Peggy K's Creator Weekly: 2023 in Review

Author

Peggy K
December 30, 2023

Here we are at the close of 2023. Where has the time gone?  This year generative AI tools are everywhere, the old Twitter died and social media became more fragmented, YouTube launched new features for creators and viewers, bloggers have more tools and more. 

To celebrate, this is a roundup of 2023 highlights and expectations for 2024. 

If you want to skip my personal updates you can get product update details in these posts:

Thank you for reading, and I hope you and yours have a fantastic new year!

Creator Weekly News

This year I published 46 issues of the Creator Weekly News, available on my blog or in my weekly email newsletter. 

At this time last year, I was scrambling to migrate the email newsletter from Revue (which was shut down by Twitter) to Beehiiv. I’m happy that’s the direction I chose, as two of the other platforms I considered have problems: Intuit MailChimp is shutting down TinyLetter and Substack has a Nazi problem.

Beehiiv’s free tier has more features than I need, and it’s easy to use. My goal for 2024 is to focus on getting more subscribers, possibly using Beehiiv’s recommendation platform. 

Creator Weekly Live

In April I launched Creator Weekly Live. Every Sunday I’m live on YouTube talking about my favorite creator updates for the week. 

A huge thank you to the folks who have been regularly joining me live! There have been some lively and interesting discussions in the chat, and it’s nice to know that I’m not broadcasting into the void. 

Thanks to the regulars for joining me and helping make this a positive community!

  • Andrew Hatchett

  • Braylen Avy 

  • Brigitte Uras

  • Chef_MDT2

  • Diego C

  • Escuela Digital

  • Ileane Smith

  • İsmail Şevik

  • Jolyn Bowler

  • Mark Barrus

  • Michael Daniels

  • Richard Clarkson

  • RealEngland (Tanya) 

Apologies to anyone I missed!

One of my goals was to try different live streaming platforms, including Meet, StreamYard, Restream and Streamlabs TalkStudio. I’ll be writing up a comparison and reviews in the new year.

And I was also hoping to get better at speaking live, and I think I have improved at least a bit.

This week’s Creator Weekly Live is the end-of-the-year celebration. Join me!

10 Years of Creator Tips and Tutorials

I launched peggyktc.com in September 2013 with some excellent Google+-related tutorials. It quickly expanded beyond that original focus. 

In my celebratory post I look back at the changes in social media (and tutorials!)  over the past decade. 

I also updated the site name to Peggy K’s Creator News which I think better reflects the current focus. 

I published 23 tutorials this year, with additional short tutorials in the Weekly Update post and newsletter. Read on to the 2023 updates overview below for links.

10 Years of Peggy K on YouTube

My Peggy K YouTube channel  (www.youtube.com/@peggyKTC) was created in February 2013, which means it also turned 10 this year. I don’t really consider it to be 10 years old though, because I didn’t start uploading videos until 2015.

This year my channel hit two exciting milestones: 

Thanks to everyone who has watched and subscribed! 

This year I focused on my Creator Weekly Live weekly live stream and posting Shorts, both of which I’ll continue in 2024.

I also started posting a weekly quiz question on my Community tab in July (when that feature was launched). How many did you get right? 

Tip: I link to new quiz questions in my weekly newsletter. Subscribe to be sure you don’t miss the next one!

Other Projects

OnEBoard

Since 2019 I’ve been a part of the OnEBoard group. Every other week I go live with my fellow team members Nina Trankova and Bob Danley to share my top tech tip of the week, and I host our #OnEBoardChat tech chat once a month or so (and write up the monthly recaps). 

Here are our OnEBoard 2023 Highlights.

Google Product Expert Summit

This year I was honored to attend the Google Product Expert Summit in London. It was two intense days of presentations and product sessions, plus sightseeing and parties (would you believe I met the royal family?). It was also amazing to connect with OnEBoard founder Nina Trankova in person!  

Tinkering With Tech

I also appeared twice on the Tinkering with Tech show, hosted by Michael Daniels, to talk about account security and Google Meet: 

Creator Updates

What happened in 2023? These are the top updates I followed:

  • Generative AI everywhere

  • More web-based graphics tools

  • YouTube expanded the Partner Program to more creators

  • YouTube redesigned channel pages

  • More live streaming options.

  • Migration from Google Analytics to GA4

  • AdSense improved site management and ad review center.

  • Updated Blogger media management.

  • Shutdown of Google Currents (the last of Google+) and migration to redesigned Google Chat

  • Continued improvements to Google Meet meetings

  • The demise of old Twitter and rise of Bluesky, Threads and the Fediverse

Read more detailed summaries of the 2023 updates: 

What’s on the horizon for 2024? 

  • More generative AI tools are coming. We’ll see how many catch on and last the year.

  • YouTube is expanding access to thumbnail A/B testing, and has announced generative AI features will be available in the near future.

  • Privacy is going to be big and if you have your own website, you’ll probably need to make some changes. Chrome is starting to move towards automatically blocking 3rd party cookies, and AdSense is requiring sites to have a Consent Management process to serve ads in the EU.

  • Social media will remain divided, but I think Meta’s Threads will be the “Twitter replacement” winner. 

Have a great year!