Creator Weekly: YouTube Collabs and Title Testing, Beehiiv-Discord Integration, Creators in Google Discover

This week’s updates are (almost) all about YouTube, as dozens of new and coming features were announced at this week’s Made on YouTube event. There’s also updates from Meta VR, Beehiiv, TikTok, Medium and more.

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🗓 Ten Years Ago This Week: Apple Ad Blockers

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

Ten years ago, iOS9 launched with a new feature: the ability to install ad blocking apps. Publishers were worried that this could significantly hurt their revenue.

Ten years later, publisher revenue from ads is down, but it’s not all Apple’s fault. Learn more.

🔴 Creator Weekly Live

Join Creator Weekly Live on Sunday, 10:30AM Pacific time (6:30PM UTC) or watch the recording.

✅ Take this week’s quiz

What do you know about YouTube’s brainstorming tools? Take this week’s quiz.

Made on YouTube: Updates for Shorts, Live, Studio, Podcasts and More

Big updates at this week’s Made On YouTube event! This is going to be a brief recap and it includes some features that won’t be available until next year. I’ll talk more about the soon to be available features in this week’s live stream and you can get details about the announced features here.

AI-powered creative tools in the Shorts editor

New Veo-powered Shorts creation tools:

Veo 3 in Shorts is rolling out to Shorts creation tools in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and UK. Watch a demo.
Animate a photo by applying motion from another video (like a dance). Watch a demo.
Stylize your video (turn it into origami or pop art)
Add an object, prop or effect with a text prompt.
YouTube is experimenting with these over the coming months.

Edit with AI is a new feature coming to the Shorts and YouTube Create app in “select markets” (including the US and India) in the coming weeks. It turns raw camera footage into a “compelling first draft” adding music, transitions and voiceover (in English or Hindi). Watch a demo.

The Speech to Song remixing tool in the YouTube Shorts editor turns dialog into songs using the Lyria 2 music AI model. This will roll out to US creators in the coming weeks. Watch a demo.

Testing, Collaboration, and Studio Features

There are cool new features coming to YouTube Studio.

Title A/B testing: Test and compare up to three title-thumnail combinations per video. This will be available to creators globally before the end of the year. Learn more.
Collaborations: Add up to 5 collaborators per video. This shows the video to all the collabs’ audiences, including a subscribe button for all collaborator channels. This will be available in the upload flow for long-form videos and Shorts, and viewers will be able to see the collabs on desktop, mobile and TV. Revenue, views and watch time are only attributed to the channel that posts the video, but the host can choose to share analytics with collaborators. You can showcase your collabs by adding a Collaboration shelf to your channel Home tab. This is gradually rolling out, and will be available to all creators globally in the next couple of weeks. Learn more.
Auto-dubbing with lip sync: This matches the speaker’s lips with the dubbed speech. This will be supported in 20 languages. This is currently in a limited test. Watch the demo.
Ask Studio: An AI chatbot that “provides quick insights and ideas to help you understand your analytics, community and get new inspiration.” This will be available to Creators in the US in the coming weeks.
Likeness detection for all creators in the YouTube Partner Program. “This technology lets you easily detect, manage, and request the removal of unauthorized videos made with your facial likeness.” This is rolling out in the coming months.
Updated Inspiration Tab: 9 ideas for every prompt and an explanation WHY they would work. “Pulling from audience behavior, we’ll provide insights to help you decide whether to invest in an idea”. This will be available to Creators globally later this year.

Live Streaming Features

New YouTube tools for live streamers.

Practice before going live. Available later this year.
Playables (75+ casual games) on Live. This will roll out for testing before expanding to more Creators later this year.
Stream horizontal + vertical simultaneously, with viewers joining one shared chat. This will expand to more creators in the coming months.
React live on mobile to other live streams. YouTube will be testing this early next year.
AI-powered highlight clips as ready-to-share Shorts. This will be available for all mobile creators in the next few weeks.
Side-by-side ads that don’t interrupt the stream on desktop and TV. They will expand to mobile devices later this year.
Transition from public to a members-only stream, giving non-members a bit of a teaser. This is rolling out now and will be available to all channels with memberships in the coming weeks.

New tools for Podcasters

Create video clips and Shorts from video podcasts with AI suggestions. Coming to US Podcasters in the coming months. More information.
Turn audio into video, for audio-first podcasters. Of course AI powered. Coming to select podcasters early next year. More information.

Monetization Updates

More tools for creators to work with Brands and sell things with YouTube Shopping.

Dynamically insert brand segments: these can be swapped in and out and removed when the brand deal is complete. This will start testing early next year.
Creator Hub: This will use AI to proactively suggest creators to brands.
Auto timestamps: product tags appear when you are talking about the product.
Auto tagging: AI-powered tools that find and tag eligible products mentioned in videos based on images, voiceover and added details.
Link to a brand on Shorts. YouTube will start testing later this year.

New tools for Artists in YouTube Music

New ways to engage with fans:

New release countdown and pre-saves. Available in the coming weeks.
Just-for-fans (top viewers) exclusive video clips with special messages. Available early next year.
Exclusive merch for top viewers. This is in testing.

New Meta Glasses

This week was Meta Connect, where Meta showcased their latest updates for glasses and VR. The Metaverse is still a thing, with Meta Horizon Studio getting new generative AI tools for creating 3D avatars, visuals and audio.

Some creator highlights include:

Meta notes that many Meta Horizon visitors are using it to access 2D panel window apps (like a browser window you access with a headset). Discord will launch a window app for Quest next year.

The Ray-Ban Meta (Gen 2) has enhanced battery life (up to 8 hours), plus 3K Ultra HD video capture. It can capture ultrawide HDR up to 60 frames per second. Soon they will also have hyperlapse and slow motion options.

Meta’s Orion are AR (augmented reality) glasses (“the most advanced AR glasses ever made”). It’s currently just a prototype, but they do intend to sell them. The idea is that they are lightweight, easity to wear, and show you virtual content overlaid on the real world. Plus “they seamlessly integrate contextgual AI that can sense and understand the world around you in order to anticipate and proactively address your needs.” It does require carrying a “puck” in your pocket for additional processing power. To me, this is a much more compelling form factor than a headset, even if the headset has passthrough video.

And looking forward, they are previewing “AI Glasses” and offering Developer tools, suggesting it might be the next big thing for live streaming: “Major streaming services like Twitch will enable creators to livestream straight from their glasses — creators could even reach multiple platforms simultaneously via streaming software partners like Logitech’s Streamlabs.” (It will be interesting to see if this actually catches on)

In other AR news, Snap announced the updated Snap OS for the Snap Spectacles. It has a new interface that lets you add widgets, bookmarks and WebXR support.

Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates

YouTube has added sticker polls to Live Streams on mobile (in addition to the Q&A stickers). Creators can customize the text and color, and resize and position the sticker. Poll stickers remain on live streams for up to 24 hours, but streamers can end it earlier. This will be available globally in the coming weeks for vertical live streams. Learn more from Creator Insider.

Some YouTube creators have noted recent view drops and speculated it's related to Restricted Mode. YouTube says it's not that. Restricted mode is off by default, its usage is small (mostly schools and libraries) and it’s not part of age-protection. YouTube states that they are absolutely not using AI to enable restricted mode for viewers.
But a drop in views could be related to:

Views leveling off after a big spike. This could be a return to “normal”.
Seasonal changes, especially kids going back to school this time of year.
Ad blockers and content blocking tools can “impact the accuracy of reporting”. If a lot of your viewers use such extensions, that can cause fluctuations.
Competition on-platform. Viewers are fickle.

It appears the issue with the view counts on some YouTube channels decreasing is actually due to a change in the Easy Privacy ad blocker list. Creator Jeff Geerling explains how decreasing viewcounts can hurt creators, in particular brands consider views when setting up sponsorships and it could hurt YouTube Premium revenue.

Twitch is celebrating SUBtember with new Hype Train Emotes.

StreamYard enhanced the in-Studio view of chat to highlight questions. Comments with a question have “subtle highlighting” and a questionmark icon.

StreamYard also added maximize/minimize buttons for elements “on Stage”.

Restream now lets you hide and show names per scene.

Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve 20.2 and Blackmagic Camera 9.8 public beta now supports Apple ProRes RAW format files.

In completely unsurprising news, there was another Executive Order to postpone enforcement of the US TikTok ban until December 16th. Supposedly there is a deal almost in place, with new US owners leasing Tiktok’s algorithm. The response from TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, just thanks President Xi Jinping and President Donald Trump for their efforts, which doesn’t sound like there is a done deal.

TikTok introduced a new “Additional Reward” for high quality videos in the Creator Rewards program. The reward is based on engagement.

The Edits by Instagram video editing app has a few new features: Save your sound effects to use again later, turn your main clips into overlays (and vice versa) and use Keyframes to control fade-in and fade-out opacity.

Web Publishers and Search

Google Discover is going beyond news articles, and will show more Creator content, including articles, YouTube Shorts, and social media (including X and Instagram) posts. If you see something you are interested in you can Follow that publisher or creator to see more of their content. Content must follow the Discover content policies. Learn more about customizing your Discover feed.

This week search engine optimizers (SEOs) noted that third-party Google Search rank trackers aren’t working correctly. This seems to be related to a change Google made that prevents seeing 100 search results per page. There is speculation that this change was to block AI tools that scrape the Google Search results. Several tools (Accuranker, Ahrefs, Semrush) have stopped showing the Top 100 search results for terms, and are only showing the Top 10 or 20 now. Some discussion has pointed out that fewer scrapers means that impressions in Search Console are less likely to be inflated, so maybe not a bad thing?. (Discussion on Reddit)

Medium announced a new writing app called TK. You can sign up for the waitlist. TK is used in journalism as a placeholder (meaning “to come”), and it looks like the app will let you add a placeholder “TK” in text as you write then help you fill that in. Watch the announcement and the Semafor interview with Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine for hints about what it might be.

Beehiiv now lets you integrate your Discord server. You can offer Discord access as an exclusive perk to your free and/or paying subscribers and pair roles to your readers and subscription tiers.

Beehiiv has also added YouTube channel integration with your built-in website. Just drag the new YouTube block into your website editor, drop in your channel or playlist ID, and you’re set. Your new videos appear automatically on your site! Check out my landing page at newsletter.peggyktc.com.

If you are a merchant with a Google Store, there is a new store widget from Google you can add to your website.

Social Media

Bluesky updated their Community Guidelines, which were created with user input and feedback in mind. In particular they have added more specific language and details (where terms were vague), and a section on Protected Expression for journalism, education, advocacy and mental health content. Of course, lots of folks aren’t happy about the final version. The updated guidelines take effect October 15th.

Mastodon is now offering commercial server hosting, which can (optionally) include moderation by the Mastodon team.

If your X posts aren’t getting enough reach, you can now pay to boost them. This is only available to paying Premium subscribers, whose posts are already boosted, so it’s not clear how big the demand for this would be (beyond spammers and scammers).

Threads now allows people you don’t follow to DM you. You can change the setting back to only people you follow in your account settings.

Communication and Collaboration

If you use Google Calendar to schedule Meet meetings, Google has new privacy limitations. If you copy or duplicate a Calendar event, the Meet meeting will NOT be copied over automatically. The meeting ID for the duplicated event can be edited to copy the original event’s meeting code.

Now it’s easier to invite folks using Outlook or other platforms to a Meet meeting. If a Google Calendar user invites a user of a different calendar app to a meeting, the meeting link is added to the location field. And if a non-Calendar user sends an invite, Calendar can detect a Meet link in the description or location fields.

Ask Gemini is coming to Google Meet. The AI chatbot can summarize discussions, recap what someone said, identify key takeaways and help you catch up if you joined the meeting late (if Take Notes for Me is enabled). The answers are based on meeting captions, Google Workspace content (Sheets, Slides, Gmail) the user has access to and public websites. It’s only available on desktop in the main meeting room. Currently only available to Business Plus customers, later it will become available to other Google Workspace customers.

Google Chat now installs apps (like the Poll app) across conversations, so the app does not need to be manually added to each Space, Group, and Direct Message conversation.

Gemini will now proactively generate “insights” in Google Forms to summarize responses to short-answer or paragraph questions.

More AI Updates and Tips

Have you tried the photo-to-video feature in Gemini? Google shared tips for effective prompting - you can make your prompts very detailed for better output.

If you create Gems in Google Gemini, you can now share them with partners and collaborators. Sharing is similar to Google Drive file sharing. Gems “make tasks simpler and save time on repetitive prompting”.

Google Chrome is getting more AI integrations, including AI mode in the address bar omnibox, contextually relevant search suggestions; Gemini chat that can answer questions, find pages you’ve visited, find references in YouTube Videos (taking you to the relevant timestamp), and integrate with Docs and Calendar; plus secure login credential autofill and scam blocking. Learn more.

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