Peggy K's Creator Weekly: YouTube Monetization, Creator Music, Twitch Streamers

September 24, 2022

Happy autumn (and spring to those of you in the Southern Hemisphere)! This week there is big news for YouTube creators (good) and Twitch streamers (not so good).  You can check to see if your art or photos have been used in an AI training set. Plus there are tips and updates to make you more productive. 

Upcoming

September 28 is Google’s #SearchOn 22 event. Learn what’s new in Google Search.

More YouTube monetization options

Starting later this fall and into 2023 YouTube will be offering more monetization options. The two big changes are the ability to earn ad revenue from Shorts and new licensing options to earn from videos with commercial music.

  • Eligibility for the YouTube Partner Program is expanding to include YouTube shorts creators. You will be able to qualify for YPP with 1000 subscribers and either 4000 hours watch time in the past year or at least 10 million Shors views in the past 90 days (no one said it would be easy!).

  • All channels in the YouTube Partner Program will be able to earn ad revenue from Shorts. A cut of the ad revenue goes towards music licensing, so videos with popular music added with the Shorts Editor can still earn. 

  • YouTube is reducing the eligibility requirements for fan funding (memberships, Super Chat, Super Thanks, Super Stickers), so that it will not be required for your channel to be in the YouTube Partner Program to earn some money. And Shorts will be able to earn from Super Stickers.

  • Creator Music is a catalog of commercial music that creators in the YouTube Partner Program can license for use in their videos. Videos with licensed music can be monetized. This will initially launch in the United States.

There will be additional details available before these options launch. Current YouTube Partners will have to accept updated terms before being able to earn Shorts ad revenue. 

Twitch Reduces Subscription Revenue Share

Twitch announced that streamers with premium revenue split deals will see a reduction in their earnings starting next year. Streamers that currently have a 70/30 subscription revenue split with Twitch will only continue with that split for their first $100,000 in earnings. Beyond that they will get the 50/50 standard revenue split. Twitch estimates this will only significantly affect about 10% of streamers with the premium terms. 

This is a disappointment to many Twitch streamers who were hoping everyone would be moved to the 70/30 revenue share. Ryan Wyatt, formerly head of YouTube Gaming, weighed in to opine “70/30 for every single dollar for all creators should be expected norm on non-ads monetization products”. (That’s the revenue split for YouTube’s channel Memberships).

Why the change? At least in part because “Delivering high definition, low latency, always available live video to nearly every corner of the world is expensive.”

Video News

Twitch updated their gambling content policy, in response to many complaints. They will be banning “streaming of gambling sites that include slots, roulette, or dice games that aren't licensed either in the or other jurisdictions that provide sufficient consumer protection”. Sites that offer poker and sports betting are still allowed. 

TikTok has increased their description character limit from 300 characters to a more “searchable” 2200. It seems they want to be the search destination for GenZ. Why? Probably to sell people things.

Web Creators 

The Google Sites site editor now lets you add spacing to your Site layout.

Social Media

Content moderation is hard. Really hard. Mike Masnick wrote about quoting The Princess Bride, getting locked out of Twitter, and how “a ridiculous amount of content moderation involves trying to interpret statements where you don’t (or, more often, can’t) know the actual context.”

AI Art

Have I been trained? Is a tool that helps artists and others find out if their images are included in art AI training data. It can also be used to determine if the AI art you generated includes a direct copy of an artist’s work. There is a similar site that lets you check to see if your Flickr photos were used in biometric surveillance research.

OpenAI is now offering Whisper, an extremely accurate audio transcription open source neural net. See the Twitter comments for various implementations to try. Andy Baio points out this is a useful tool for generating captions for your content.

Stock photography site Unsplash now bans AI-generated image submissions, as does Getty Images. The issue? There are “open questions with respect to the outputs from these models”.

Productivity

 Nina Trankova posted a tutorial showing how to embed a Google Calendar appointment booking page on your own website. Appointment booking is included with Google Workspace Individual subscriptions and other Google Workspace business plans.

Google’s Assistant and Calendar Reminders are becoming Google Tasks. If you set an Assistant Reminder, it will appear in your Tasks list and Google Calendar.Tasks are integrated with Gmail, Chat, Calendar, Drive, and Docs on the web, and available on Google Calendar and the Tasks app on mobile. 

Add Figma and FigJam files to Google Calendar Events.

More

Did you know you can submit a Doodle to Google? They get hundreds of suggestions every day, so your odds of being chosen are slim. But if you are passionate about a Doodle concept, it’s worth submitting.

With protests against the police in cities across Iran, government authorities have been trying to shut down WhatsApp, Instagram and the entire internet.