Creators

YouTube Shorts can now include 60 seconds of music or sounds, up from 15 seconds before • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Apps, Creators, Media & Entertainment, Music, shorts, Videos, YouTubeNo Comments

YouTube today is addressing one of creators’ chief complaints with filming videos for its TikTok competitor, YouTube Shorts: to date, the music and sounds added to videos could only be 15 seconds in length, even though Shorts themselves can be as long as 60 seconds. Now, thanks to revised licensing deals, YouTube says the majority of music on Shorts will be available in durations of up to 60 seconds. In addition, creators can “remix,” or sample, up to 60 seconds of sounds from other videos, instead of only 15 seconds, as before. Over the next few weeks, YouTube creators will begin to see the expanded options for adding music to their videos when using the audio picker in the YouTube app for iOS and Android. In some cases, the songs will only be 30 seconds in length, due to continued licensing restrictions, YouTube notes. The company, like TikTok and others, negotiates with songs’ rights holders, including the music label or distributor and publisher, before including the track in YouTube Shorts. While YouTube won’t comment on the state of its deals with its music industry partners, it says that most songs in its audio library will now have a maximum duration of up to 60 seconds. The update aims to make YouTube Shorts more competitive with its rivals, including TikTok and Instagram Reels, at a time when the length of what’s considered a “short-form” video is also changing. To access the longer music tracks, creators will need to tap the “+” icon to enter the Shorts camera in the mobile app then pick an audio track from the library. When choosing the sound in the audio picker, you’ll be able to see the duration time which indicates how much audio you can use from the specific track. Creators will also need to change their video recording duration in the Shorts camera in order to use more than 15 seconds of audio, YouTube notes. Similarly, the company is also expanding the length of audio that can be clipped and re-used from other videos. In April, YouTube announced the launch of a remix feature that allows Shorts creators to sample clips from existing YouTube videos that have been posted publicly on the platform — unless the video’s owner had opted out. Many creators see this functionality as a way to bring more visitors to their channel or to introduce their content to a younger generation of users who may have only discovered their videos through Shorts. Before, creators could only sample 15-second segments of original audio from eligible Shorts and video-on-demand content. Now, they can sample up to 60 seconds. While the length of music is being expanded, the maximum length of a YouTube Shorts video itself is not — it will remain 60 seconds. The new feature will roll out to YouTube users globally on iOS and Android. Currently, YouTube Shorts are being watched by over 1.5 billion logged-in users every month and garner over 30 billion views per day, the company claims. Unrelated to music expansions, YouTube also today confirmed the launch of Shopping on YouTube Shorts — a new feature being piloted with U.S. creators that lets them tag products from their own stores. The move follows the launch of TikTok’s own of e-commerce features. Currently, viewers in the U.S., India, Brazil, Canada, and Australia can view and interact with these tags for the time being, and the feature will expand to more creators next year.

What’s going on with NFT royalties? • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 2, 2022Posted in Creators, Crypto, EC Blockchain, EC Cryptocurrency, looksrare, NFTs, raribleNo Comments

In recent months, conversations around NFT creator royalties shifted as some platforms abandoned royalties for other alternatives. Not everyone is happy about it. “Every platform had royalties about a year ago,” Alex Salnikov, chief strategy officer and co-founder of NFT marketplace Rarible, said to ZebethMedia. Then half a year passed and some marketplaces stopped implementing them, he added. Creator royalties were originally introduced across the NFT community as a way to pay artists for their work in both primary and secondary sales. In general, the content creator royalty is 2.5% to 10% of an item’s purchase price. Most royalties average about 5%, Salnikov said. A lot of creators’ initial income comes from primary sales, but over time, secondary sales can build out their income through royalties, Alex Fleseriu, CEO of fine-art-focused Solana NFT marketplace Exchange.ART, told ZebethMedia. “It holds up their success and it’s very important for them to make a living.” “Let’s pick one of these ways and get all of the NFT marketplaces behind it. We’re cursing the market by fighting over market share.” Rarible co-founder Alex Salnikov Royalties and rewarding creators are the foundations for building long-term value, Shiti Manghani, COO of web3 gaming and development studio Find Satoshi Lab, said to ZebethMedia. “The creators and artists will work with platforms that value their work, stop their exploitation and consequently empower them to create their best work.” Find Satoshi Lab launched a multichain NFT marketplace on Tuesday that enforces royalties. “Web3 was born in many ways to solve for the challenges faced by creators with centralized institutions that did not allow for fair rewards to be awarded,” Manghani said. “[We] would like to stay true to that ethos.” Separately, Exchange.ART on Wednesday launched its “Royalties Protection Standard,” which enforces creator royalties on secondary sales of NFTs on its platform. This means that new NFT collections on its marketplace can utilize the standard to ensure artists that their work won’t be traded on marketplaces without their consent. “We’ve seen royalties come under a lot of pressure lately,” Fleseriu said. “We’ve seen marketplaces, protocols, basically allow buyers and sellers to circumvent those royalties, which intensifies this predatory nature of the NFT ecosystem overall, especially in the [profile picture] market.”

Facebook expands its professional mode profile setting to all creators globally • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in Apps, Creators, Facebook, meta, SocialNo Comments

Meta has announced the global expansion of its professional mode profile setting on Facebook to all creators. Professional mode is designed to be used by creators looking to monetize their followings on the social network. Facebook began testing professional mode with select creators in December 2021 and is now offering it to anyone on its platform. Professional mode is somewhat similar to Pages in the sense that it gives creators a separate profile to build their presence on the social network. In a blog post, Facebook said that it sees professional mode as a way to “build a public following, earn money from various monetization programs, and connect with your audience in more meaningful ways.” The profile setting gives creators access to monetization features and analytics tools, such as Facebook’s Reels Play bonus program that allows you to earn money for the reels you share. Professional mode also gives eligible creators access to Stars, which lets you earn money directly from followers on reels, live and video on demand. In-stream ads will also be launching to eligible professional mode creators, which gives them the opportunity to earn money by enabling ads before, during or after longer videos on demand on Facebook. The company is also testing ads on Facebook Reels on professional mode with a select group of creators across the globe. The company says the ad format integrates into reels by placing ads on reels or in between looping reels. Creators on professional mode also get access to subscriptions, which gives creators the option to share subscriber-only content on the social network. Subscriptions haven’t fully rolled out yet, and are still in the testing phase. “Professional mode allows you to build a global audience of followers, while still staying connected to friends and family from your personal Facebook profile,” the company said in the blog post. “As you post public content, you’ll have access to features designed to help you obtain and engage new followers – that were previously only available on Pages.” The expansion comes at a time when Meta is investing in its creator user base, as it sees the potential in a new revenue stream that comes from things like creator subscriptions. As Meta continues to build the metaverse, it’ll need the support of creators, so it’s not surprising that it’s looking to broaden its offerings for creators.

Digital assets marketplace Creative Fabrica launches generative AI tool • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 31, 2022Posted in AI art, Creative Fabrica, Creators, Generative AI, StartupsNo Comments

Creative Fabrica, a marketplace for digital files like print-on-demand assets, fonts and graphics, announced today it will launch its own generative AI tool. Called CF Spark, it’s already seen three million prompts generated, and more than 500,000 published by Creative Fabrica creators over the past three weeks. Like other digital assets on the platform, users can put up their generative AI files for paid use by other members, which Creative Fabrica says makes it the first generative AI that also allows creators to make money. Backed by investors like Felix Capital, FJ Labs and Peak Capital, Creative Fabrica has an agreement with Stable Diffusion, the image-generating AI system by Stability AI and is working on a partnership with OpenAI to include Dalle 2 in its ecosystem. CF Spark also uses the Dreamstudio API. Creative Fabrica CEO Roemie Hillenaar said this mix allows users to get different results and covers a broader range of styles. Creative Spark started building CF Spark before Stable Diffusion was released open source, Hillenaar told ZebethMedia. “We saw that DALLE and MidJourney where opening up their gates towards more beta users and we took the bet that OpenAI (make DALLE) will open up their API at any time. At the time we were betting towards the end of this year and we thought to build already the product as if the API would be available,” he added. But in the middle of that, Stability AI released Stable Diffusion open source and since Creative Fabrica was already in the process of developing CF Spark, it allowed it to take the new tool live more quickly. To use CF Spark, creators enter a prompt, which generates four images that they can chose to publish on their page. Other Creative Fabrica users can re-prompt the AI images to get different results and upload images of what they create with AI-generated art (for example, a T-shirt). CF Spark is available to Creative Fabrica’s four million users for free. In total, the platform has a library of almost six million fonts and graphics.

YouTube redesign gives long-form videos, Shorts and Live videos their own tabs on channel pages • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Apps, Creators, Media & Entertainment, shorts, Videos, YouTube, YouTube ShortsNo Comments

YouTube is rolling out a change impacting how videos appear on its platform. The company today announced a redesign that now splits video content into three different tabs on all channel pages — one for YouTube’s traditional long-form content, another for YouTube Shorts only, and a third for Live videos, including past, current and upcoming live streams. The changes will allow users to more easily access the types of YouTube videos they want to watch — a move YouTube says it made based on user feedback. In an announcement, the company said it heard from viewers they wanted to be able to navigate to the kinds of content they were most interested in when exploring a creator’s channel page, leading to this makeover. The update also means that Shorts content and Live streams will no longer be found in the main Videos tab on the channel page — something that could appeal to longtime YouTube viewers who haven’t appreciated the infiltration of YouTube’s short-form content into their favorite channel’s video feed in recent months. However, for those who do like watching Shorts, the redesign gives YouTube a way to direct them to more short-form videos. Now, when users are watching Shorts videos in the Shorts feed in the main YouTube app, then navigate to the creator’s channel, they’ll be sent directly into this new Shorts tab to watch even more Shorts content. This could help YouTube boost its views for Shorts as those users will no longer be immediately lost to the creator’s long-form content, as before. Initial feedback from users on Twitter responding to YouTube’s post about the changes has been positive, as users are expressing their appreciation for giving each type of content its own separate category. The redesign follows another major update to YouTube this month which introduced, at long last, YouTube handles in the @username format. These usernames will now allow creators to identify their channel and interact with their viewers across YouTube Shorts, channel pages, in video descriptions, in comments and more. YouTube says the tabbed redesign is rolling out starting today and will be available to all users across all devices in the weeks ahead.

YouTube to broadly support the @username format with launch of YouTube handles • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 11, 2022Posted in Apps, Creators, Media & Entertainment, YouTube, YouTube ShortsNo Comments

YouTube is making it easier for creators to direct viewers to their channels. The company today announced “handles,” a new way for creators to identify their channel with an @username format in order to interact with their viewers across YouTube Shorts, channel pages, in video descriptions, in comments and more. These handles will be made available to everyone on YouTube — you don’t need to be a creator of a certain size or subscriber count to claim your own unique @handle, YouTube says. Handles and @usernames are common across social media, including on sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Telegram and others. But YouTube had only offered limited support for the format — allowing creators to mention channels in video titles and descriptions with the @ symbol, or mention other users in YouTube Live chats, for example. But the @username option was not available in other areas and discussions. Instead, you’d have to reply to another YouTube user’s comment in order to tag them. With YouTube’s expansion into TikTok’s territory with YouTube Shorts, however, the company now wants to more closely mimic the way the ByteDance-owned video app encourages users to engage in back-and-forth discussions through their short videos and in the resulting discussions and video responses that come about. To work, that requires the use of @usernames — or @handles as YouTube calls them. YouTube says the new handles will appear on both channel pages and Shorts, making them “instantly and consistently recognizable” across the platform. After handles are fully launched, users will be able to @mention others in the comments, community posts, video descriptions and elsewhere. While these handles won’t replace the channel name itself, they will be unique across YouTube, allowing creators to establish a distinct presence for themselves on the platform. Support for handles will begin to roll out gradually, starting later next week. To protect creators from having their channel name staked by someone else in what’s sure to be one of the biggest username landgrabs on the internet, YouTube notes that channels that already have a personalized URL will see that becoming their default handle unless they choose to change it. The company also indicated that the timing of the rollout of handles has been designed in a way to ensure that established creators will gain access to the feature first, as YouTube plans to utilize factors — like the creator’s overall YouTube presence, subscriber count and whether the channel is active or inactive — when determining when to offer a creator the ability to set up their own handle. After a handle is established, YouTube will additionally create a matching URL in the format of youtube.com/@handle, which would allow the creator to market their handle elsewhere on the web or in other media. And if the channel already had a personalized URL it was using for a similar purpose, they won’t need to update their links — that URL will automatically redirect to the new handle-based URL instead. Everyone on YouTube will be able to grab a handle for themselves at some point. YouTube says creators should look for a notification to arrive over the next month.