Summer is in full swing, and I hope you are keeping cool! This is a holiday week, with just a few updates including news from YouTube, Meta, Substack and X.
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Tip of the week: Use the Google Vids Screen Recorder extension to record both your screen and yourself. Captured video can be edited in Google Vids (which is free for everyone). It’s great for creating tutorials. Check out my video to see the results.
Top Updates
- Celebrate the US’s 250th birthday with silly YouTube Shorts effects, historical images, American music and live streamed celebrations.
- Add licensed popular music to your YouTube image posts to make them more engaging if they appear in the Shorts feed.
- Gemini Omni is available to generate clips in the YouTube Shorts editor and YouTube Create app. And you can use a selfie Avatar.
- YouTube shared tips for creating Shorts and using Ask Studio.
- Edits video editing app can auto-generate bilingual captions, and add overlays to templates.
- Meta Glasses have new Instagram Stories video and editing features.
- X launched Live Studio (beta) for live stream management.
- Substack posts include automatic translation and country-specific leaderboards.
- AdSense ad intents may now show Gemini generated content in addition to display ads.
- Cloudflare can filter AI bot traffic by type (Search, Training, and Agents). Check your default settings!
- Social media GIFs aren’t quite the same, as Google kills the Tenor API.
- Threads live chat can have co-hosts and lets you easily share to our feed.
- There are updates for Apple Creator Studio, Gemini with Google Photos and Slides,
The US at 250 🇺🇸🎆
The United States Declaration of Independence was adopted 250 years ago today, on July 4, 1776.
YouTube suggests posting content around the 4th of July and “you could be featured on the YouTube homepage.” There are also new Shorts effects: Fireworks, Food Ranker and Coloring Book.
If you search for America 250 content on YouTube in the US, you’ll see featured content on a dedicated shelf.
C-SPAN has partnered with YouTube to broadcast America 250 celebrations on YouTube TV and livestream on YouTube. Watch C-SPAN.
Google Arts & Culture has Making of a Nation: America at 250, celebrating the history of the American Revolution with objects and documents from top museums and archives.
Spotify gave an overview of American music artists and creators.
Flickr shared American historical images from museums and archives on the platform.
YouTube and Video
YouTube has expanded the music options for image Posts. Image posts can appear in the Shorts feed on mobile devices, giving them more visibility. You can add up to 15 seconds of audio, choosing from the royalty-free tracks in the YouTube Audio library, licensed and popular music, or AI-generated Dream Tracks. Music and text overlays can be added when creating a Post in the YouTube mobile app. Posts show in the Shorts feed will count as Views in Analytics.
Back in May, YouTube added the Gemini Omni video model to YouTube Shorts Remix. Now it’s available for the “Create Video” option in the YouTube Shorts editor and YouTube Create app. Generate videos up to 10 seconds, using up to 3 reference images. You may even be able to use an Avatar version of yourself.
Five tips to inspire your first YouTube Short.
There’s an official guide on how to get started with Ask Studio in YouTube Studio.
The Edits app now lets you easily add automatically-generated bilingual captions, in English, Indonesian, Russian, Portuguese, Gujarati, Spanish, Hindi, Korean, Bengali, German, Italian, Thai, French, Japanese, and Kannada. Also new: lock the position of clips in templates and new summer sound effects.
There are new Instagram Stories video creation features for Meta Glasses, including immersive Spin View (viewers can rotate their phone to see the full perspective), Multi-Cam syncing of your glasses and phone cameras in Stories, and the option to adjust playback speed, reframe the action, and balance the audio.
If you use StreamYard for multi-aspect-ratio streams (or dual format streaming), you can now create separate portrait and landscape layouts.
X introduced Live Studio in beta (x.com/i/live-studio). This is a livestreaming dashboard that is part of their Creator Studio suite of tools. It makes it easy to schedule or start live streams, live chat controls, real-time analytics and the option to download completed streams.Access requires an X Premium subscription. Learn more.
Web Publishing
If you have AdSense ad intents ads on your website, users that interact with a link, anchor or chip may see related Gemini-generated content, in addition to display ads. AdSense says, “This not only drives additional revenue for you when users click on ads, but also keeps users engaged with your page through related Gemini-generated content.”
Readers can now translate Substack posts from English into 15 different languages, and from 100 languages into English. They have also added new country leaderboards in France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and UK.
If you use Cloudflare to protect your website (including on their free tier), there are now more granular options for managing AI traffic. You can now separately control access to AI bots for Search, Training and Agents. Starting September 15, the default settings will block Training and Agent on pages that display ads (which implies a human visitor goal), while Search is allowed. Warning: enforcement uses the most restrictive applicable rules, which means multi-purpose crawlers (Googlebot, Applebot, BingBot) are included if you block Training.
From SEO Roundtable: Google's Head Of Search - Liz Reid: We Want Great Content To Shine.
Social Media
Why are GIFs on social media different now? On June 30, Google killed Tenor API access for 3rd party developers. Tenor is a GIF database, sort of like Giphy. If you use GBoard, Google Chat or Google Messages and have inserted a GIF, that is Tenor. Google had an API that let developers use that functionality in their own apps for free. It was used by many platforms, including Discord, X, Bluesky, and WhatsApp. Many platforms have switched to Klipy, which has a different selection of GIFs, which may mean your fave is missing. (Tenor is still in use on Google properties.)
Instagram published a complete guide to Instagram stories. Everything you need to know.
Threads community live chat has new features, including up to 3 co-hosts, community champions as hosts, an easy way to share messages from live chat to your feed, and translations. The live chats are public “real time” discussions, available inside communities on mobile. They are working on the desktop version.
X has said they want to better reward original creators, penalizing creators that simply aggregate popular content. Head of Product Nikita Bier announced this week that an experiment “removing the Top-30 highest paid revenue share accounts [using the old payment formula] from the For You timeline increased both time spent and daily active users on X.” All these accounts posted a high volume of copied content. Those 30 accounts supposedly have had their revenue cut “up to 99%” since then. It’s not clear to me if the issue is the volume of posting, or what they post (often engagement or rage bait) or both.
Tools
Apple Creator Studio, the recently-announced creative app bundle for Apple devices, has new features. This includes new AI tools and integration of Pixelmator Pro, across Final Cut Pro, Keynote, and other apps, and new music tools for Logic Pro. Find out about all the updates here.
Gemini now lets you connect Personal Intelligence with Nano Banana and Google Photos.This lets Gemini generate “deeply personalized” images, based on your “taste and lifestyle.” This is available to eligible users in the US.
You can create a full presentation with Gemini in Google Slides. Previously you could only create one slide at a time. Ground the information in your Google Drive files and match the style of another presentation. The generated slides are fully editable. This is currently only supported for English. This is available for personal Google Accounts with an AI Pro or Ultra subscription, and select Workspace editions.
The Google Drive mobile app now has access to AI Overviews and Ask Gemini. This is available for personal Google Accounts with an AI Pro or Ultra subscription, and select Workspace editions.
If you are a WhatsApp user, you can now reserve a username. The username lets you communicate with people without revealing your phone number. Creators and small business have the option to claim their existing Instagram or Facebook username on WhatsApp.
Getty Images will likely terminate its merger agreement with Shutterstock. This is likely due to concerns from UK regulators. The stock image platforms announced their planned merger in January 2025, so this has been ongoing for over a year.
Interesting Reading
Talking Points Memo: TikTok Doesn’t Want Us To Talk About the NewsSEO Roundtable: Fraudulent DMCA Takedowns Wreak Havoc In Google Search
Thanks for reading! 🌼
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