Creator Weekly: YouTube Shorts Views, Twitch Ad-Friendly Guidelines, Facebook Friends Feed

Author

Peggy K
March 29, 2025

It’s the last week of March and there are tons of updates this week.

There are updates for YouTubers, Twitch streamers, website owners, newsletter writers, plus Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, X and more.

Top news and updates this week

  • YouTube metrics change: A Shorts View will count when a Short starts playing, rather than when someone watches the Short. This is comparable with other short-form video platform metrics.

  • YouTube is testing reduced push notifications to prevent people from turning off notifications altogether. 

  • Twitch published Advertiser-Friendly Content Guidelines to help monetizing creators understand how their content may affect revenue.

  • YouTube has added a “take a break” option for live streams, showing a pre-recorded video or ads.

  • You can now see your subscribers in the YouTube mobile app. 

  • You can access the YouTube AI Inspiration tab from content and comments in YouTube Studio, and bookmark your favorite suggestions.

  • AI bots are killing the open web, but Cloudflare has an AI Labyrinth to distract them.

  • Google Search says it’s good to create audio versions of your blog articles, for users, not for SEO. 

  • The AdSense European Regulations settings now let you enable Consent Mode to allow Google Analytics to respect user consent choices.

  • Beehiiv has a new Newsletter builder and templates. 

  • Substack has a new leaderboard system to highlight fastest growing and top earning publications. 

  • The new Facebook Friends tab is a feed of just content from your friends. 

  • Meta added AI tools to help brands connect with creators. 

  • Instagram lets you play Reels at double speed.

  • Instagram is removing friends’ content Notes. 

  • Pinterest is partnering with Coachella and sharing festival trends.

  • LinkedIn added Newsletter Analytics. 

  • Google Photos has dark mode on desktop. 

  • Google Meet is rolling out dynamic layouts for video meetings.

  • Google launched Gemini 2.5 with enhanced reasoning.

  • Plus learn how Yes became Forks, the 23andMe bankruptcy and privacy, and Microsoft at 50.

10 Years Ago This Week 🗓

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

Ten years ago, the launch of the Meerkat and Periscope apps brought mobile live streaming to the masses. Both platforms are long gone, but their legacy lives on with all the major social platforms offering mobile live Tips & Tutorials

 Did you catch last week’s OnEBoard Chat about Community? Check out the discussion and additional resources.

YouTube Counts More Shorts Views

YouTube is changing the way they count views on Shorts. Currently Views are counted when someone actively engages the Short. Starting March 31, a View will be counted when the Short starts playing, or replaying. That means someone scrolling past the Short in the Shorts Feed will count as a View. 

Why the change? This is the way other platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels count “Views”, so the numbers will now be comparable. This is good for creators, especially for making brand deals. And likely better for YouTube, who can show advertisers that the performance of Shorts is similar short video on other platforms.

Current Views will be counted as “Engaged Views” going forward. 

What does this mean? 

  • You may see an increase in the number of “Views” on Shorts starting March 31. 

  • Only Engaged Views count towards eligibility for the YouTube Partner Program. 

  • Only Engaged Views matter for monetization earnings.

YouTube Tests Reducing Push Notifications

YouTube is testing reducing some push notifications. For viewers in the experiment who have set “All” notifications for a channel, they will not get a push notification if they haven’t recently engaged with that channel. 

Why the test? Viewers may opt in to all notifications from many channels, and when that becomes overwhelming, just turn YouTube notifications off completely.

You can see how many of your viewers have done that in YouTube Studio > Analytics > Audience > Subscriber Bell Notifications. 

For my channel, 15% of subscribers have opted in to All notifications, but only 3.5% actually have YouTube push notifications turned on 🙁.

Note that YouTube says this is a small experiment, so odds are it doesn’t affect you.

Twitch Publishes Advertiser-Friendly Content Guidelines

Twitch has published Advertiser-Friendly Content Guidelines for monetizing creators.

Twitch requires streamers to add Content Classification Labels to content that might not be advertiser friendly. That isn’t new. What is new is now there’s more information about how a Label may affect ad revenue. 

Twitch says their "goal is to be more open about how brands decide where to run ads, and also, help our streamers make informed decisions about what to stream".

Content that “many advertisers choose not to run ads on” includes sexual themes, gambling, and politics and sensitive social issues (“inflammatory or attacking political discussions”).

Labels that are eligible for ads by default, but that advertisers may choose not to monetize includes, mature-rated games, violent & graphic depictions, significant profanity, and drugs & intoxication. 

Also, creators who received a temporary account suspension for Community Guidelines violations like sexual content, nudity, gambling and hateful conduct, may have ads removed for a “short period of time.”

Streamers reinstated after an indefinite suspension will lose ads for at least a month following their return.

More Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates

The new “Take a Break” option for YouTube live streams lets you select a 1, 3 or 5 minute break. You can use the default “Away” slate (pre-recorded video) or upload a video to show viewers. If eligible, midroll ads may show. Learn how to set that up.

You can now See Your Subscribers on your channel page in the YouTube mobile app, sorted by recency. Previously this was only available in YouTube Studio Desktop. Note that it only shows subscribers who have public subscriptions.

In the YouTube Studio Mobile app it’s easier to distinguish content-specific analytics from channel analytics by adding an “additional thumbnail next to a detailed content header” for videos. Learn more.

YouTube shared more mid-roll ad explainers. If you are a YouTube Partner and monetize with mid-roll ads, you should have received an email with more information. And if you only use automatic mid-rolls, it would say that in the email, with a note that you don’t need to make any changes.

You can now access the YouTube AI-powered Inspiration tab from more places in YouTube Studio. Just click the 3 dot menu icon on content, comments or from the Analytics page. The Inspiration tab now suggests “Hooks” for video intros and lets you bookmark your favorites. Learn more.

YouTube Creators has an overview of how Simulstreaming to multiple platforms (YouTube + other platforms, or landscape + vertical) works and best practices. Watch the video. Note that if you use a platform like StreamYard or Restream to live stream to multiple platforms, you don’t have to do any fancy configuration in YouTube Live Control Room. 

The olds are watching YouTube on TV. Tubefilter reports: Seniors are watching twice as much YouTube on TVs as they were a year ago. Video podcasts account for a good chunk of that growth. By “seniors” they mean viewers age 65 and older, so not me quite yet.

Twitch is seen as a safe haven by some creators in marginalized groups, as platforms like X and Facebook/Instagram roll back content moderation.

Lindsey Gamble reports on video tips shared by LinkedIn’s Director of Product Marketing.

TikTok is shutting down its Notes photo-sharing app, and is encouraging users to switch to Bytedance’s Lemon8 app, which is pretty much the same thing.

The Spotify Partner Program is expanding to nine new countries (see the list here). The program allows monetization of both video podcasts and audio podcasts.

AI bots are killing the open web. The bots scraping the web for AI training don’t follow robots.txt directives and just use any available connection to a website. It’s not just rogue bots either. Apparently Meta’s crawler is a serious offender. This uses up the website owner’s server resources and can effectively cause a denial of service attack. To fight this Cloudflare has a new “AI Labyrinth” feature that directs the bad bods through a series of irrelevant web pages using up their resources.

Google Search says that creating an audio version of a blog article is unlikely to impact the original page's rank in search, and it's a good thing for users!

Google is beginning to roll out Search AI Overviews in the EU, starting with Austria, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland.

Google’s CMP (Consent Management Platform) in AdSense now supports Consent Mode, which “allows other Google products you use (such as Google Ads, Google Analytics, or Firebase) to respect your users' consent choices.” This will be available on the European Regulations settings page in Privacy & Messaging. Learn More.

Glenn Gabe reports that Reddit’s AI-powered translations of content are ranking well in the Google Search results, while other forums have seen a drop since Google’s March Core update.

Beehiiv which I use to run my newsletter, has a new Newsletter builder and a few nice templates to start with. I feel the urge to work on a spring redesign!

Substack has a new leaderboard system that highlights the fastest growing and highest earning publications. There are separate leaderboards for the most popular categories. To help publications grow, Substack is also offering publisher and post-level stats. And they are promising Title testing (which sounds useful).

Social Media

Facebook wants to “bring back the magic of friends”. The new Friends tab is a feed that is only content from your Facebook friends, with  no recommended content. If you are in the US or Canada, you can get the new feed and pin the tab on mobile (see the link for details). Will this truly “bring back the magic”? I suspect not. It’s not a new shiny platform any more, and many folks stopped posting on Facebook long ago. (I’ll note that Facebook has been trying to figure out how much “friends” content to show for more than a decade, so this probably isn’t the last change they will make).

Meta is making it easier for businesses and brands to connect with creators with AI-powered creator discovery and content recommendation tools, particularly for Instagram’s Creator Marketplace. They have also added more information about creators, including showing relevant Reels content and indicators showing a creator’s experience with partnership ads. 

Instagram finally lets you play Reels at double speed. Long press on the right or left edge of the screen for the video to play at 2x. Yay! (Now I want this for YouTube Shorts).

Instagram is apparently also slowly rolling out the option to repost someone’s post in your feed. Previously you could only repost someone’s post to a Story. There’s no announcement or official information yet, so it could just be a test.

Instagram is turning off content Notes on posts and Reels. These are small notes only your friends on instagram can see, not the new Community Notes. It launched last year, and according to Instagram’s Adam Mosseri “didn’t end up seeing a lot of adoption”. 

Instagram is working on improving search, including search for accounts and content.

Elon Musk’s xAI purchased Elon Musk’s X for “$33 Billion”. Scare quotes because this was an “all-stock” transaction, rather than money changing hands, and it’s not clear how the valuations for the businesses were determined. This apparently is financially good for X (and Musk, presumably).

X is expanding access to its React with Video option. This lets you react to a post with a video (the original post is included in the video). 

Pinterest is partnering with the Coachella Festival with the theme “Remix yourself on Pinterest”. You can stop by their physical space at the festival to create moodboards, or just check out the current festival trends.

Pinterest is introducing Modules to the home feed, to “give Pinners more context about their feed content and more ways to explore topics.” Pinterest Engineering explains how they work. And follow the Pinterest Pop Culture profile for inspiration. 

Bluesky runs on the ATProto network, but it’s not limited to Bluesky. At last week’s ATmosphere Conference developers and open source advocates talked about the promise of platform, challenges and what’s coming..

Communication and Collaboration

Features are available to free accounts unless otherwise noted. 

Google Photos now has dark mode on the web. You can change this under Settings > Appearance.

Google Slides finally has proportional scaling when multiple objects are selected. It is also easier to select individual objects that are on top of each other.

Google Meet has new dynamic layouts. “It allocates available space based on content being presented, tiles pinned by users, and more to address a core hybrid-work challenge of remote meeting participants not being able to easily see or identify in-room users.” The default automatically crops out most of the background (maybe making custom backgrounds less relevant) and lets you decide how your self-view tile is cropped. Definitely check out the demos.

“Help me write” in Gmail and Gemini in Drive PDF viewer are now available in more languages. This requires Google One with AI Premium or a Google Workspace account.

If you have access to Gemini in Google Drive there are new “nudges” on the Drive homepage, including “summarize a folder”, “learn about a file”, and “learn about Gemini in Drive”.

Did you miss any of the Google Workspace announcements this month? (If you’ve been reading my posts, you should be caught up!). If so, check out the Workspace March feature drop post. There are updates for Meet meeting notes, Google Vids and more language options across Workspace products.

More AI Updates and Tips

Google launched Gemini 2.5. Google says these are  “thinking models, capable of reasoning through their thoughts before responding, resulting in enhanced performance and improved accuracy.” It’s now available for Gemini Advanced users.

If you use Microsoft Copilot you might try one of their new reasoning agents for work, “Researcher” and “Analyst”. 

More Reading (and watching)

The Pew Research Center discovered the option “Yes” in some polls was replaced by “Forks”. They took a dive into why that happened and how it was fixed. The short version is that it was a combination of browser automatic translation (mistaking English for Spanish) and Google Translate (which translates Spanish “Yes” to English “Forks”). It’s a cautionary tale and shows how you cannot rely on automated translations for anything important.

Genetic testing company 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy. The California Attorney General (and AGs from several other states) have posted a consumer alert with instructions for requesting removal of your 23andMe data and DNA samples.

Microsoft is 50! From the Microsoft blog: Microsoft at 50: The journey and future of the partner ecosystem

Thanks for reading! 🌼