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Creator Weekly: RSL Publisher Collective, YouTube Multi-Language Tracks, Reddit Subscriber Counts

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Peggy K
September 13, 2025

Hello Creators! We are entering the last week of summer, the world is full of turmoil (currently listening to this), and there is news for video creators, web publishers, social media and more.

For updates for YouTube, Vimeo, Reddit, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, Substack, a new collective rights organization for publishers (big and small), and more, read on.

Top news and updates this week

  • Really Simple Licensing & the RSL Collective Rights org gives options to publishers who want to control AI bot access.

  • YouTube multi-language tracks are available to more creators, with multi-language thumbnails being tested.

  • Reddit replaces subreddit subscriber counts with viewers and contributors

  • Patreon redesigns Creator Home pages with shelves to organize and highlight content.

  • Apple Final Cut Camera 2.0 supports open gate recording, ProRes RAW capture and genlock. Some features require the new iPhone 17 Pro.

  • Generate AI Stickers in the YouTube Shorts editor. 

  • Vimeo will be acquired by Bending Spoons (acquirer of Brightcove, StreamYard, Evernote, Meetup).

  • Adobe Premiere Pro has new effects, transitions and animations. 

  • CapCut AI Suite is just what you would expect: a suite of AI-powered tools for audio and video creation. 

  • There are also new features for StreamYard and ReStream live streaming platforms. 

  • Google claimed “the open web is in rapid decline”, then explained they were only referring to display ads. 

  • Reddit has new Reddit Pro tools for publishers. 

  • Substack has new grown metrics and easier sharing to other platforms. 

  • Beehiiv added YouTube integration for its website builder. 

  • Quote posts are coming to Mastodon.

  • Bluesky added built-in bookmarking and is expanding age verification to more locations. 

  • Meta’s Community Notes are almost never seen. 

  • Patreon has new revenue and audience growth metrics for posts.

  • LinkedIn now shows you Saves and LinkedIn Sends stats. 

  • Yahoo Mail cut free storage down to 20GB. 

  • Plus updates for Google Chat, Drive, Sheets, Photoshop, ChatGPT; celebration of Techmeme’s 20 years, new emojis, and more.

🗓 Ten Years Ago This Week: Are apps the future of TV?

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

In 2015 Apple declared that the future of television is apps as it launched the new Apple TV. The shift to using apps to watch on the big screen gave creators on YouTube and other platforms a new place for their audience to watch. And while people still watch regular TV, YouTube and other apps are winning. Get the details.

New Tips and Tutorials

A quick tip: Easily link to your next YouTube livestream with an easy-to-remember URL.

YouTube Expands Access to Multi-Language Tracks

YouTube is expanding multilanguage audio to millions more creators. This is adding your own translated audio tracks (which ideally are more accurate than AI-generated auto-dubs). YouTube says that a video with an alternate language audio track is treated as a different video than the original, so the algorithm treats it as a new video for that audience. 

Creator and Chef Nick DiGiovanni says that he uses (more expensive) human, not AI-generated, voices: 

"I just felt like I would miss out on some of my personality when translating to other languages otherwise. And there are just sort of nuances in different languages that I wanted to have." 

YouTube has also started a pilot that allows "select creators" to upload different thumbnails for different language audiences. Needed if your thumbnail has writing on it!

The RSL Collective Rights Organization for Publishers

RSL is an open, decentralized protocol (based on RSS) that lets you easily add a licence for AI bots to your site. It can require attribution for use, or even require royalties.

That’s where the new RSL Collective comes in. It’s likened to the collective licensing organizations for music, like ASCAP and BMI. 

Proprietary nonpublic content can be encrypted, including paywalled articles and videos, with a paid license required to access the content. 

Here’s how it works: 

  1. Create a free publisher account to register your websites

  2. Add a RSL Standard license to your site’s robots.txt file

  3. The RSL Collective has standardized tools to manage licensing, track content usage, bill and receive royalties, and audit license compliances on behalf of members.

You can also use the RSL Standard licenses without joining the Collective. The licenses can be added to robots.txt files, web pages, HTTP headers, or RSS feeds. 

Supporters include Reddit, Yahoo, People Inc, Internet Brands, Ziff Davis, Fastly, Quora, O’Reilly Media and Medium.

Tony Stubblebine, CEO or Medium, writes that the platform has “implemented the simplest version of this new RSL Standard, which prohibits AI companies from using your stories to train their AI models but allows them to summarize and link back to your writing in AI-generated search results.”

And this resonates with me: “Given that people publish on Medium to get readers, we think the obvious default stance is to allow a product like ChatGPT to use your writing in their AI-generated search results if they are sending significant traffic in return. We are hoping that Google will catch up to OpenAI— so far, traffic from Gemini AI summaries is very poor.”

The question is whether AI companies will actually license the content when asked to. It may help that big publishers are supporters. 

Related measures: 

  • CC Signals, a new Creative Commons license type “for the age of AI”, due to launch in November in Alpha.

  • Cloudflare “pay per crawl” option, currently in beta. This lets you control access to your content by AI bots, and charge companies that want to crawl it.

Reddit Drops Subscriber Counts

Reddit is dropping subreddit subscriber counts, which they note are "often a measure of a subreddit’s age and not current activity". New public metrics are Visitors and Contributions. 

  • Visitors: number of different users who visited in the past week 

  • Contributions: number of non-removed posts and comments in the past week

Reddit is "one of the first major platforms to publicly display active participation, focusing on meaningful, real-time engagement rather than subscriber numbers." More meaningful, in part, because people don't usually need to join a subreddit to post or comment.

Reddit says “By emphasizing active participation over passive membership, we’re continuing to highlight what makes Reddit unique: real people engaging in real conversations.”

New Apple Camera Features

This week was Apple’s big hardware event where they announced new iPhone hardware, including new camera features. In particular the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max support

  • The free Final Cut Camera app has professional quality filmmaking tools for the iPhone. Version 2.0 for the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max allows recording RAW data “for maximum creative freedom in post-production.” It “introduces open gate recording, which uses the full camera sensor to capture a wider field of view at resolutions greater than DCI 4K” and lets you capture vertical or landscape video without rotating your phone. It also supports genlock, which lets you sync your iPhone to other recording devices. The new version requires iPhone Xs or later, running iOS 18.6 or later, with some features limited to the latest iPhones.

  • The iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max have higher resolution camera sensors, with three 48MP Fusion cameras, a new 48MP Telephoto camera, and up to 8x optical zoom. The iPhone 17 has one 48MP Fusion Main camera and one ultrawide camera, plus 2x Telephoto.

  • The Center Stage front camera has a square front camera sensor “offering a wider field of view and higher resolution”. It lets you take photos and videos in portrait or landscape orientation while holding the iPhone vertically. You can also record video on the front and read cameras simultaneously. It supports “ultra-stabilized” video in 4K HDR.

  • Professional video features include Dolby Vision HDR recording, 4K120 fps, ProRes Log 2, ProRes RAW, ant genlock syncing. The iPhone 17 can record video in 4K60fps Dolby Vision, with Spatial Audio. See also the specs for the new iPhone Air.

Sounds great for video creation if the new iPhones are within your budget.

Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates

You can now add AI-generated stickers to your YouTube Shorts from a simple prompt. In the Shorts Editor in the YouTube Mobile app, tap the Stickers icon, select AI Sticker, then type the description of the image you want to create. Select your favorite from the options offered. The sticker can be resized and positioned on your video. This is currently only available in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Are you wondering how the YouTube Hype points work for different size channels? KW Media has the data.

The September 5 NFL game set a new record for most concurrent viewers of a live stream on YouTube, with a17.3M average-minute-audience (AMA). The previous record was the ISRO Chandrayaan-3 Mission Soft Landing (8M+ concurrent viewers)

Tubefilter summarizes a recent report from the Atlantic on YouTube videos that can be found in AI training sets. While many are from educational and news channels, “hundreds of thousands of others--if not more are from individual creators”. Search for videos.

Google’s AI video generation models Veo 3 and Veo 3 Fast can now generate vertical video and video in 1080p HD. Those features will be coming to Google Vids, and likely any other product that has Veo 3 integrated. 

Vimeo will be acquired by Bending Spoons, which will take the company private. Bending Spoons previously acquired StreamYard, Brightcove, Evernote, Meetup, and WeTransfer. Based on previous acquisitions they will likely significantly reduce staff and raise prices. In April Vimeo Streaming launched, letting creators create their own video streaming apps.

Vimeo made a recent change that requires users to be signed in to download public videos. This does not affect unlisted videos.

Adobe Premiere Pro has 90 new customizable effects, transitions and animations integrated after Adobe’s acquisition of Film Impact. 

Spotify just launched the Big on BookTok hub. It’s a partnership with TikTok that turns a BookTok wishlist into a “To be Listened” audiobook playlist on Spotify. The collaboration runs through November in the US.

Last month the CapCut AI Suite launched. It includes:

  • AI Story Maker generates a full video from a topic, including script, visuals and animations.

  • AI Image, Video and Music generators

  • AutoCut and AI Clipper makes it easier to create short videos.

  • AI Video Translator

  • Auto captions

  • Text-to-audio

  • AI Avatars

  • Turn stills into video with Mimic Motion and Lip Sync

  • Remove backgrounds or objects

  • Auto enhance to make videos look more polished

CapCut makes it hard to find details about what features require a Pro account. I’d assume most of these do require a subscription or only provide limited access for free.

Canva has released new features for paid accounts including voiceover recording.

StreamYard now lets you create up to 16 Custom Layouts (formerly 8) and improved interface, making it easier to switch during a show. 

StreamYard has also added a new Notes tab. In-studio participants can add private formatted notes while you are streaming. 

ReStream lets you add animated overlays and logos. Tune in to this week’s Creator Weekly live stream to see what it looks like (should I animate a banana?).

ReStream now lets you add a second camera with audio (previously it would just be video).  

SEO Roundtable reports  that in a recent court filing, Google declared “The fact is that today, the open web is already in rapid decline.”  Google has clarified that they were referring to “open-web display advertising”, but there is some skepticism about that. I mean, why is open-web display advertising declining? Could it be because the open web is declining?

Reddit has new Reddit Pro tools for publishers: Article Insights (track how stories are shared on Reddit), Auto Import (sync RSS feeds to make articles instantly shareable), and AI-powered community suggestions for posting. Readers can view a shared article within the Reddit app.

Substack has new growth metrics for creators, with a timeline of growth and granular source breakdowns. 

To help you grow on Substack, after you publish, you’ll now get ready-to-share social assets for Instagram Stories, Facebook, and other platforms.

Beehiiv now lets you integrate your newsletter’s website with YouTube, so it automatically updates with every new upload.

Social Media

Quote posts are coming to Mastodon. Authors can disable quotes for posts either globally or on individual posts. When someone quotes your post, you are notified, and you can remove your post from theirs. This will first be available on the mastodon.social and mastodon.online servers

Bluesky is enabling Kids Web Services (KWS) age verification in South Dakota and Wyoming, which passed laws similar to the UK Online Safety Act.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri says that creators were right that posting multiple Stories per day decreased reach, and now that issue is fixed. 

At the beginning of the year, Meta started replacing professional fact checking with Community Notes. Notes are only published if people with different opinions and political views agree they are helpful. Meta says that only 6% of notes are published. Meta is testing allowing anyone to request a Community Note or rate a note’s helpfulness, and sending a notification when a post a user interacted with gets a Note. 

Facebook is removing Community Chats. You can download messages before that happens. 

Facebook Groups now has a Topic tags feature to organize content and “shape your group’s culture”.

Patreon rolled out a redesigned Creator Home page. There are now two header options, and you can add “shelves” to highlight collections of content by theme or series, popular posts, important announcements, or products from your shop. There is a separate Posts tab with a chronological feed of posts. This is available to all Creators.

Patreon has new metrics that let you see how individual posts are driving revenue and audience growth.

LinkedIn added two new post metrics: Saves and Sends on LinkedIn. Team member Julia Flavin says Saves are “a stronger signal [than impressions] that the content was actually helpful”. 

Snapchat launched Imagine Lens: “Snapchatters can create, edit, and recreate Snaps simply by entering their own prompts, then seamlessly share them with friends, post to their Story, or outside of Snapchat.”

Communication and Collaboration

Yahoo Mail recently reduced the free account storage limit from 1TB to 20GB. If you need more storage, you have to pay. And of course people aren’t happy.

Tables, an experimental tool from Google’s Area 120, launched in September 2020. It will shut down in December. It is designed to help teams track work and uses Bots to automate tasks like email reminders of overdue tasks or automatic chat room posts when a new form is submitted. It’s integrated with Google Sheets, Forms, Groups and Contacts.  Many of those features became available in AppSheet Databases, which launched in June 2023. Tables data can be exported to Google Sheets or an AppSheet Database.

You can now get push notifications for emoji reactions to your Google Chat messages. Or you can turn them off.

You can see Gemini-created document summaries on the Google Drive Home page. Requires a Google Workspace Business, Enterprise, or AI Pro for Education account or a Google One AI Premium subscription.

There is a new condensed view of version history changes in Google Sheets.

More AI Updates

John Nack posts that Google Gemini 2.6 Flash Image, better known as Nano Banana, is coming to Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop supports multiple 3rd party generative AI models. 

So. Much. Slop. AI Podcast Start Up Plans 5,000 Shows, 3,000 Episode a Week (Hollywood Reporter) 

More Reading

The US Treasury Department has published a preliminary list of occupations that customarily receive tips for the new  “no tax on tips” deduction. It includes Digital Media Creators, but there are exceptions. Don't count on it until everything is finalized. 

There are new emojis, including Distorted Face, Fight Cloud, Ballet Dancer, Orca, Hairy Creature (Yeti), Trombone, Landslide and Treasure Chest. While they probably won’t be on your device for a while, you can access them as part of the Google Noto Emoji font.

Thanks for reading! 🌼