Creator Weekly: Hide YouTube End Screens, Twitch Stream Rewind, Linktree-Canva Integration

This week there are a variety of updates (unlike last week’s mostly-YouTube focus). There is news for YouTube, Twitch, Spotify , LinkTree, TikTok and more. 

Top news and updates this week

🗓 Ten Years Ago This Week: Facebook Launches 360-degree video

To celebrate 10 years of Creator Weekly, I’m sharing highlights from 2015. 

Ten years ago Facebook launched 360-degree video in the News Feed, the perfect combination of the shift to video and VR trends. But are you seeing 360-video in your News Feed today? What happened? Get all the details.

YouTube Labs is a new feature for US-based Premium subscribers to try prototype AI-powered features. The current experiment is in the YouTube Music app - as you listen to radio and mixes, AI hosts will chime in with relevant stories and insights. Opt in at YouTube.com/New.

Mixboard is a new, experimental AI-powered concept board and brainstorming too. You can use your own images or use AI to generate images. It includes the Nano Banana image editing model to help you modify or combine images. This is in public beta in the U.S. at labs.google/mixboard 

YouTube now lets you "Hide" the end screen on a video (that's the overlay with recommendations over the last seconds of the video). The setting doesn’t stick, so you have to click that button on every video. 

Also the "watermark" you can add to your videos no longer becomes a subscribe button when you hover your cursor. 

Will this affect video engagement?

YouTube says these changes should not decrease views of end screens more than 1.5% or so (most people don't watch to the end anyway), and the watermark subscribe button affects less than a tenth of a percent of subscriptions.

YouTube will be allowing some creators with terminated channels back on the platform. Apparently it’s about allowing some channels that spread COVID and election misinformation back on the platform. That certainly sounds political. 

Is there more to it? YouTube has only said, “We've had a lot of questions about a pathway back to YouTube for some terminated creators to set up a new channel. This will be a limited pilot project that will be available to a subset of creators in addition to those channels terminated for policies that have been deprecated. More to come soon!”

Hopefully they will provide more details soon.

I’ll note that this is being spun by some people as a big win against censorship (or “censorship”), but it’s not clear it’s that.

Twitch has launched Stream Rewind, which lets viewers pause, rewind and resume streams (like the live stream DVR on YouTube). 

This can be enabled by Twitch Affiliates and Partners on their channels. 

It can currently only be used by Channel and Turbo subscribers (because they “don't typically see ads during streams, which allows us to focus on perfecting ad delivery before making Stream Rewind available to everyone”), but it will eventually be usable by all viewers.

Spotify is implementing changes aimed at protecting artists from harmful AI content. 

Linktree lets you create a very simple landing page that you can use as your “link in bio” on social media. They have just added tools to make your profile prettier and more engaging:

President Trump has signed an order that allows TikTok to operate in the US with ownership from a select investor group. That group includes Larry Ellison and Oracle, Rupert Murdoch, and Michael Dell. ByteDance will retain less than 20% ownership.

Read the order supporting the proposed deal (for some reason, this has a whole section about how great President Trump has done at making totally unrelated deals).

TikTok’s algorithm will reportedly be retrained with only U.S. user data in a process that will apparently be overseen by the U.S. government. It will be interesting to see how the recommendations change (President Trump apparently quipped he would like it to be “100% MAGA recommendations). 

I also expect changes to TikTok’s misinformation and hate speech policies.

YouTube now lets you filter comments in Studio to find “New replies to your response”. That can be used in combination with other message filters. You can also view comments by “most relevant” (now the default), rather than “newest”. Plus you can now set default channel comment filters in Studio on mobile.

YouTube launched an All Party Parliamentary Group in London, "a vital bridge between the UK's creators and Westminster". It will “champion the significant social and economic contributions of UK creators while working with policymakers to deepen their understanding of the digital creator economy”.  It sounds like a lobbying organization.

Fast Company: Pit bulls, rats, and 2 circling sharks: The inside story of Google buying YouTube 

Creator Insider answered Creator questions about YouTube’s recent update to the profanity policy in the advertiser friendly guidelines. 

StreamYard has added a QR Code generator, for sharing links with your audience. Restream has had this feature for years. This seems like a good option if your audience watches your live streams on TV.

Social Media Today reports: TikTok highlights related trending topics to help guide Creators. 

Meta just launched Vibes in the Meta AI app and meta.ai. You can easily generate and share videos, and browse an AI video feed. If you see a Meta AI video on Instagram you can remix it in Vibes with a single tap.

Google Vids has added more tools for converting a Google Slides presentation into a video. You can import specific slides from a presentation, generate an AI voiceover, script and background music. The video can be edited before you export or share the final version.

AdSense retired session-related metrics (“ad sessions”, “Ad session RPM”, etc). They suggest using Google Analytics instead for analyzing session-level data.

Google Search Live has fully launched in English in the U.S. This lets you have a voice conversation in AI Mode and share your phone’s camera feed so the AI can “see” and chat about what you are looking at.

Android users in the U.S. can now use conversational AI editing in Google Photos. You can give a detailed prompt or just write “make it better”. This was originally available on the Pixel 10. Learn more.

Microsoft Photos is getting AI-powered auto-categorization of images on Copilot+ PCs . This automatically detects and organizes images into categories like screenshots, receipts, notes, and identity documents. This is available for Windows 11 Insider channels.

If you use Adobe Photoshop you can select which AI model you want to use. It’s not limited to Adobe’s Firefly. You can select from 3rd party models including the latest additions:  Google’s Nano Banana and Black Forest Labs FLUX.1 Kontext [Pro].

Social media manager Hootsuite now lets you schedule posts on Bluesky.

Instagram now has 3 billion monthly active users, with growth driven by messaging, reels and recommendations (so not friends posting photos). Expect to see a focus on those features. They will be testing a way to “tune your algorithm” by indicating the Reels topics you are (and are not) interested in.

The new trend on Instagram is skinny and wide horizontal reels. The Instagram Creator account shows how to use it like a news ticker. Apparently the ability to upload video with atypical dimensions has been available for a while, but one video took off, and so it’s being copied all over.

If you are in the UK, you will soon be able to get a Meta subscription for ad-free Facebook and Instagram. There is a reduced cost subscription for additional Facebook and Instagram accounts you have added to Meta Accounts Center. Meta (unsurprisingly) notes that they think that “personalised ads are the best experience for people and businesses.”

Two new features to make it easier to manage Gmail emails on mobile: use the “Mark as Read” option from Android notifications, and sender avatars in iOS notifications.

If you have trouble writing Google Chat messages, there is a new option to refine a message with Gemini. This is available to Google Workspace accounts and personal accounts with a Gemini Pro or Ultra subscription.

Gemini in Google Sheets can now give “detailed natural language formula explanations, provide formula error explanations and self-correction, and output multiple formula options.”

If you use conditional notifications in Google Sheets you can now add 20 rules per spreadsheet, rather than 10.

Google Drive is updating sharing permissions. You can no longer restrict access to specific files inside a shared folder. Access to a file will be the same as access to the parent folder.

Ars Technica: When “no” means “yes”: Why AI chatbots can’t process Persian social etiquette

OpenAI released ChatGPT Pulse, “a new experience where ChatGPT proactively does research to deliver personalized updates based on your chats, feedback, and connected apps like your calendar.” It can do “asynchronous research on your behalf” once a day (for example, restaurant recommendations if you are traveling, healthy dinner tips, or a follow up on discussed topics). This is available to Pro users on mobile.

Computer World: OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws 

Both Google and Apple published articles detailing negative impacts of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in the EU. Of course they are self-serving, but also bring up points that sound concerning.Thanks for reading! 🌼