Creator Weekly: Snapseed Update, Twitch Viewbots, AdSense Vignette Ads

Dear readers, I hope you are enjoying spring weather and not glued to your internet device (I’m trying to get out more). This week there are updates for YouTube, Twitch, AdSense, Threads and more. 

I am debating whether to live stream this Sunday, as I’m feeling better this week. If you catch me, stop by and say hello in the live chat. It’s like riding a bike, right?

You can now find an overview of your YouTube account status in YouTube Studio mobile. Open the YouTube Studio app, click your profile picture, and then select Account Status. It shows Copyright and Community Guideline violation status, and your channel’s monetization health.

YouTube will hide channel descriptions that don't follow the Community Guidelines, starting May 18. You can edit the description to restore visibility. Example: Minors sharing personal contact information.

YouTube updated their advertiser-friendly guidelines to clarify the policy around Shocking Content. If the content features young-looking subjects (human or not), in distress, featuring shock or disgust like gore, it won't be eligible to earn ad revenue.

YouTube is testing a layout redesign in the mobile app, with Subscriptions feed moved to the top of the screen. This will be “swipeable” to make it easier to move between feeds. Other feeds (like Movies & TV) may also be moved to the top navigation.

Twitch is cracking down on viewbotting. Channels that “persistently viewbot” will have a cap on the streamer’s concurrent views based on “historical data regarding that creator’s non-viewbotted traffic.” 

Twitch is testing Streamer Shouts: “Personalized messages sent to groups of viewers post-stream to celebrate moments and milestones - delivered straight to their Activity Feed”

Twitch also made it easier to see a channel’s active Drops. 

StreamYard is making it easier to keep track of which live chat comments you’ve already shown on screen. 

The Edits video editing app has a few new features: 

Google Search added new features to AI Overviews and AI Mode that highlight websites and online discussions. Google says “we're building AI in Search to help you discover the richness of the web, connecting you directly with the sources and creators you’re looking for.” Features include: 

AdSense is changing the behavior of vignette ads to comply with the new Google Search spam policy that prohibits back button hijacking. Vignette ads will no longer trigger when a site visitor navigates backwards (the other triggers remain, and are still intrusive). The Google Search policy that prohibits back button hijacking goes into effect on June 15. Pages that are engaging in back button hijacking may be subject to manual spam actions or automated demotions, which can impact the site's performance in Google Search results. 

The Medium Partner Program will start rewarding editors, in addition to writers. "The TL;DR is that when a publication editor in a qualifying publication assigns themselves to a story in the publication submission queue, that editor earns 25% of what the story earns. The writer will keep all their original earnings." This sounds like a good way to commit to rewarding quality content.

Microsoft explained how AI systems have forced Bing search indexing to evolve. They point to a recent webinar about optimizing your content “in the era of AI”. 

The Beehiiv MCP (Model Context Protocol) lets you connect to your AI platform of choice. It is now available for free accounts. It lets you analyze your subscriber data, content archive, surveys, polls, podcasts, audience and other data. Suggested starting prompt:  "Audit my beehiiv account and tell me the single biggest thing I'm not doing that could help me grow my audience."  How to connect the MCP. It’s optimized for Claude (Anthropic developed the protocol). It appears that MCP connectors are only available in Gemini for developers and enterprise customers.

Beehiiv has updated hosted podcast pages to include broad distribution (Apple, Spotify, etc), episode pages, full transcripts, playlist of recent episodes, video embeds and more.

Snapseed, Google’s “pro” photo editing app, is rolling out a major Android update. It includes the Snapseed Camera, which can be used for “film looks” and custom styles, a redesigned Home tab, non-destructive and batch editing, new editing tools and faster editing overall. This redesign was available to iOS devices in February. Get Snapseed for Android.

 If you use Amazon Photos it’s been redesigned to shift the focus from storage to discovery. Your Home page now has curated collections of photos (like trips or people) and you can search using natural language.

Skills is a new AI feature in Chrome that makes it easier to repeat tasks when you open new web pages or documents. Save your most effective prompts and run them with a single prompt. This is currently only available for Google Workspace Business, Enterprise and Education accounts.

Help Me Write in Gmail can now better contextualize using Google Drive and Gmail content. It will also try to match your usual tone and style. For personal Google Accounts this is available with a Google AI Plus, Pro or Ultra subscription. It’s also available for Google Workspace.

Instagram is testing allowing creators “who often create with AI” to label themselves as an “AI creator”. The label appears on the profile and alongside content. Will any of the accounts that post AI-generated images that they pretend are real photos use this? I’m guessing not.

Supposedly there was a major purge of bot followers on Instagram, with some celebrity accounts losing literally millions of followers. Most reports from normal accounts noted a drop of less than 5%.

Finally (yay!), Threads DMs are available on desktop. 

Threads has new music stickers that add a nice music player to your post.

Threads is also testing animated mini stickers in posts. The announcement used animated letters ransom note-style (click to see), which are pretty visually exhausting. 

Meta is going to use automated AI systems to detect underage (under 13) teens. It will use both visual clues and age estimation (but not facial recognition), and contextual clues like posts about school or birthdays. Why? Because teens and kids often don’t provide an accurate birthdate.

Bluesky now lets you launch Germ’s end-to-end encrypted messaging from Bluesky profiles. Germ runs on the same AT Protocol as Bluesky.

Acorn is a new online community platform built on the AT Protocol used by Bluesky. It was developed by Blacksky. Communities can create follow Starter Packs, set moderation policies, and users can build feeds for announcements and other content. 

Sometimes YouTube’s systems for flagging inauthentic content are going to get it wrong. But it also seems like the appeal system isn’t working. This story about animator Nathan Little’s demonetization is a case in point. 

Charlie Warzel @ The Atlantic: How Short-Form Clips Took Over the Internet

Another old time search engine is gone. Ask.com, formerly Ask Jeeves, shut down on May 1st. It launched in 1997, a year before Google. Google’s Danny Sullivan reviewed the site in 1998, explaining how you could use it to “ask questions to give you answers” (it wasn’t AI, it was people!).