Google announced a bunch of new features for Google Play listings for games including AI-powered FAQs, displaying the latest YouTube videos, new immersive ad formats, and support for native PC game publishing.
These announcements were made at the Google Games Developer Summit held at San Fransisco.
Play Pass and Play PointsTo drive more in-app purchases, Google is now allowing developers to set discounts for users who have the company’s Play Pass subscription.
Support for PC gamesIn the last few years, Google has made its Play Games for PC program available in more than 120 countries.
Now, the company is set to allow publishers to put native PC games on the Play Store.
Twitch is looking at life beyond the livestream Livestreaming is a tough business.
“So the goal really is like, a lot more people seeing more Twitch content every time they’re in Instagram, every time they’re in TikTok, every time they’re in YouTube Shorts.
“… Live content is very different from offline content, and offline content has a somewhat easier ability to go viral.
Content on Twitch is extremely long form, with streamers regularly broadcasting gameplay or just chatting for many hours per session.
Unfortunately for Twitch, many compelling alternatives to broadcasting one’s life for hours on end exist, particularly in the form of YouTube.
Several social media websites are experiencing outages on Tuesday morning.
YouTube confirmed that some users are having trouble loading videos on the platform; meanwhile, platforms like Discord and Meta’s Threads, Facebook and Instagram are down as well.
YouTube also shared an update on its X account, which links to the support page.
thanks to everyone who sent notes about loading issues with YouTube: we're on it!
🔍 will follow up here once things are back to normal, you can also follow our Help Community post for details ➡️ https://t.co/4Ezmtku3Em — TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) March 5, 2024The root cause of these widespread outages remains unclear.
YouTube Create, Google’s standalone mobile app aimed at creators, which helps them produce both Shorts and longer videos, is expanding to a broader set of markets after last fall’s launch into beta testing.
The idea behind Create is to offer video creators an easy-to-use suite of free tools for making videos on the go.
With Create, users can upload clips, split and trim videos, use effects, and access royalty-free music to complement their videos.
By offering a suite of tools just for YouTube creators, the company hopes to capture more of the market that prefers to use standalone tools for editing videos.
Starting today, the Create app is available in new markets including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Finland, Hong Kong, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, and Turky.
Telegram CEO and founder Pavel Durov announced today that the company is launching its ad platform next month, allowing channel owners to receive financial rewards.
In March, the Telegram Ad Platform will open to channel owners in nearly one hundred countries, marking a major shift toward content monetization.
“Similar to our approach with Telegram usernames on Fragment, we will sell ads and share revenue with channel owners in Toncoin.
YouTube offers a 55% share of ad revenue to creators in the YouTube Partner Program, while X started offering revenue sharing to users in July 2023.
Telegram has more than 800 million monthly active users around the world, and Telegram users generate over 500 billion views in broadcast channels every month.
Google releases new open LLMs, Rivian lays off staff and Signal rolls out usernamesWelcome, folks, to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter covering noteworthy happenings in the tech industry.
This week, Google launched two new open large language models, Gemma 2B and Gemma 7B, in its continued bid for generative AI dominance.
The company, which describes the LLMs as “inspired by Gemini,” its flagship family of GenAI models, made each available for commercial and research usage.
Change Healthcare hit: Change Healthcare, one of the largest healthcare tech companies in the U.S., confirmed that a cyberattack on its systems occurred recently.
YouTube triumphant: YouTube dominates TV streaming in the U.S., per Nielsen’s latest report.
Facebook, Instagram, Snap, YouTube, and other social networking companies offer programs to connect creators with brands, and now Spotify is doing the same.
The company announced the launch of AUX, its new in-house “music advisory agency” for brands.
While not necessarily a creator marketplace, the program has a similar aim — it will facilitate connections between brands and emerging artists for various campaigns benefitting both parties.
For Spotify, AUX represents another source of income, as well, as the company says brands can pay Spotify to leverage the new service.
“Spotify is always looking for ways to leverage our music ecosystem to deepen the connections between artists, brands, and fans,” said Jeremy Erlich, VP, Head of Music Content at Spotify, in a statement.
YouTube is changing the design for creators’ channels on the big screen, the comapny announced today.
The update is rolling out to all creators today, but may take a few weeks to appear to all viewers, the comapny told TechCrunch.
The changes impact the channel pages on TV only, it noted.
Creators will likely respond positively to changes that help boost their subscriber numbers and better showcase their content on the big screen.
The company is in competition with traditional TV and streamers like Netflix on TVs, but also with newcomers like TikTok, which launched its own TV app in late 2021.
Nielsen today released its January report on viewing usage across linear TV and streaming, which revealed that YouTube is once again the overall top streaming service in the U.S., with 8.6% of viewing on television screens.
The new data points to YouTube’s dominance in the TV streaming arena and marks 12 consecutive months of the platform being in the top spot.
HopeScope, a creator who reviews viral products, notably saw a 172% jump in TV watch time in 2023.
YouTube has reached a few other milestones in recent months, including the 100 million users who pay for YouTube Music and YouTube Premium.
Additionally, YouTube TV now has more than 8 million subscribers and YouTube Shorts recently achieved over 70 billion daily views.
Earlier this week, the 19-year-old son of former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, was found dead at UC Berkeley of an apparent drug overdose, according to his grandmother, Esther Wojcicki.
The news broke widely yesterday, though Wojcicki posted the news to Facebook several days ago, writing: “Tragedy hit my family yesterday.
Esther Wojcicki told the Palo Alto Daily of her grandson’s passing, “Kids in college, especially freshmen and sophomores, experiment with everything.
I didn’t have the opportunity to interview Wojcicki while she held one of the most prestigious CEO posts in the world.
I love kids, I love work and I think at some level I just love creating things and building.
