Peggy K's Creator News

YouTube is making changes to treat all "children's content" as if a child is watching. That will affect the way they collect data, serve ads, and what engagement features are available. Update November 12, 2019: YouTube now requires creators indicate whether their videos are "made for kids" or not. Learn how to update your channel or videos' Audience setting . If you create YouTube videos that could be considered "children's content" upcoming changes may affect your channel . And if you are a parent, you'll be glad to learn that YouTube is finally acknowledging that younger kids aren't always using YouTube Kids to watch videos. Starting in about four months, we will treat data from anyone watching children’s content on YouTube as coming from a child, regardless of the age of the user. That means the changes will go into effect around the beginning of January 2020. Here is what's changing on videos "made for kids...

Monday is Labor Day in the US, the unofficial end of summer. Pack away your swimsuit, put on a sweater, and dig in to this week’s updates and tips. There is news for YouTubers, AdSense Publishers and more. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki posted her quarterly update for creators , with a discussion of how YouTube tries to balance “openness” with protecting the YouTube community. She argues that having an open platform gives “diverse and authentic voices” a platform and helps build community. But that also means allowing some controversial and offensive content. So YouTube tries to follow the “4 Rs”: quickly Remove policy-violating content, Raise-up authoritative voices, Reduce the spread of content that almost (but doesn’t quite) violate policy, and Reward eligible creators with monetization opportunities. To that end, YouTube made changes to their recommendation system in the US to reduce the spread of problematic content. That worked well enough that they are testing similar changes i...

Because of an "increase in abuse and spam" in Community Contributions,  all contributions will be held for channel owner review . As a YouTube creator, you can enable Community Contributions to allow your fans to add subtitles and translate the titles and descriptions of your videos. It's a great way to help reach viewers all around the world. But, as with so many good things, spammers ruin it for everyone. How Community Contributions work 1. Viewers submit contributions 2. YouTube moderates submissions for spam and inappropriate content. 3. If enough people have added translations to a video, the community is asked to help review them. Previously, when a submission got enough reviews, it was automatically approved for the video. Unfortunately, this process was not working well enough, and contributions with spam and abusive language sometimes were published. Now, all contributions are held for manual review by the channel owner before publication Enabl...

Starting the week of September 2, YouTube will stop publicly displaying exact subscriber counts. You will still be able to see your own channel's exact number of subscribers in YouTube Analytics. YouTube announced in May that they would abbreviate public subscriber counts  to help make the numbers more consistent across YouTube . And it's true that the numbers don't exactly match anywhere. Here are the current numbers for my channel : On my channel: 2,895 Social Blade : 2,894 Dashboard of YouTube Studio Beta and YouTube Studio app for Android: 2,890 YouTube Analytics in Studio Beta: 2,886 YouTube subscribe button (on the right menu here): 2k  That's not a very big difference, but it makes a case that those last digits aren't that precise at a given time. This change will also affect the YouTube API, which means features like  Social Blade’s popular live subscriber counts  - watched both by excited creators nearing a milestone and by  gaw...

Google announced that publisher policies for AdSense, AdMob and Ad Manager will be streamlined and simplified starting in September 2019. Each product will have a change log where publishers can easily find any updates.  Note: AdSense and Ad Manager Publishers received an email on September 30, 2019 that these changes are going into effect. This change is meant to simplify finding policy information and to standardize policy across all Google's publisher products. Policy will cover two categories of content. The Google Publisher Policies cover content that Google will not monetize with ads. Trying to place ads on such content is now, and will continue to be, an AdSense policy violation that could result in account suspension or termination. The Google Publisher Restrictions covers content that Google will not place Google Ads on, but that you can monetize with other advertising products or with direct deals with advertisers. Placing ads on this content will NOT b...

This was a busy week in the Googleverse, with updates for YouTube, Photos, AdSense, Duo and much more. I looked back on Blogger’s 20 years and forward the rescheduled migration from Hangouts in late 2020. Twenty years ago this week Blogger was born. I took a look back and talk about why Blogger is my chosen blogging platform. Starting this month Google Photos is rolling out the ability to search your photos by the text in them. You can use built-in Google Lens to copy the text once you find it. Engadget reports that Google Photos face grouping is finally rolling out across Europe. It’s not clear where exactly this feature is available. Check your account to see if the option to enable face grouping is available. YouTube has updated their policy to start removing “mature” content that targets younger children and families , including videos with sexual themes, obscene content, and violence. Previously such videos were age-restricted. Similar content that does not explicitly t...

Twenty years ago today, folks were  Livin' la Vida Loca  and Blogger was born at Pyra Labs*. Blogger Home Page October 1999 "Weblogs" were a fairly new idea, and Blogger was not only one of the first weblog platforms, but also helped popularize the terms "blog" and "blogging", which is not quite as much of a mouthful. Pyra Labs' Meg Hourihan on the origin of the word "Blogger" Blog*Spot free hosting service for Blogger-powered blogs, April 2011 After struggles with funding, Blogger was sold to Google in February 2003 . This may have rescued the platform, as  Guardian reported at the time : The sale is a dramatic turnaround for San Francisco-based Blogger, which rode the high and subsequent low of the dotcom boom. The company was founded in 1999, and Mr Williams had to lay off the company's entire staff in late 2000. He continued to maintain the service by himself from his home until last year, when he increased ...