YouTube Creator News: New Features & Revenue Changes

Transcript

The code break is here. YouTube Engineering is on vacation. Let’s talk about the final Creator News update for 2025. YouTube is closing the year with quite the list of features that affect everything from your editing workflow to your revenue. There are new AI tools for mobile, a global crackdown on VPN ad viewers, and a huge expansion of community features. Let’s get started.

First up, a major upgrade for mobile creators. The YouTube Creator app is now available on iOS. Not much to say here except have fun with it!

Also, the Android version of the Create app is getting an upgrade with Google’s latest Gen AI model, V3 Fast. This allows you to generate videos with sound or images from text prompts directly in the editing timeline. If you create Shorts on the go, this could be a production boost.

Speaking of AI, Nano Banana, Google’s image editing model, is coming to YouTube posts. Creators in the US, Canada, India, and New Zealand can now use AI to change backgrounds, remove objects, or completely restyle image posts directly in the app. We’ll keep you updated once it rolls out to more regions.

Talking about community engagement, voice replies are further expanding. You can now reply to comments with a 30-second audio clip in the YouTube main app and in YouTube Studio. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of voice messages, but if you are, have fun with it.

Also, Channel Guidelines are expanding to Communities and are now available to creators with access to intermediate features. Quick recap: With Channel Guidelines, you can set house rules for your live chat, comments, and Fan Community. They are not automatically enforced by YouTube, but they give viewers an idea of what kind of interaction they can expect on your channel. All in all, this is a neat feature that has been collecting dust for a while now. Personally, I would love to see translations added to Channel Guidelines as well, but we can’t have it all.

For my vertical live streamers, Super Chat goals are finally coming to vertical streams. You can now set a revenue goal with a celebration animation, just like in classic horizontal streams. By the way, I’m looking into data for Super Chat goals. So, if you’ve used them successfully in the past and are willing to share some info, please let me know!

While we’re talking about monetization, YouTube is rolling out a fix globally to disable ad serving for viewers that likely use VPNs. If you have a high percentage of viewers using VPNs to simulate other regions, you might see a shift in your ad revenue as these impressions are no longer monetized the same way. This has been fully ramped up as of December 8th.

And last but not least, a huge win for both viewers and creators. YouTube is launching new settings to manage language preferences. You can now explicitly set your preferred language for audio titles and descriptions. This ensures that if a video’s original audio matches your preferred languages, YouTube won’t force an auto-translation on you. You can find the setting at YouTube.com/account_playback and edit or add languages there.

Careful, it is separate from your app language and doesn’t impact search results. And of course, I have some nitpicking to add: There’s currently no search bar in the menu, so you have to scroll through the entire list of languages manually. It’s a bit annoying, but honestly, that’s complaining on a very high level. I’m just glad to have finally control over the original audio again.

And that wraps up the YouTube Creator News for 2025. From the entire team here at KW Media, thank you for watching, commenting, and being a part of this community. We still have a Christmas live stream planned for the 23rd of December. So, if you have some questions about YouTube or just want to hang out, feel free to set up notifications for that. Maybe I’ll even finish a video or two between the years. We’ll see. Something something big plans for 2026! And anyway, have a wonderful holiday break, stay creative, and I’ll see you again soon with more YouTube Creator updates.