Peggy K's Creator Weekly
Posts
Creator Weekly: YouTube Autodubbing, Twitch Shared Viewership, Google Search Console

Creator Weekly: YouTube Autodubbing, Twitch Shared Viewership, Google Search Console

Peggy K
December 14, 2024

We are two weeks from 2025, and tech companies have launched a flurry of updates and new features, likely to get them out before the end of the year.

For video creators there’s news and updates for YouTube, Twitch, TikTok and for bloggers there’s new Medium features, updates to Google Search console, and news about WordPress-related litigation. Plus there are updates for Tumblr, Bluesky, Threads, Instagram, and X. And so much AI news!

It’s a lot, I know. Hopefully there are at least a few updates that you find useful.

Top news and updates this week

Make your commitment for 2025!
Get your 2024 recaps from Twitch and Beehiiv, and see your Google Local Year in Search.
YouTube is expanding auto-dubbing translations to more creators.
Twitch now shows Shared Viewership stats for collabs.
The YouTube mobile app has improvements for creators.
YouTube’s expanded AI Inspiration tools are now on the Content tab in YouTube Studio.
YouTube is piloting a “Watch With” feature where creators comment on sports events.
YouTube is testing multiplayer games on the web and app.
TikTok lost their appeal to delay their ban in the US.
LinkedIn now displays public video videos.
Medium launched human-curated Featured Stories.
WP Engine won a preliminary injunction restoring their access to WordPress (dot) org.
Google Search Console added a new 24 hour reports view.
Google Search Console Insights no longer includes Google Analytics data.
Tumblr launched Communities out of beta.
Bluesky clarified its moderation policies, announcing they do not consider off-platform behavior.
Threads tests starter pack-like curated profile collections.
Instagram launches Trial Reels, where you can test Reels before launching them to your followers.
Meta now allows Instagram creators to remove their first policy strike through education.
X added more restrictive eligibility requirements for its creator program.
Google Photos now lets you undo a device backup.
Google Docs has 40 new templates, and Gemini can create a full document from Drive files and a single prompt.
Google Chat lets you mention people without adding them to your space or group, and has a new Gemini-powered “translate for me” option.
Google’s NotebookLM has a new interface, lets you interact with AI Overviews, and has a paid subscription with more options.
Google announced Gemini 2.0, with the ability to act as an agent. There are Project Astra improvements, and newly launched Project Mariner, Jules and Deep Research.
OpenAI released Sora, their text-to-video AI.
Reddit is testing AI-powered Reddit Answers to help people find information from Reddit posts.
Plus more tips, updates and articles.

Creator Weekly Live 🔴
What do you think about this week’s updates? Join the live Creator Weekly on Sunday, 10:30AM Pacific time (6:30PM UTC).

Take this week’s quiz ✅
What do you know about the color of the year?

What’s Your Commitment for 2025?

Have you made a commitment for 2025? Think of one word that sums up your commitment for the new year, then add yours here.
1. Open the Short in the YouTube mobile app.
2. Tap “Add Yours” to see who has added theirs.
3. Tap the “Add Yours” button again to create your own Short with the same prompt.

Get Your Year-End Recaps

If you are a Twitch viewer or streamer, your 2024 Recap is now available (www.twitch.tv/annual-recap), you can see stats like your total hours watched, most-watched games or categories, the top streamers you watched and emotes you used. Streamers can see hours streamed, new followers & subs and more.

If you are in the US, you can get your Google Local Year in Search (trends.withgoogle.com/local-year-in-search). Honestly, it seems pretty boring. It’s “metropolitan areas”, not actually local, and only shows popular searches for Olympians, songs, sports matchups and “near me” searches (In my area the top two near me searches are about voting, and the next 3 are about finding insurance, which is so very boring.).

Beehiiv Rewind is available if you use the Beehiiv newsletter platform. Check your email for more details or click the Rewind button on the left menu.

YouTube Expands Access to Auto Dubbing

YouTube is expanding its automatically dubbed translations from the original small group to hundreds of thousands of channels in the YouTube Partner Program that are “focused on knowledge and information”.

Auto dubbing started as “Aloud”, a Google Area 120 experiment. It was originally announced at the September 2023 Made on YouTube event (more than a year ago).

Currently the automated dubbing is from English to French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish; or from one of those languages back to English.

If it is available for your channel you can find the controls in YouTube Studio > Settings > Upload Defaults > Advanced Settings. You can preview the dubs before publishing and remove dubs after a video is published. Viewers will see an “auto-dubbed” label on the video. Learn more.

The big question for me is how accurate the dubbing is, and whether it’s wise to add a dubbed version in a language I don’t speak.

Twitch Shared Viewership Metrics

Twitch added a new metric for collabs: Shared Viewership. This shows total unique viewers across all collaborator channels, and it does impact the stream’s position when people sort by viewership.

Collaborative live streaming has been one of Twitch’s big focuses this year, with Drop Ins launching in August to make spur-of-the-moment collabs easier.

Shared Viewership applies when “collaborative streamers (who are actually present) are sharing audio and/or video together” and Shared Chat is enabled. Shared Viewership will not affect a creator's "Path to Partner" or the number of people who see ads on a channel, but there may be collab monetization options in the future.

Note that in addition to the shared stats, creators will still be able to see view numbers for individual channels.

Learn more about Shared Viewership.

Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates

YouTube is making improvements to the main YouTube mobile app for creators (details from Creator Insider):

Simplified Channel layout for new channels.
See all your videos, even private or drafts or members only, and you can sort them by oldest/newest or most viewed.
See your public subscribers.
Simplified Channel analytics and data stories.

As announced a few weeks ago, YouTube’s AI-powered Inspiration tools in YouTube Studio have moved from the Analytics section to Content (where it’s a better fit). YouTube touts it as “the starting place for brainstorming content.” You can get suggestions for topics, video outlines, thumbnails and titles that you can refine. This is available on the web and mobile YouTube Studio app, in all countries except those in the European Union, UK and Switzerland. The output is only in English. Learn more from the YouTube Creators channel.

YouTube is piloting a new “Watch With” feature that lets creators provide commentary, analysis and reactions to live sporting events. It’s designed to be watched on TVs, rather than your smaller screens.

YouTube is testing multiplayer games as part of its selection of YouTube Playables mini games. Try Ludo Club or Magic Tiles 3 on desktop or the web.

Learn about how to make YouTube Shorts people want to watch with creator Jenny Hoyos and Shorts product lead Todd Sherman.

TikTok has lost their appeal to delay their ban in the US. Parent company ByteDance says they will shut down the app in the US on January 19 under the current schedule. What exactly will happen is still up in the air, with a sale possible. Note that a TikTok ban would likely also include the CapCut video editor and the Lemon8 “lifestyle” photo sharing app. Most TikTok creators seem to be at a loss to know how to get their followers to move with them (if that happens).

Zach Bussey reports that Twitch is adding options to sort Clips by category, date, or who created it.

Lindsey Gamble reports that LinkedIn now publicly displays video views.

Web Publishers and Search

Medium is trying to set itself apart with a focus on human curation, rather than AI and algorithms. To that end, they launched Featured Stories. Publications will be able to feature stories to their followers that will be more highly recommended in Digest emails, on the homepage For You feed, in the publication story page, and anywhere followers see a publication's stories.

In the latest update to WP Engine versus Matt Mulleweg and his company Automattic, a judge granted WP Engine’s request for a preliminary injunction. This effectively requires a reset to the way things were before this really heated up, with WP Engine given access to the WordPress (dot) org site and their ACF plugin returned to their control. In the aftermath, Mullenweg reportedly rage quit a Slack for WordPress developers and a group of long-time WordPress open source contributors have written an open letter urging Mullenweg to work with the community. Mullenweg’s “State of the Word” live stream on December 16 should be interesting.

Also related, Yoast creator Joost deValk writes WordPress, and what should be on its roadmap.

Beehiiv CEO and founder Tyler Denk writes: Death by a thousand substacks, that argues “if you’re not a breadwinner on Substack, you’re the yeast.” Yes, of course, it’s biased.

Google Search Console has added a new 24 hour view to performance reports. That lets you see impressions, clicks, average click through rate (CTR) and average position in the search results with hourly granularity over the past 24 hours. The data appears with a delay of only a few hours.

Google Search Console Insights no longer includes metrics from Google Analytics. Google says this will keep the focus on Search data. See the original announcement from Google Search Central on LinkedIn.

Social blogging platform Tumblr launched Communities out of beta. These are meant to be a way to connect with people who have similar interests. Learn more.

As masses of new users join Bluesky, it is going through some moderation-related growing pains. (Some context via Reddit). Two clarifications they made about policy enforcement have left many people disappointed: they will primarily focus on what people do on the platform, rather than taking into account what people are doing on other sites; and they do allow people to share Bluesky screenshots (which gets around blocking) with commentary, as long as the commentary does not violate policy. While this may seem reasonable, there are people who coordinate harassment off the platform, and in some cases have followers who “know” that when someone’s profile or post is shared, that’s a suggestion that person should be harassed, even if the post itself is innocuous.

Some journalists are being criticized (or blocked) for following terrible people on Bluesky. Often their argument is that they need to know what that terrible person is posting, for their reporting. But that actually is unnecessary, as Bluesky profiles have RSS feeds - follow the feed, not the person!

Threads seems to be taking some inspiration from Bluesky, and are testing their version of starter packs, with curated collections of profiles. Currently there are a small number of invited curators creating the lists, but this should eventually be available to everyone. Right now all users in the US can see and follow people in the collections.

Threads also lets you record and share a voice clip from the mobile app. I’m not sure if this is new or not, but the only shared voice recording I’ve seen there is this post from the official Threads account.

Instagram has launched Trial Reels to help “reduce the pressure of releasing a Reel. Basically if you set a Reel as a trial, it is just shown to a group of people who are not your followers to see how it does. It doesn't show up on your profile, and it is not pushed to your followers. If it goes well, you can then publish it as usual. If you like how it performs, you can then share it with your followers. It seems like this is designed to ensure you aren’t catering to your followers’ tastes.

In August Meta launched a program that let Facebook creators remove their first policy violation strike by going through an educational program. They are now expanding this to creators on Instagram. This is available once in a 12 month period, and severe policy violations may not be eligible.

X has added more restrictive eligibility requirements for its creator program. You now must have 5 million organic impressions over the past 3 months and at least 2,000 verified followers (people with a paid subscription). Creators who have been trying to join the program for months (and paying for a subscription for eligibility), aren’t happy about the changes.

Andrew Hutchinson at Social Media Today takes a hard look at X’s claims that they have had record high usage in 2024, and the numbers don’t seem to add up.

In Mastodon’s latest update, they added Wrapstodon, a fun “year-in-review” feature. It’s not available generally yet, but I’m guessing next year there will be some year-end recaps.

Communication and Collaboration

Features are available to free accounts unless otherwise noted.

Google Photos now lets you undo a device backup, which lets you remove all the photos that are on your device from Google Photos, without deleting those photos.

Google Docs has 40 new “high-quality, visually modern” templates for business, education and more. These are pageless templates, meant to be viewed online (as most people do).

Gemini AI “help me create” in Google Docs can create a full document using Google Drive content from a single prompt. This requires a Gemini add-on for Google Workspace or a Google One AI Premium subscription.

Gemini in Google Drive can now be pointed at a specific folder to perform tasks like summarizing the documents in the folder. This requires a Gemini add-on for Google Workspace or a Google One AI Premium subscription.

In Google Chat you can now choose what to do when you @ mention someone who is not a member of your group discussion or space. You can either add them (which is how it has always worked) or just message them.

The new “translate for me” in Google Chat uses Gemini to translate from over 120 languages into your preferred language. This is only available to Google Workspace customers with the Gemini add-on or AI Meetings and Messaging add-on.

The GitHub app for Google Chat has been upgraded with enhanced repository and pull request subscription options and improved notification cards.

More AI Updates and Tips

Reddit is testing Reddit Answers. This uses AI to “help find, synthesize, and deliver easy-to-understand answers from real conversations in communities on Reddit.” It is available in English to some users in the US, and can be found at reddit.com/answers or in the iOS Reddit app.

Google’s NotebookLM has a new interface and now lets you verbally ask questions of the “hosts” in the podcast-like AI-overviews. There's also a new paid NotebookLM Plus subscription, which lets you create more Audio Overviews and notebooks, use more sources per notebook, and have more options to customize the output. This will be included in Google One AI Premium in the new year. It can also be purchased for Google Workspace and Google Cloud. Learn more.

Key members of the NotebookLM team, including the team lead and designer, have left Google for a “stealth” startup.

Google announced Gemini 2.0, with the ability to act as an agent. This is being used to improve Project Astra, which can now access Google Search, Lens and Maps; and to develop new prototypes: Project Mariner (“it’s able to understand and reason across information in your browser screen, including pixels and web elements like text, code, images and forms, and then uses that information via an experimental Chrome extension to complete tasks for you”), Jules (a coding agent that “can tackle an issue, develop a plan and execute it, all under a developer’s direction and supervision.”), agents that can explore virtual worlds created by Genie, robotics and more.

Google introduced Deep Research, which will do research for you from information across the web. It’s available with a Gemini Advanced subscription.

OpenAI has released Sora, their AI model that can create realistic-looking video clips from text prompts. Features include storyboards of sequential prompts, combining clips, and generating video from a photo.

The limitations? “The version of Sora we are deploying has many limitations. It often generates unrealistic physics and struggles with complex actions over long durations.” And OpenAI is limiting uploads of people, to prevent creation of deepfakes. The created videos have C2PA⁠ metadata, which identifies them as created by Sora.

If you have a ChatGPT Plus subscription, you can try Sora now (up to 50 videos, 7 seconds long, at 720p resolution). A ChatGPT Pro subscription is required to output videos in high definition, and up to 20 seconds.