Creator Weekly: Facebook deletes live stream archives, Twitch updates Community Guidelines enforcement, The Core Fan Era

I hope you are staying warm out there! I’ll admit, here in the Bay Area it’s Fool’s Spring, with sun and warmth, but probably another bout of winter weather (which means rain, so maybe only winterish). 

This week Facebook and Twitch are limiting video storage, Twitch updated Community Guidelines enforcement, Meta is opening up their Community Notes program waitlist, and more.

Top news and updates this week

• Facebook will only store live stream archives for 30 days. 

• Twitch is limiting storage of Highlights to 100 hours.

• Twitch Community Guidelines violations will now expire, but there are escalating consequences for repeat violations.

• Are creators entering the “core fan” era? Patreon thinks so.

• YouTube is now a bit more magenta. Did you notice?

• You can now more easily promote YouTube Shorts.

• YouTube is expanding its test of voice replies to comments.

• Yahoo is expanding their ad revenue sharing Stories from Creators program. 

• Amazon is shutting down its Inspire video feed.

• There are promising stats from TikTok LIVE and the Spotify video podcaster partner program. 

• Medium is making Featured stories more visible. 

• Meta has opened sign-ups for Facebook, Instagram, and Threads Community Notes program. 

• Instagram now lets you schedule DMs and pin messages. 

• Bluesky lets you restrict post replies to Followers and search for posts from a specific user.

• LinkedIn now gives email stats for newsletters. 

• Google Tasks now has its own site. 

• Google Meet is updating the mobile meeting interface, lets you scroll back through 30 minutes of captions, and is updating AI “Take Notes for Me” with transcript timestamps and suggested next steps. 

• There are AI updates for Gemini in Google Workspace, Google Ads, the Apple Vision Pro and xAI’s Grok 3.

• Plus reading (and watching) on blogging, 35 years of Photoshop, Apple account security, and more.   

New Tips and Tutorials

How to complete AdSense identity verification for YouTube Partners (and others), and how to get support if you’re having trouble.

Facebook and Twitch Limit Video Storage

Two stories this week highlight that online services are not meant for long term content storage.

Facebook is updating their video storage policy to delete live stream archives after 30 days. Why are they doing this? Because “most live video views occur within the first few weeks of broadcasting”. Older videos archived for longer than 30 days will also be deleted, with 90 days notice. 

To save a copy of your Facebook live streams you can either download individual videos, download all videos or transfer the videos to Dropbox or Google Drive. There is also an option to edit the videos to create clips for Facebook Reels.

Also this week, Twitch will limit storage for Highlights and Uploads to 100 hours starting April 19. This change does not apply to storage of past broadcasts (VODs) or Clips. According to Twitch, this will only affect 0.5% of active Twitch streamers (which is still 10s of thousands of users). Apparently Highlights “haven’t been very effective in driving discovery or engagement” and “the storage of this content is costly.”  

Twitch VODs are only stored 7 days (60 days for Partners), so moving VODs to Highlights was a way to keep those videos on your channel, and some creators apparently have thousands of hours of video stored. As a bonus, they retain the live chat during the Highlight segment, unlike Clips. Streamer reaction to this change has been pretty negative.

 To monitor storage, Twitch added a new account storage tracker on the account Video Producer page of the Creator Dashboard. Creators can download videos (one-by-one, or using a 3rd party bulk downloader) or export videos to YouTube (being mindful of upload limits).

While Google does limit storage in Google Photos and Google Drive (letting you pay for more), YouTube doesn’t have any storage limits. 

If you are moving videos to YouTube, note that your account must be verified to upload videos longer than 15 minutes. Verification also gives you a higher daily limit of uploads (although YouTube does not share what that limit is exactly).

Twitch Community Guidelines Enforcement Update

Twitch has updated their Community Guidelines enforcement so that violations will eventually expire. Previously every violation permanently counted against your account. 

The time to expire depends on the severity of the infraction. Low severity (like cheating in games) may expire after 90 days, while high severity violations (like hateful conduct) could remain as long as 2 years. Here’s how Twitch determines that: 

We define harm as including actions that lead to physical, emotional, social, or financial damage to a community member, to Twitch, or to society. We’ve developed an internal framework to map out our policies against categories of harm levels that are treated similarly. At the high end, this includes violations that present an urgent risk to physical safety. At the low end, this includes violations which are lower in urgency and may result in more of a mild disruption or annoyance.

They will soon also share the snippet of livestream or chat that caused the violation.

Along with this, they are escalating the consequences of violations.  If you have a new violation in the same policy category before the first violation expires, the suspension length will increase.

The Community Guidelines themselves have not changed, and you can appeal violations.

This change puts Twitch more in line with other platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram which all allow Community Guidelines strikes to expire. 

Entering the Core Fan Era

Patreon released their State of Create report based on an in-depth survey of 1,000 creators and 2,000 fans. The report is in fancy info-graphic style, which I recommend checking out.

“On one hand, the TikTokification of the internet has helped more creators get discovered by new audiences, and that has been a welcome change. But creators are agreeing more and more that getting in front of all those potential new fans isn’t so useful if they can’t keep reaching them consistently.”

• More than half of creators say it’s harder to reach their followers today than five years ago, as platforms have moved away from “the follow”. 

• Fans spend more time watching short form video, but say long form video provides more value -- and that’s what they are willing to pay for. 

• Most creators say “the algorithm” impacts what they create, and prevents them from exploring their passions and interests. 

• Fans spend most of their time in the “for you” feeds on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, rather than the Following or For You feeds.

• Five years ago creators were more focused on follower count, likes, comments, views, and watch hours. Today they say quality, fan relationships and financial stability are most important.

Core fans or superfans are “a small minority of their fans who make the most outsized impact on their income, and how energized their community is overall.”

And the future is direct-to-fan paid memberships, sales, livestreams, courses and the like, rather than ad revenue and brand deals.

Obviously Patreon is a platform where creators can do that. But they aren’t the only ones. Just look at the proliferation of paid newsletters and the like.

This isn’t a new idea. Way back in 2008, Kevin Kelly (founding executive editor of Wired magazine and former editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Review) wrote that “to make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.” The key was having those fans pay you directly, rather than going through an intermediary like a publisher, retailer or record label. 

He concluded: “The takeaway: 1,000 true fans is an alternative path to success other than stardom. Instead of trying to reach the narrow and unlikely peaks of platinum bestseller hits, blockbusters, and celebrity status, you can aim for direct connection with a thousand true fans. On your way, no matter how many fans you actually succeed in gaining, you’ll be surrounded not by faddish infatuation, but by genuine and true appreciation. It’s a much saner destiny to hope for. And you are much more likely to actually arrive there.”

Since 2008 we’ve seen the rise of social media with a dependence on (fickle) advertising revenue. Maybe a community of core fans is a better thing to strive for.

Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates

Did you notice YouTube is looking a little pink? YouTube’s icons have shifted from pure red towards magenta. The design team explained their thinking behind the change. YouTube’s red was a bit too red, didn’t always render correctly, and caused burn-in issues on TV screens (which are one of YouTube’s big bets). The new color doesn’t have those problems. The team also had to consider how it looked in different contexts and made sure that color wasn’t the only way that information was conveyed. Plus it looks more “modern”. 

If you want to pay Google to promote a YouTube Short you can now do that from the Shorts tab on your channel or the Shorts shelf on your Home tab. Learn more from Creator Insider.

YouTube is expanding access to its experimental voice replies to comments. This is limited to iOS devices. Learn more.

The BBC reports on a new study that accessed YouTube videos at random (it took almost 1.87 billion bad guesses for every real video it found), to get a picture of what’s happening on the platform. The median number of views for videos? 41 (and the majority have fewer than 500 views). And surprisingly 16% of the videos were primarily still images. It’s hard to know how accurate this is - YouTube won’t comment. But it’s an interesting snapshot. Follow the link for more details.

TikTok shared 2024 stats for TikTok LIVE: 100 Million creators went live, 46 Million for the first time with billions of viewers and hundreds of billions of chats. The article highlights top live streamers like @captaineriklive (fishing adventures), @puzzlingbeats (puzzle solving with music), and Singapore musician @strictlypipa.

Yahoo has signed up more than 100 YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok creators for its Stories from Creators program. The Stories appear on the new Yahoo News homepage and creators receive a 50% ad revenue share. Yahoo for Creators launched in March 2024, with a call for creators for “lifestyle topics” (such as fitness, travel, home, and technology). Apparently top performing articles may have hundreds of thousands of views, and some creators are earning thousands of dollars a month.

Spotify shared stats about its video podcaster Partner Program that launched last November. Hundreds of podcasters are now earning more than $10,000 per month, and viewership is up.

Amazon is shutting down its TikTok-like Inspire video feed. This was a feed of videos from Amazon partners promoting Amazon items as affiliates.

Web Publishers and Search

Medium is making Featured stories more visible, with Featured story push notifications and a new Featured Homepage feed for publication followers. Publication editors can select stories to be Featured. When they do they are recommended more highly in the For You feed, digest emails and elsewhere on Medium. 

Substackers can now publish video directly in the Substack mobile app.

Beehiiv’s website builder (currently in beta) has added new templates, and you can easily customize the layout. They are still newsletter-focused, but it’s feeling more and more like newsletters+web are the new blog. 

Social Media

In January Meta announced that they would no longer use 3rd party fact checkers for Facebook, Instagram and Threads. They would be replaced with an X-like Community Notes program. Engadget reports that if you are in the US and over 18, you can now sign up on the waitlist to be a Community Notes contributor. I don’t expect much from this. Programs like this all have the same weakness: the notes don’t appear publicly until enough contributors indicate the note is helpful. That’s slow for quickly-spreading false information, and it means highly contentious issues will likely never get a note. And just because a note is popular doesn’t mean the note is actually accurate. 

404 Media reports: Meta Sues Alleged Violent Extortionist For Holding Instagram Accounts Hostage. One thing I took away from this is that it is apparently very easy to get an Instagram account suspended by just reporting it.

You can now schedule DMs and pin messages in your Instagram chats.

Lia Haberman notes that Instagram appears to be down-playing Stories.

Bluesky now lets you restrict post replies to Followers and more easily search for posts from a specific user.

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber spoke at the Knight Media forum about how users are looking for trustworthy news, directly from sources, without links being deprioritized. She also talked about plans for paid subscriptions, monetization and more.

If you are using LinkedIn for your newsletters, you can now see stats for Email Sends and Email Open Rate.

Communication and Collaboration

Features are available to free personal accounts unless otherwise noted.

You can now access Google Tasks at tasks.google.com , instead of through Google Calendar or the sidebar of another Google Workspace service like Docs.

The Google Meet mobile app is getting a small design update. The emoji reaction will replace the hand raising button on the bottom bar. Hand raising will be available from the 3 dot overflow menu. Host management controls and “report a problem” are moving to the main Settings. And the call button on iOS is moving to match the Android app. See the before and after images for details.

Google Meet now lets you scroll back through 30 minutes of captions. Great if you missed part of a discussion or want to review what people said! 

Google Meet Gemini-powered “Take Notes for Me” now captures suggested “next steps” from the meeting, and can provide citations to meeting transcript timestamps. These are slowly rolling out to Google Workspace Business Standard and Plus, Enterprise Standard and Plus, and Gemini Education Premium. They are not available for personal Google Accounts.

Google Drive now allows shared drive managers and My Drive owners to restrict folders to specific folders. This was previously in beta. Learn more about folders with limited access in Drive.

More AI Updates and Tips

Gemini in the side panel of Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Drive and Gmail is now available in 17 additional languages. See the full list.

Google Ads offers advertisers new generative AI tools to create photo-like “lifestyle”  images of adults (such as someone cooking). Easy for advertisers, but it isn’t great for stock photographers. The images are watermarked with SynthID (so others can see they are AI-generated) and have guardrails.

Apple Intelligence is coming to the Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset. Apple says “users will be able to proofread, rewrite, and summarize text using Writing Tools; compose text from scratch using ChatGPT in Writing Tools; explore new ways to express themselves visually with Image Playground; create the perfect emoji for any conversation with Genmoji; and much more.”

Benedict Evans explains why he can’t use OpenAI’s Deep Research (and you shouldn’t either, if accurate information matters to you).

xAI’s Grok 3 was released, along with AI tools for X advertisers.

More Reading (and watching)

Stack Exchange co-founder and blogging pioneer (Coding Horror) Jeff Atwood on why to blog:
There's certainly a place for video, there's a place for chat. These tools all have their uses, but use the appropriate tool for the appropriate job. I think blogs are a very, very versatile tool in terms of median length, telling a story, and sharing it with the public.

Adobe is celebrating 35 years of Photoshop.

Howtown looks at the difficulties of identifying AI-generated content: I tried to prove I'm not AI (YouTube video). Currently fake images and video are assumed to be real, real images and video are denounced as AI and there isn’t any perfect way to tell them apart (although Adobe, Google, Sony and other companies are trying).

This report from The Verge sounds is bad for security: Apple pulls encryption feature from UK over government spying demands.

404 Media reported on a “true crime” YouTube channel that was all AI-generated. YouTube has now terminated that channel for “multiple violations of our Community Guidelines, including our policies covering child safety that prohibit the sexualization of minors.”

Spotify is giving musical artists and podcasters affected by the LA fires access to its recording studios.

ArtNet looks at a storyboard exhibit in Milan: From 'Raging Bull' to 'Un Chien Andalou'—A New Show Traces Cinema's Greatest Storyboards. “Visually setting a scene and then plotting out its ebbs and flows may help the film team consider relationships between characters, figure out how to advance the narrative, or realize how to convey the essence of a particular segment.”

Rene Ritchie has a nerdy rant: Why tech reviews kinda suck now (he explains more here).

The Google Play Books app for iOS now has a “Get Book” button that takes you to the Google Play Books website to purchase books. Google says “buying books is easier”, but it looks to me more like bypassing Apple’s App Store charges.

Thanks for reading! 🌼