YouTube, Instagram, SoundCloud, and other online platforms are changing the way people create and consume media. The Verge’s Creators section covers the people using these platforms, what they’re making, and how those platforms are changing (for better and worse) in response to the vloggers, influencers, podcasters, photographers, musicians, educators, designers, and more who are using them.
The Verge’s Creators section also looks at the way creators are able to turn their projects into careers — from Patreons and merch sales, to ads and Kickstarters — and the ways they’re forced to adapt to changing circumstances as platforms crack down on bad actors and respond to pressure from users and advertisers. New platforms are constantly emerging, and existing ones are ever-changing — what creators have to do to succeed is always going to look different from one year to the next.
The standalone video editing app supports green screen and cutout features, just like ByteDance’s CapCut app.
YouTube is going back to its roots.
Fresco, the creative software giant’s painting and drawing app, will now allow users to embed Content Credentials into their work that specifically identify it as “created without generative AI.” Content Credentials can already track if images have been manipulated using AI tools but clearly marking them as AI free is a new one, especially for a company that’s so heartily embraced the technology across its other apps.
20 years in, YouTube is a dominant entertainment force. Now it’s coming for just about every way you spend your time.
Android Central and leak hunter Assemble Debug point out that the feature has started to appear, as shown in this Reddit post. Beyond just displaying lyrics for certain songs, it allows users to highlight specific ones to create a social media-friendly sharing card, just like Spotify does.
Let us know if you’re seeing this in your app.
Now, all creators in the YouTube Partner Program have access to auto-dubbing, according to a video from YouTube’s Creator Insider channel. The company is working on bringing auto-dubbing to “more creators” down the line.
In December, YouTube said that the AI-powered feature was expanding to “hundreds of thousands of channels” in the program.
That’s according to Semafor’s White House correspondent Shelby Talcott. The TikTok turmoil is just going to go on forever, huh?
The marketplace runs on small businesses all over the world — but Donald Trump’s tariffs are causing uncertainty. In a blog post today, Etsy CEO Josh Silverman said the company will add features like shopping pages surfacing domestic sellers, which could be useful for shoppers who want to avoid tariffs.
Etsy also updated its seller handbook with a tariff section providing advice. It’s an interesting look into the many moving parts of global trade that are upended by Trump’s trade war.
At least somewhat. Media Matters analyzed top podcasters aligned with Donald Trump and found that while most covered his tariff policy positively, there are signs of fracturing. Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan are among the right wing influencers who’ve criticized Trump’s trade war in recent weeks.
TikTokers are obsessed with the Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark III, so we went on a quest to get one.
Musician Benn Jordan explains how he used “adversarial noise” — a technique applied to audio files that sounds normal to humans, but like something else entirely to AI models — to poison music generators. The “Poisonify” attack “makes music not only untrainable but threatens to degrade the entire model” too, according to Jordan, much like the Nightshade tool that artists use to protect their work.
YouTube’s deal to stream Coachella performances continues through 2026, and tonight you can start watching the festival’s first weekend, free of charge.
This year, aside from the long list of performing artists and occasional special guests, the options include split-screen multiview, “watch with” commentary streams by creators if you need some narration, a vertical livestream if you prefer the YouTube Shorts look, and dedicated apps for your Android device or iPhone / iPad.
Bluesky accounts for Adobe and Photoshop were dogpiled by the creative community shortly after making their first posts on the platform, attracting hundreds of negative comments before the posts were removed. The creative software giant’s image problem is no easy fix, having long been lambasted by its own users over subscription pricing models, AI adoption, and market domination.
[futurism.com]
According to a legal filing X is willing to drop Twitch from its antitrust lawsuit accusing advertisers of an “illegal boycott,” but only if Twitch meets “certain conditions” by the end of the year — though it hasn’t said what those are. Amazon-owned Twitch wasn’t one of the initial companies X sued, but was added at a later date. It’s not the first to get out either — Unilever was dropped from the suit in October 2024.
The YouTuber’s line of chocolate bars are getting hit by new taxes on imports. MrBeast said on X that for products sold outside the US, it would be cheaper to produce them abroad given the trade war Trump created.
“A random price hike was pretty brutal ngl,” he wrote in a follow up post. “We’ll figure it out. I feel for small businesses though. Could really be a nail in the coffin for them.”
Donald Trump’s tariffs threaten to blow up Shein’s supply chain, which heavily depends on Chinese manufacturing. Bloomberg reports that the Chinese government didn’t like Shein’s plans to move some of its manufacturing out of China — Shein wants to avoid tariffs as much as it can, and the Chinese government reportedly is looking to minimize manufacturing job losses.
[bloomberg.com]
