Creator Weekly: YouTube Community Promotion, Adobe Premiere for iPhone, Threads Text Attachments

Hello Creators! This is a great week for iOS device users, with new apps for video editing (Premiere, YouTube Create) and Instagram. There’s also updates for everyone on Twitch, Threads, Bluesky, Discord, TikTok, Vids and more. Read on!

Top news and updates this week

🗓 Ten Years Ago This Week: Big Tech Allies to Create a New Video Format

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

In September 2015 tech giants Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, Mozilla and Netflix came together as the Alliance for Open Media. Their goal: to create an open, royalty-free video coding format. The result was AV1, which is still (slowly) being adopted. Learn more.

YouTube explains four metrics creators should master for their channel. Check out the tips and follow the “creator take action” suggestions (I need to do this).

Androidify yourself! The Androidify app is available for Android (of course) and on the web. You can either upload a photo or write a prompt to generate your shareable Android bot. Some lucky folks will be given the chance to animate the bot with Veo (plus on Fridays this September, you’ll be able to animate your Android bot into an 8-second video).

YouTube has added the ability to easily share a direct link to your Community. Visit your Community in the YouTube app, tap the 3 dot menu icon, then select Share to find your sharing options. 

You can also share individual Community posts by clicking the share icon underneath a Post. You can get the link, share the post to another app, or repost it on YouTube.

These seem like nice ways to boost your (or anyone’s) YouTube Community, although I’m not convinced yet it’s worth enabling for my channel.

The YouTube Create mobile video editing app is now available to iOS users in Canada. It requires an iPhone XR (or newer model) running on iOS 17 or later. 

The app is already available for Android in 21 countries.

Just last week, templates were added to the app.

This appears to be renewed focus on developing the app, which gives creators another alternative to CapCut and Edits.

Adobe announced the Premiere app for iPhone. This is the mobile version of Adobe’s premium video editing software. 

It will be free to use, with paid add-ons for cloud storage and generative AI credits. 

Adobe is discontinuing the simpler free Premiere Rush app.

Features include:

They are supposedly working on the Android version.

Threads now has a blogging-like feature, similar to Articles on X. 

You can add a Text Attachment with up to 10,000 characters of text to a Threads post (in addition to the 500 character post limit). You can include an external link, so you could use this to share a preview of content on your blog, newsletter, podcast, book or other platform. 

A caveat, though, is that the attached text is not currently indexed by search engines, rendered in embeds, or shared to the Fediverse, so this is strictly only for people who see it on Threads itself. (You can see an example from Glen Gabe here)

Threads is also improving threads. They are testing a floating label that shows how deep you are in the thread (so you can see if a post is number 3 of 7, for example). When someone taps into a thread, the original poster’s post replies are at the top. And threads are better displayed on your profile, showing the first and second post in a thread, plus an indicator of thread length.

Instagram finally has an iPad app. Instagram says people have been asking for this “for a while”, which I suspect is an understatement. 

The app opens to the Reels feed, with Stories at the top. There’s also a “Following” tab where you can filter for “All”, just “Friends” or a “Latest” chronological feed. 

The entire design is meant for the tablet’s larger screen, which should be a significant improvement.

While you can create a post, it does not include the Reels editor - for that you need to use a phone. 

The design changes will be coming soon to Android. 

The new Google Photos Create tab is rolling out in the U.S. (This was originally announced in July). It’s a hub to find all of Google Photos’ creative tools. 

YouTube launched Gift Effects. Fans purchase Jewels, and can use those Jewels to buy Gifts for vertical live streamers (US only). Gifts are static or animated images. There are now five new Gift interactive options: Cat Ears, Good Job, Flower Crown, Celebrate and Royal Crown (labeled with a purple sparkle in the Gift picker). When purchased they appear on screen for 8-15 seconds. Learn more.

Recent updates to the YouTube app for Smart TVs and Gaming Consoles include better search recommendations and new shelves with “Over 20 minutes” long-form videos and “Recommended podcasts shelf based on your previous search history.

YouTube has a new Culture and Trends report focused on GenZ (teens and twenty-somethings), highlighting what it calls “Creative Maximalism”. What the heck does that mean?  Read the report, which is clearly aimed at middle-aged people who want to grab the attention of kids today.

YouTube has a new partnership with Sesame Workshop, the creators of Sesame Street.

YouTube is bringing C-SPAN to YouTube TV, and they are improving C-SPAN’s presence on the main YouTube platform. C-SPAN is a non-partisan non-profit that covers government proceedings without commentary.

Flow Sessions is a new program that gives select filmmakers unlimited access to Google Flow AI filmmaking platform, AI education and mentorship from the first Flow artist-in-residence, filmmaker Henry Daubrez.

Twitch has a new article listing the official  contact methods they use.Messages will only be sent from @twitch.tv, @justin.tv or @amazon.com email domains. They also use in-account banners. Don't get scammed!

Twitch is experimenting with new comment moderation settings.There is a new slider bar that lets you quickly and easily set up Chatter Permissions, AutoMod & Message Filtering, & Channel Protection. You can optionally use Advanced Settings for more refined controls. Try it at dashboard.twitch.tv/settings/moderation 

TikTok is partnering with Fandango to allow TikTok users in the US to purchase movie tickets. There will be “in-app hubs” for movies with a Get Tickets button, starting with the new TRON:Ares movie premiering October 10th.

TikTok launched a new Creator Pilot Program for Affiliate and Marketing creators with between 1,000 and 5,000 followers. This allows smaller creators to begin monetizing content in  TikTok Shop.

If you use StreamYard for vertical live streaming, you can now use Scenes in vertical streaming mode. 

Carolyn Shelby for Search Engine Land: The implosion of the blogging-for-dollars revenue model. This isn’t new, it’s been declining for years, but Shelby argues that AI “stealing clicks” and audiences looking for “fast, clean, useful answers” are the final nail in the coffin.

In the latest version of Bluesky: 

LinkedIn has a new integration with the CapCut video editing app. You can export your videos from CapCut directly to LinkedIn with just a couple of clicks. The video announcement (click the link) has a “Made with CapCut” button to get you started.

Oscar Rodreguez, VP of Product at LinkedIn, says they are making changes to “keep engagement real”. They are working to make “engagement pods” ineffective (these are groups that like, comment and share each other’s posts to artificially boost them). They are also “reducing the number of low quality posts, including click bait, promotional content and automated comments.”

Discord is updating their policies to add age-verification for UK users to access 18+ content, and updated information on how user data is used to improve the platform (NOT training AI) and shared with third parties (like advertisers). They have also added policy explainers to their Community Guidelines.

Discord has made improvements to server and channel management, 

In the latest round of Discord updates, they have added Tumblr embed support.

Instagram is using machine learning to improve notification quality, by introducing a “diversity-aware notification ranking framework that helps deliver more diverse, better curated, and less repetitive notifications.”

Instagram now lets you pin your own comments to your posts.

For reasons unknown, Facebook is trying to make Pokes a thing again. You can see who “poked” you and find friends to poke at facebook.com/pokes or poke friends from their profile. This might have been amusing 10 or 15 years ago, but now, please don’t poke me.

Google Vids can now use AI to generate a video from a Slides presentation. “Gemini will generate a video draft by pulling text and visual content from your slides. This includes incorporating relevant Slides, images, and text in drafts, in addition to suggested scripts, AI voiceovers, music, and more.” Requires an eligible Google Workspace account or Google AI subscription.

You can now use Gemini to refine text in a text box in Google Slides. For example, you can ask Gemini to rephrase, shorten, formalize, or bulletize the current text. (My rule of thumb is that there should not be so much text that people are reading your slide, rather than listening to the presentation.) Requires an eligible Google Workspace account or Google AI subscription.

Scanning documents with the Android Google Drive app has an improved interface for previewing and retaking scan images. (I use this all the time!)

The Android GBoard has new AI powered writing tools to correct grammar, fix typos, and change your writing style (casual, formal, expressive, concise). 

Android Circle to Search can now live translate text (including text on images) as you scroll through content. Useful!

Google responds to rumors about Gmail security issues: Gmail's protections are strong and effective, and claims of a major Gmail security warning are false. 

The Verge: How Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaksi It’s all about being boring, and making users follow the rules.

Electronic Frontier Foundation: Age Verification Is A Windfall for Big Tech—And A Death Sentence For Smaller Platforms 

Bloomberg: Technicolor Liquidated in 2025 in France, US, Rest of World 

A US Federal Court has announced the remedies imposed on Google, which lost a landmark anti-trust case. Some thought they might have to spin off Chrome or Android. But the main penalty is that Google cannot make exclusive contracts with other companies to feature or default to Google products -- but they can still pay companies to do that, as long as it isn’t exclusive. Google will also have to share search data with certain “Qualified Competitors.” Google responded: “Now the Court has imposed limits on how we distribute Google services, and will require us to share Search data with rivals. We have concerns about how these requirements will impact our users and their privacy, and we’re reviewing the decision closely.”

Also this week: Google hit with $3.45 billion EU antitrust fine over adtech practices 

The Verge: Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion to authors in landmark AI settlement, which works out to about $3000 per work. This was based on Anthropic’s use of pirated copies of books -- using legally purchased books to train their AI models would be considered fair use.

LE Audio for Android lets you share device audio with a group. Use your phone to create a silent (to outsiders) disco.

404 Media: Google AI Falsely Says YouTuber Visited Israel, Forcing Him to Deal With Backlash. It’s a serious problem that AI Overviews of search results sometimes include totally incorrect information. People don’t click the links to check the sources for confirmation. This is especially a problem when the false information touches on politics (in this case attributing the activities and opinions of one person to a different person, even though their names aren’t even similar). 

Thanks for reading! 🌼