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YouTube's New Best Practice: Shut Your Mouth
When Mr. Beast gives thumbnail advice, your content manager should listen.
Tod Maffin
September 07, 2023
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In This Issue:
🔍 Google requires disclosure of AI-altered political ads, but not other types
🧵 Threads starts rolling out post text search
📺 YouTube experiments with longer and fewer ads on TV screens
📌 Pinterest introduces body type tech for inclusive searches
🍪 Chrome’s new APIs help march toward death of third-party cookies
🎙 Sirius XM unveils podcast brand safety tool for advertisers
📉 Publishers report declining Snapchat revenue
🛒 Instacart offers new advertising options and insights via new Shopify app
📣 T2, a Twitter alternative, introduces a follower-focused 'For You' feed
📺 Connected-TV viewing hours see a 21% jump in May
🗨 Patreon launches a chat feature resembling Discord
😮 MrBeast finds closed-mouth thumbnails boost YouTube results
Google Updates Policy for Fake Video Ads
I don’t think it matters which side of the political fence you’re on to not be terrified about the looming combination of generative AI video and national elections.
Our first big test will happen in America — where it’s already gotten dicey. Florida’s governor is running for the Republican presidential nomination. An ad for his campaign showed photos of Donald Trump hugging and kissing the forehead of public health director Anthony Fauci — a much-maligned figure on the right.
Except that never happened.
The images were generated by AI, and that was not disclosed.
It’s happened with videos too, and Google this week said it would not ban the use of fake videos for political campaigns.
Instead, it will require campaigns to disclose if they’re using sound or images that have been altered or created synthetically.
And you can’t hide it either — the updated policy says the disclosure must be clear and conspicuous and be located somewhere that users are likely to notice it.
But honestly, how much will that matter?
As marketers, we know the power of imagery.
A strong image or video is usually what gets the click, not the body copy.
And with media literacy on the low side in much of the world, how many people will even understand the distinction between real and generative, even if it is disclosed.
Indeed, there does not seem to be much in the way of bans or disclosure requirements for non-political marketers.
Google also clarified that AI use that doesn’t impact the message of the content — resizing or recolouring or cropping, and so on — should be fine.
Should Google's new AI disclosure policy apply to non-political campaigns as well? |
Threads Gets Text Search
Meta’s Twitter competitor, Threads, has started to roll out the ability to search through posts.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced this—on the site, of course—saying it will go to most English- and Spanish-speaking countries, starting with the U.S. and the U.K. today.
Until now, you’ve only been able to search for users.
This appears to be only for the mobile app, for the time being, and not the web app. It’s also a little hidden — when you search, you’ll still get a list of users, but there’ll be a new “Search for” option at the top that will show you matching posts.
Many people have said text search is one of the important pieces to competing with X.
How will this change affect your use of Threads? |
YouTube Experiments With Longer TV Ads
YouTube will soon show people watching on TVs ads that are longer — but, there will be fewer of them.
The company says people who watch on large screens expect a more traditional television ad experience — longer and less skippable than the traditional YouTube ad placement. It was just earlier this year that YouTube brought 30-second unskippable ads to TVs.
They’ll also be testing a countdown timer showing how many seconds of an ad break is left. Right now, you might recall, YouTube shows the number of ads left — like “Ad 1 of 2” — but that doesn’t tell the consumer how long they’ll actually be waiting. This is just in testing for now, but I expect they’ll roll it out.
TV is an important viewing surface for YouTube. The company says it reached 150 million people across connected TVs in the U.S. in April. And people are watching more than 700 million hours of YouTube content on TV screens each day.
This past Spring, they added multiview for sports games and a couple of months ago extended that feature to non-sports content as part of their YouTube TV package, which is not available outside the U.S.
Pinterest Launches Inclusive Body Type Tech
Pinterest today announced it’s making its search feature more inclusive of different body shapes.
Pinterest’s Inclusive Product Team partnered with experts… to develop a body type technology that uses shape, sizes, and form to identify body types in images.
With this enhanced understanding of visual content through computer vision technology, Pinterest has shaped its algorithms to increase representation of both body type and skin tone across search results and related Pins.
For example, if a user searches for date night outfit inspiration, they will see results inclusive of various body types and skin tone ranges.
Pinterest previously released tech that makes skin tones and hair styles more representative of the population.
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Chrome Browser Gets New Tracking APIs
Google's Chrome browser continues the march toward killing off third-party cookies by 2024.
Today, the company said its Relevance and Measurement APIs for Privacy Sandbox are now universally available in Chrome. The Sandbox is Google’s attempt at a privacy-conscious alternative to cross-site tracking cookies.
This means no need for browser flags or trial participation.
Three per cent of Chrome users will still be held in a group unaffected by this, letting Google run A/B tests. It plans to roll this out to all users in the forthcoming months.
Chrome also introduced new ad privacy settings, letting users control and customize Privacy Sandbox features, like ad topic targeting.
Despite these changes, most users won't see much of a difference, as the update primarily concerns developers.
Now that these APIs are available, developers and ad providers can prepare for the upcoming end of third-party cookies in their offerings.
Next up: in Q1 of next year, Google will shut off third-party cookie support for 1% of Chrome users to start.
Sirius XM Introduces Podcast Safety Tool
Sirius XM has release a new verification tool for podcast advertisers to ensure brand safety and suitability.
In one example cited by the company, an auto retailer initially turned off all news programming but this tool was able to find a suitable Formula One racing news show that otherwise would have been excluded.
Reporting will be available live during a campaign, so marketers can tweak things in real time, and post-campaign analysis will include brand suitability info.
But it won’t work for every platform — the new tool offers third-party metrics validation only through SXM Media and AdsWizz.
The Sirius XM Podcast Network includes Stitcher Studios, Team Coco, NBC Universal, and OWN.
Publishers Report Declining Snapchat Revenue
Digiday has some reporting today on the state of social media monetization for large content brands — and Snapchat doesn’t come out looking great.
In August, Snap removed the carousel of Stories that specifically highlights accounts that users follow from their Discover page and merged those Stories with the main feed on the Discover page, which includes popular content from all public accounts surfaced via its algorithm.
According to a Snap spokesperson, the move was made in an attempt to simplify the user’s consumption of content on the Discover page. The publishers, however, feel as though this change impacted their ability to reach followers on the platform.
[One of the publisher execs said:] “This time last year, [one] million or two million people would read the same Story. Today, maybe 60,000 people read that Story. And when our revenue is based on the ad impressions in that Story, you can do the math of how far it’s unfortunately sunk.”
In fact, that exec said revenue fell for their site about 75% year over year on Snapchat. Snapchat said the change led to an increase in both viewers and time spent on the platform. But they used data from Q2 to prove their point, and this carousel change happened after Q2. And Q2 saw their ad revenue decline by 4% year over year. Last Q1 was also in decline.
The LGBTQ publication PinkNews said revenue earned from its rev share deal with Snapchat isn’t small, but it’s not been as good as previous quarters.
Last year, 80% of PinkNews’ revenue came from social media ads — most of which from Snapchat. Now, that number is under 50%.
In Brief
Instacart has released a new app for Shopify merchants. This lets Shopify's CPG stores access Instacart Ads and sales data. read more
US influencer marketing spend is set to outpace social ad spend in 2023. Growth is especially notable on TikTok, but it's surpassing other major platforms too. read more
T2, a Twitter alternative, has launched its "For You" feed. Unlike some platforms, it's not the default. The feed prioritizes content from followed users and relevant topics. read more
Connected TV viewing hours increased by 21% in May 2023. Now, 73% of US households stream content. read more
Patreon is rolling out a chat feature. It lets creators connect with fans in group messages. read more
And finally…
Creators and marketers who use YouTube a lot always look to one creator in particular for guidance on the real best practices: Mr. Beast.
I probably don’t have to explain who that is now — YouTube’s biggest individual star — and he makes so much money, he has a full team dedicated to thumbnail testing.
When you saw everyone using close-up shocked facial expressions with an open mouth on their thumbnails, blame Mr. Beast.
When people started putting thick white outlines around any person in the frame, that’s because Mr. Beast did.
But now, we have some new guidance — a policy change, if you will, on that shocked facial expression.
Mr. Beast’s team have tested and tested, and yesterday reported that combining that shocked expression with closed mouth results in more clickthroughs and, thus, video views.
To be clear, you can still show teeth — in fact, you probably want to show teeth — just don’t actually open your mouth.
Today’s newsletter has a couple of screenshots from his YouTube analytics showing specifically what this looks like:
In fact, look back at some of his most recent videos, and you’ll see many of them have switched over to this new look.
YouTube released the thumbnail A/B test tool this past June to a couple of hundred creators, and said it will launch more widely next year.
In the meantime, expect to see that overly enthusiastic, dental-first look — coming to a thumbnail year you.
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