Peggy K's Creator News

Shopping? Visiting family? Enjoying the great outdoors? Whatever you are doing, take a few minutes to check out this week’s updates for YouTubers, business owners, Instagrammers and more. YouTube is rolling out the Community tab to channels with at least 1000 subscribers . You can post text, polls, images, videos and more. Commenting is a bit limited, so it doesn’t seem like it’s ideal for discussions at the moment, but it seems useful for perhaps keeping your subscribers’ interested when you aren’t posting videos. You can see (and vote in) my first poll  Creators can now @mention other users when publishing a Community post , in addition to @mentions when replying to video comments. Mentions are one of the things I miss about Google+ comments on YouTube, so I’m happy about this update. It would be great if mentions were eventually available to commenters other than the channel owner (although perhaps that’s too ripe for abuse).  YouTube now shows a “Known issues” widget...

This coming week is Thanksgiving in the US, which means big sales and few updates. That means updates needed to be launched this past week, to get ahead of the holiday. There While Google+ won’t be completely shut down until August 2019, other Google products and services will be disconnected before then. This week Google Photos removed the option to share images to Google+. You can still share a link to an image in your Google Photos account, or select a recent image from Google Photos when creating a new Google+ post. (Technically you can select an older image from Google Photos, but that requires scrolling through your photo library to find it. The Google contact cards that appear on mobile when you click a profile photo in Hangouts or Gmail, or the About button on a Google+ Profile have a new uniform look. Contact info is highlighted, and there are buttons to Hangout, Email, Call or Schedule an event (although some of those may be greyed out, depending on whether you have that...

The air is cooling, leaves are falling, and California is burning. Some folks can see winter on the horizon. Nonetheless  updates are appearing. This week in the official Google+ Aspire Community, I talked about how to get your Google+ followers to subscribe to your YouTube channel, tips for sharing your videos to Google+, differences between following someone on Google+and YouTube and so forth. The #CreateConnection conversation is over, but y ou can still read the discussion . With last week’s announcement that Flickr will be limiting free accounts to only 1000 photos and videos, there was great concern that much of the Creative Commons content shared on the platform would be lost. Flickr has now announced that any images shared under a Creative Commons license before November 1st will not be deleted from the platform, the Flickr Commons archives from governments, universities, museums and other organizations will remain, and they are working with nonprofits to get them s...

This week I attended both the annual YouTube Contributors Summit and Google Product Experts Summit in California. I learned a lot and had an excellent time with my fellow experts. If you enjoy helping people with YouTube or other Google Products, learn more about the YouTube Contributors program  and the Google Product Experts program. It also meant I didn’t have as much time to put this report together, so this week has fewer stories than usual, although I think I got the highlights. Up until this week, once you had a fully approved AdSense account you could place your ads on any website. It was up to you to ensure it complied with the AdSense program policies. Now you must add any new site to your AdSense account before it can show ads . Once you do that, ownership of the domain will be verified, and the site reviewed for complain with the AdSense Program Policies. Flickr announced two major changes this week. First off, the will be moving away from Yahoo login . That’s un...

Happy almost-Halloween everyone! There are some treats for creators this week. YouTube Premieres are now available to all Creators . Set a date and time for your uploaded video to “premiere” and a video watch page is created with comments and live chat both. Your fans can then watch the premiere of your video together while they chat.  YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki posted her final update for 2018 , with a plea to users that they "tell the world" how they will be impacted by Article 13 of the EU's new copyright legislation, and paints a dire picture about the possible outcome: it "could force platforms, like YouTube, to allow only content from a small number of large companies." She also gave an overview new features implemented over the past year, and announced the new "YouTube Learning" initiative to support high quality educational content.  You can now follow businesses in Google Maps to see events, offers and other updates. Makes a lot of s...

With the announcement that the consumer version of Google+ will be shut down in April 2019, some active Plussers want to be sure their Followers find them in their new home. I've seen a few questions whether there is likely to be a way to automatically convert their Followers into YouTube Subscribers. While I'd love to have an additional million subs, I think it's quite unlikely that will ever be an option. In my case, I gained a large percentage of my Google+ Followers when I was on the old Suggested User List shown to users when they created a Profile. I would bet that many of the followers I gained that way haven't used Google+ in years, if they ever did at all. And the folks who follow you on Google+ may not specifically be interested in your videos. So what can you do?  Ask your Google+ Followers to subscribe to your YouTube channel!  RELATED:  How the Google+ shutdown will - and will not - affect your YouTube channel

While Plussers are looking for a new home, life - and app updates - go on. There are improvements to video watching, live streaming and much more. The YouTube embedded video player - the one you use on websites other than YouTube - got a redesign. It now displays the channel’s avatar, and there is no longer a way to hide the title or prevent related videos from appearing at the end. You can, however, limit the related videos to those from the same channel. And now you don’t need to stop watching videos while you are surfing on desktop. On YouTube, just click the mini-player icon on the bottom right of any video to continue watching as you browse the site. And if you use Chrome, picture-in-picture is now the default on Linux, Mac and Windows (and soon Chrome OS), so you can watch videos in a floating window whatever you are doing on your computer. There is evidence Facebook was aware that it was providing inaccurate video viewership metrics for over a year . Thos metrics not on...