaming content.

Live streaming was the focus, not only to compete with Twitch (which was acquired by Amazon in late 2014), but to develop YouTube as a live streaming platform. This launch corresponded with new live streaming features that benefited all YouTubers, not just gamers.

Learn more about what happened next.

🔴 Creator Weekly Live

Join Creator Weekly Live on 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 Hype? Take this week’s quiz.

To Do & Try

Google Vids is now available for free for personal accounts (without AI features). Give it a try at vids.google.com.

Even if you don’t care about football, you might want to check out the NFL game on September 5th on YouTube to watch one of the four creators running a “Watch With” stream. How to use the “Watch With” feature on your Smart TV (or go directly to the Creator’s channel). U.S. only.

YouTube Hype Expansion

YouTube Hype is now available in 39 countries, including US, UK, EU countries, Japan, Korea, Indonesia and India. Learn more.

Viewers can Hype long-form video from the past week from monetized channels with 500-500k subs
Bonus points for smaller channels
Viewers can Hype for free 3 times per week
Most hyped videos appear on a leaderboard and get a badge

More features will be coming this fall, including category leaderboards, posts featuring the video you just hyped, which can allow established channels to “introduce emerging talent.”

Google Vids for Everyone

The Google Vids video editor Workspace app is now available to everyone, free of charge. There’s a catch, of course. The free version doesn’t include Gemini-powered features.

To get you started, there is now a “Vids on Vids” instructional series. Yes, they use the new AI Avatars (read on).

Two features coming soon:

The ability to create Vids in portrait and square formats, in addition to landscape. This is a game changer! You will be able to make your Shorts, Reels and TikToks.
Backgrounds, filters, effects and noise reduction, just like you have in Google Meet meetings.

There are also three new AI-powered Vids features. Note that they all require either a Google Workspace account, or a Google AI Pro or Ultra subscription. (Some features are available with Workspace Labs for free)

Google Vids can now generate a transcript from your video recording and “identify and trim filler words and awkward pauses” with a single click. (Use with caution, because not all silences or “ums” are actually filler).

Google Vids has added the option to use a preset AI Avatar to read your script.

You can generate up to 20 AI Avatar videos per week.
Avatar videos are up to 30 seconds long.

Google Vids can convert still images to video with sound. Upload your image, then add a prompt to describe the video. Learn more.

Not available in the European Economic Area, Switzerland or UK.
8 seconds long.
24fps frame rate
720p resolution
16:9 landscape orientation
Up to 10 videos per day.

Google Gemini Nano Banana Levels up Image Editing

Google Gemini can now easily edit your photos with Google’s “best image model”, Nano Banana. (Also be sure to see Google’s tips for effective prompting).

Upload an image of a person or pet and prompt Gemini to change the location or costume.
Example prompt with headshot: "Reimagine this person as a matador in a bullfighting ring:
Blend multiple photos together.
Example prompt with photo of woman and photo with dog: “Create an image where the woman in the photo is cuddling the dog on a basketball court.”
Multiturn editing lets you edit the images generated by Gemini, altering only specific parts of the image.
Example: Start with a photo of an empty room, and ask Gemini to add furniture piece by piece.
Add the style from one image to an object in another image.
Example prompt:: "Reimagine these rainboots (in image), the shape and style inspired by the flower image.”
AI-edited images have both a visible watermark and an invisible SynthID watermark.

Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates

The YouTube Create video editing app now has templates to get you started. Create is available for Android phones that have at least 4G RAM (I also use it on my Pixel tablet). It is available in 21 countries. More information from Creator Insider.

YouTube is “working on an opt-out” for their experiment in deblurring and denoising Shorts. If you read the comments on that X link, many creators are not-surprisingly suggesting it should have been opt-in from the start.

YouTube has updated the billing system for purchasing Memberships on iOS devices. This will roll out to all creators with channel Memberships on September 16. This presumably related to a recent court decision that requires Apple to allow purchases outside the App Store. (Apple is still fighting this)

YouTube is experimenting with Gift Goals. Gifts powered by Jewels are available for vertical live streams from monetized channels. Goals let the creator set a target gift amount and time frame to encourage Gifts being given (similar to Super Chat goals).

Google Photos has a new feature that automatically identifies “Key Moments” in your videos and lets you create shareable short clips. This is rolling out to Android users in September, and iOS support is “coming soon”.

You can now generate NotebookLM Video Overviews in 80 languages. See a demo of Video Overview creation and use cases.

While TikTok will likely get another enforcement reprieve in the US while some sort of deal for US ownership is still being negotiated (Is that happening?), China has made clear that the TikTok algorithm won’t be part of the deal.

Twitch added a new badge to identify bots that a streamer has added to the chat.

StreamYard now includes sound effects. It has 15 built-in royalty-free options (drum roll, laugh track, gong, and so forth), and you can upload your own audio files too.

Web Publishers and Search

Google VP, Product, Google Search Robby Stein says they are working on updates that may encourage AI Mode users to actually click the links.

Embedded link carousels in AI Mode responses, because people are more likely to click links “when they have more context on what they’re clicking and where they want to dig deeper.”
They are making “model updates” to improve inline links. “We are training the model to understand where and when people are most likely to want to click out…”
They are expanding the Search Labs Web Guide experiment, which creates an “AI-organized” search results page.

The Google Search August 2025 Spam Update is rolling out. Google says this is a “normal spam update, and it will roll out for all languages and locations”. No word yet if this is significantly affecting the search results.

Danny Sullivan spoke at Word Camp US (the WordPress summit) about “How (and why!) Google Search keeps evolving. Sullivan was the Google Search Liaison until this month (he is now a Director within Google Search). Do you have to optimize your site for Google AI search results? “... what I'm trying to say is don't panic. What you've been doing for search engines generally and you may have thought of as SEO is still perfectly fine and is still the things that you should be doing. And especially because it's the next part, good SEO is really having good content for people.” Watch his presentation.

The Typepad blogging platform is shutting down. If you have content there, you have until September 30 to download it. WordPress has a Typepad importer if you want to move your content. Typepad originally launched in 2003, using Six Apart’s Moveable Type platform. It stopped taking new signups in 2020.

Perplexity launched Comet Plus, what they call “a business model for the AI age”. It seems to be revenue sharing with Publishers. Users pay a monthly fee and Perplexity “allocates revenue to our partners based on three types of internet traffic: human visits, search citations, and agent actions.” Interested Publishers can email to join the program.

Social Media

On the age verification front: It’s going to end up only big platforms can afford to comply with Mississippi’s age verification requirements. More small social sites are blocking Mississippi users, including Dreamwidth and Groups.io. Meanwhile Mastodon says they don’t have the means to verify ages and store that information securely (and can’t control what various servers using Mastodon software do).

Meta released their second quarter 2025 transparency report for enforcement actions. Social Media Today notes that Meta’s claim that they’ve “cut enforcement mistakes in the U.S. by more than 75%” is a bit misleading, because enforcement is down overall. That’s at least in part to policy changes implemented in January.

Threads is rolling out (or at least testing) a text attachment feature for longer posts. It’s not clear to me what the attraction for creators would be. People have to click to read the full text (although without leaving the platform), and this competes with the poster’s own blog or website. Also not great: it breaks Fediverse sharing.

Instagram Messages now has filters that let Creators better manage their messages. Options included Verified, Followers, Story Replies, Unanswered and Unread.

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri says that caption length doesn’t matter. Long captions don’t hurt, but they don’t help either.

Is there any point to sharing links on Facebook? In their latest “Widely Viewed Content” report, Meta notes “97.8% of the views in the US during Q2 2025 did not include a link to a source outside of Facebook. For the 2.2% of views in posts that did include a link, they typically came from a Page the person followed (this includes posts which may also have had photos and videos, in addition to links).”

Creators, organizations and businesses can create a Reddit Pro account to track your mentions, immediately answer questions and measure impact of your posts and comments. Reddit Pro for iOS is now available, and all Pro users can get more account insights.

A New Social launched Bounce Beta. In the current version, it uses Bridgy Fed to migrate users from Bluesky to Mastodon or Pixelfed. It’s early days, but seems like an interesting step towards allowing people to have a single social media profile that connects across platforms.

Spotify has added in-app Messages that let you share content with “friends and family”. This is limited to “people you know and have previously shared Spotify content with”.

Communication and Collaboration

You can now use Gemini in the side panel of Google Drive to ask questions or give summaries about images. Drive could already do this with PDFs, files, folders and videos. This is available for Google Workspace users.

Gemini in Google Sheets can now automatically format your data as a table and create a table name. It also can use dynamic table references that are updated as you add or remove rows from the table. Requires Google Workspace or a Gemini subscription.

More AI News & Updates

The New Yorker: The A.I.-Profits Drought and the Lessons of History

Ars Technica: Authors celebrate “historic” settlement coming soon in Anthropic class action. The Judge in the case ruled that while using copyrighted content for AI training was fair use, downloading and building a “research library” of pirated books was not.

If you use Anthropic’s Claude AI, you might want to join the waitlist for the new Claude Chrome extension. That lets users “instruct Claude to take actions on their behalf within the browser.” See the link for more information about how they are building safeguards into the extension.

Peggy K's Creator News

Search This Blog