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Creator Weekly: YouTube copyright details, Bluesky traffic, Adobe allows 3rd party AI

Creator Weekly: YouTube copyright details, Bluesky traffic, Adobe allows 3rd party AI

Peggy K
March 22, 2025

Spring has sprung, flowers are in bloom, and tech companies shared lots of updates. I suspect it’s the “launch by the end of Q1” rush.

This week there are updates for video on YouTube and LinkedIn, for live streamers from Twitch, Kick, and Restream, for publishers using Ghost and AdSense, and for social users on Bluesky and Threads. Plus a bunch of Gemini and other AI updates.

Pour yourself a cup of coffee or tea and dig in!

New Tips and Tutorials

If you have an Android phone or tablet, and a Windows computer, install Quick Share for Windows to quickly and easily share files between your PC and Android device. Get the Quick Share for Windows app.

To Do & Try

TikTok has a new account Security Checkup, that you should definitely use. Start in the TikTok mobile app on your TikTok Profile > Settings & Privacy > Security & Permissions. The page has a step-by-step guide to secure your account.

Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates

YouTube has improved the Video Copyright Details page in YouTube Studio. It’s easier to find information about copyright claims and how they impact your channel. This is slowly rolling out to creators. Learn more from Creator Insider.

YouTube is improving the member content feed in the mobile app to “help drive new member activation and make it easier for new members to find content.” Learn more from Creator Insider.

YouTube is experimenting with visual guides in the Shorts editor that show you where not to put text or stickers if you want them maximally visible. Learn more from Creator Insider.

YouTube is testing an option for viewers to hide the end screen. The overlay at the end of the video can sometimes obscure important details, so this lets viewers hide it. There is a restore button if they want to see it again. Learn more from Creator Insider.

Some YouTube creators may see a message in YouTube Studio inviting them to help YouTube build tools to “detect and manage AI-generated content showing creators’ faces”. If you see it, you can voluntarily submit a video selfie. Your submission will only be used to develop AI protection tools. Learn more from Creator Insider.

YouTube is answering more questions about the mid-roll ad quality improvements coming in May. This time the Director of the YouTube Partner Program is answering questions like “How will YouTube’s bots know better than the creator where to insert ads?”, “How will it work with retention editing? (which tries to minimize gaps and breakpoints)?”, “What about gaming content?”, and “Why should you trust YouTube?”.

YouTube recapped 11 updates they shipped in the past year. No surprises if you’ve been reading the weekly roundup, but it’s a nice reminder of what YouTube wants to highlight: auto dubbing, the AI Inspiration tab, YouTube Shopping partnership with Shopify, Longer Shorts, Gifts powered by Jewels, Communities, improved Subscribe button on TVs, Hype, “Watch With” (watch live events with Creators), Veo AI Dream Screen, and Thumbnail A/B/C testing.

Semafor Media interviewed YouTube CEO Neal Mohan, where he spoke about moderation of medical-related content and COVID. It all seems a bit vague to me.

Digiday reports that YouTube has shared more details about how it will allow creators to organize content into TV-friendly episodes and series. They will create “beautiful show pages” for the series, and make them discoverable in the YouTube app.

Vimeo posted a recap of recent new features, including improved navigation, integration of text-based video editing into the classic video editor, and Adobe Premiere Pro integration.

Twitch now lets creators opt out of discounted gift subscription events. Creators may want to opt out because they earn less revenue per discounted subscription. Twitch does note “Our analysis shows that these discounts drive a higher volume of purchases and typically more than offset the reduced price.” Passionfruit notes that creator response has been mixed.

StreamElements sponsorships on the Twitch Creator Dashboard have rolled out to Affiliates.

Twitch CEO Dan Clancy explained to Business Insider why moderation of live streams that are multiple hours long is harder than moderation of a video on demand platform like YouTube. He didn’t explain why Twitch sometimes issues bans that it immediately reverts when people complain.

Streaming platform Kick has made it easier to qualify to become a Partner. Previously you needed 25 subscribers, plus 100 average viewers, 50 hours streamed, 500 unique chatters and 1500 followers. Now you only need 75 average viewers, 30 hours streamed, 250 unique chatters and 250 followers (the biggest difference).

New on Restream: Improved audio-only mode controls and improved custom layouts (YouTube video, with demo). Plus there is Kick chat integration and if your stream drops they will keep the connection open 60 seconds so you can reconnect. Get all the details of recent updates.

LinkedIn is testing a full-screen player for vertical video, and removal of the video tab. What you see depends on the country you are in.

LinkedIn has a new Create Video newsletter, with product updates, best practices and tips.

YouTube star Lilly Singh has launched HYPHEN8, an influencer network for global South Asian creators. She says authenticity is important: “What we actually want is real, flawed, imperfect humans. I think that’s really important with storytelling. Storytelling, by nature, is humans connecting with other humans. So if you take away what makes us human, that connection inevitably disappears.” If you are interested, sign up on the official website.

Web Publishers and Search

Barry Schwartz @ SEO Roundtable: Google Said It Made Updates To AI Overviews Links In May? The question mark is because there isn’t any real evidence of that. The conclusion is that Google should provide data in Search Console about clicked links in AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Blogger expert Adam explains why Google Search may just not be into you(r blog).

AdSense is allowing some publishers to use online verification to replace the usual ID verification and address verification with a mailed PIN. This is managed by a third party service called Persona. Online verification is only available in “certain locations”, so check your options in your AdSense account under Payments > Verification Check.

Newsletter and blog platform Ghost has opened a public beta for ActivityPub social web integration. You can follow other publications with ActivityPub (including Ghost and WordPress) and social sites like Mastodon and Meta’s Threads. The social Feed lets you create short-form posts that social followers will see, but that won’t appear on your website. A Ghost(Pro) account is required to join the beta.

Bing Webmaster Tools now includes Copilot AI for everyone. It gives personalized answers to questions, offers deep data insights, and learning resources. Currently it is only available in English.

Bluesky now redirects links through go.bsky.app, making it easier to track traffic from Bluesky to your website in Analytics. And they note that they “view the Bluesky app as a lobby to the open social web, and we don’t demote or throttle links.”

Meta Threads is adding several new features:

Improved video player, with pause, play and skip buttons, and a swipeable progress bar.
Add up to 10 tappable topics to your bio.
Prompts in the post editor to add a suggested topic, either a trending topic or one you previously shared.
Timely topics tags in the For You feed are now more prominent.

Reddit is replacing PMs (Private Messages) with Reddit Chat and inbox notifications. Existing PMs will be available in a read-only downloadable archive. The roll-out will take 3 months and Reddit is asking for feedback. Chat will be improved with pinned chats, an unread feature, filtering of spam invites, and more. The comments on the announcement are pretty uniformly negative.

Bloomberg: Community Notes on X and Meta Can’t Save Social Media From Itself

Communication and Collaboration

Features are available to free accounts unless otherwise noted.

If you use Google Photos on an Android device, the “Undo device backup” option is now available. This removes any photos or videos on the device from Google Photos.

Gmail has a new, improved, “smarter” search (powered by AI, of course) which is supposed to show the most relevant search results. Relevance is based on factors like how recent the message is, most clicked emails and frequent contacts. And you can always toggle over to the most recent results.

Google Vids AI-powered “Help me create” generates a draft video from selected files in Google Drive. And now it will automatically generate AI voiceovers for each scene, for cases where speed is more important than authenticity (yes, that last bit is me editorializing). This is available for Google Workspace Business (Standard, Plus), Enterprise (Standard, Plus), and Essentials.

If someone shares a Google Docs, Slides or Sheets file in Google Chat, Gemini can now “Summarize this file” right from the Chat conversation. This requires Google Workspace for Business (Standard, Plus), Enterprise (Standard, Plus) or Education with the Gemini Education add-on.

Canvas in Gemini is a new space to generate first drafts of documents and code. They can be refined, edited and exported to Google Docs. It is rolling out for Gemini for personal Google Accounts and Gemini Advanced subscribers, plus Google Workspace Business, Enterprise, Education, Frontline, Essentials and Nonprofits.

Gemini is available in more languages on the side panel of Google Chat. New languages include French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. This requires Google Workspace for Business (Standard, Plus), Enterprise (Standard, Plus) or Education with the Gemini Education add-on.

Gemini is now available on the side panel of Google Slides in 21 new languages. This includes the ability to use text to generate images. This requires Google Workspace for Business (Standard, Plus), Enterprise (Standard, Plus) or Education with the Gemini Education add-on.

More AI Updates and Tips

Adobe is allowing users to select 3rd party AI models (while noting that their Firefly model is “commercially safe and IP-friendly”). The choice will initially include Flux 1.1. Pro (Black Forest Labs), Fal.ai Upscalers, Veo 2 and Imagen 3 (Google), and Runway Frames. All AI-generated content will include Adobe’s Content Credentials. AI model choice will first be available in Project Concept “mood-boarding” and Adobe Express.

Google is adding the podcast-like Audio Overviews originally developed for NotebookLM to Gemini. It can create an Audio Overview from documents, slides, and Deep Research. It is initially available in English, but more languages will be coming soon. It’s available in Gemini on the web and in the Gemini mobile app.

Two new NotebookLM features: “an interactive Mind Map lets users navigate complex topics in their notebooks” and a selector for output language.

Google shared tips for using Deep Research in Gemini. It is apparently “really good at hyper-local searches and finding things in your immediate vicinity”.

Google’s AI Studio includes Gemini 2.0 Flash (Image Generation) Experimental, which lets you use text prompts to edit images. It can add or remove objects (including watermarks), zoom out or reposition objects. Try it here. Two notes: It is still experimental, and apparently was trained with a relatively small set of training data, so your mileage may vary. And Google AI Studio is aimed at developers, so it isn’t quite as user friendly as Gemini.com.

Anthropic’s Claude AI can now search the web for “more up-to-date and relevant responses.” It uses Brave Search. How it works.

The Atlantic reported on the “Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem”. Meta pirated literally millions of fiction and non-fiction books to train its AI, because licensing the books was too expensive and “too slow”. You can search the LibGen database they created by author here. My socials are full of authors reporting that their books were included. Meta couldn’t be bothered to even purchase a single copy. 😠 (Atlantic subscription required)

Meta AI chat is rolling out to European users, and will be available in six languages. Meta says “It’s taken longer than we would have liked to get our AI technology into the hands of people in Europe as we continue to navigate its complex regulatory system – but w’re glad we’re finally here.”