Mediastreet
Author

editor

Browsing
In News

Why Creating a Membership Site Can Add Value to Any Business (And How to Do It)

No Comments

By Kasey Kaplan.

You can offer educational content as a primary or complementary business line in your organization.

Every business must attract and grow a user base. You could have the best idea in the world, but without users, there is no revenue — and without revenue, there is no business.

You are an expert in your respective domain. You understand the ins and outs of the space you operate in and the pain points in the market. So, why not take that knowledge and repurpose it into a membership site to better engage customers, increase loyalty and generate even more revenue?

What do I mean by a membership site? I mean a digital portal where, based on your strategy, customers can access content about specific subjects related to the industry in which you operate. This is generally a mix of educational and informative content such as courses, white papers, webinars and more.

This idea is becoming more popular as a primary or complementary business line in an organization. Having built these sites for organizations, I suggest you consider a few key things before creating your own.

Determine how you can add value.

The point of a membership site is to drive value for existing and new customers. The benefit to you is that you will have an engaged community that is loyal and more likely to purchase from you.

So, like most things in business, make sure you address a problem your members are having and create a solution that helps them solve it.

Create a solution that works for your members.

When you implement a paid (or free) membership solution, chances are the members are busy people who are focused on improving their businesses. They are using your solution as a tool to help them achieve this goal. That’s why quality matters.

Your messaging needs to be clear and concise. Navigation needs to be intuitive and easy. And your site needs to offer value in order for people to stay engaged (and continue paying).

Before you market your solution, create a plan around this. Determine what your messaging will look like, how often you will communicate and how frequently you’ll make updates or add content. I also recommend implementing marketing automation where possible so the manual burden is reduced.

Create a solution that works with your business case.

Build a platform that supports what you want to accomplish. Too often people overlook the importance of making sure the technology and software used to create the platform are right for what they want to accomplish.

Scope out and summarize what you envision the future features/functions to be so the team building the platform can make the right decisions from the start. Some basic things you might want to consider include:

  • What type of content will be in your membership portal?
  • How often will data be backed up?
  • How many members will you have?
  • Will you be able to scale your servers in the event there is high demand?
  • Will the site be able to load fast and run smoothly for users?
  • What type of data and analytics do you want/need?
  • Will people use the site on mobile? If so, is it optimized for mobile?

Build a valuable brand.

This is something I encourage every single business I work with to do no matter what. Your brand is one of the only things that sets you apart from the competition — so make it good.

A membership site can be a great core business or complementary product to an existing business line. However, you need to ask yourself why someone would pay to be a member when, chances are, they could find a good amount of the content you’re providing online already.

The answer is because they trust your brand to provide high-quality and credible content that can give them an edge, and they like the idea and benefits of being part of an exclusive community and the convenience of having everything in one place.

Determine your monetization strategy.

This is something that can evolve over time, but determine how you will monetize your membership site, what success looks like and how you will measure ROI. Here are a few common monetization strategies:

  • Offer a recurring membership fee-freemium model, where you have some free content and other content that requires a paid membership.
  • Monetize through advertisements/sponsorship.
  • Upsell extra features or services to your core business.
  • Mix and match the tactics listed above.

A membership site can be a great way for your business to grow and retain loyal customers. Spend time thinking about how this can best fit into your organization and how it can add the most value.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Kasey Kaplan, founder of KWK Studio & Quuie, nd co-founder of Urban FT. His business passions focus on strategy, marketing & product.

Sourced from Inc.

Read More
By
In News

Après Advertising – new speakers added!

No Comments

Après Advertising: Where can the skills you learn in advertising and marketing take you next?

About this Event

The Shark Awards and the Association of Advertisers in Ireland bring you this special event – looking at and chatting about:

How the skills you develop in the world of advertising & marketing can take you almost anywhere in your working and creative life.

A special showing of Donal Moloney’s short film “Ad Men in Sheds” will be screened as part of this event, with two of the featured Ad Men joining the panel to discuss this topic.

Date and Time
Thursday, 28 November, 6-7.30pm

Location
1 wml, 1 Windmill Lane, D02 F206 Dublin

This event is FREE to attend but please register in advance: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/apres-advertising-tickets-82181528163

Our other contributors on Thursday:

On the back label of every Drumshambo Gunpowder Irish Gin bottle it states in bold type: ‘From The Curious Mind of PJ Rigney.’

Well, Pat’s ‘curious mind’ began getting very curious when he worked in marketing at Gilbeys. His tale about how he went on to create his own famous drinks brands is well worth listening to – over a drink.

Pat will be joined by Barry Devlin, who began his career as an advertising copywriter and went on to become a rock star, and a writer, and a filmmaker – and you’ll need a long drink for his tale as well.

Camille Donegan began her career in the creative/arts sector as an actor. Her working environment there exposed her to another, more tech-led career that involved intense study in the IT sector to gain the knowledge that has brought her to the XR sector of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. See and hear the real Camille.

Loretta Dignam has worked most of her career at Marketing Director level in blue-chip multinationals: Mars Inc, Diageo, Kerry Group, and Jacob Fruitfield.  She was the winner of the Marketer of the Year Award in 2011, chaired the Gender Equality committee of the Abbey Theatre and is chair of the Development Committee. She set up The Menopause Hub, Ireland’s first and only dedicated menopause clinic. Loretta is a truly enlightened marketeer and you’ll hear her story at Après Advertising on Thursday.

Panel moderator for the evening is Orlaith Blaney formerly CEO of McCann Dublin and former President of IAPI. Orlaith is now Chief Communications and Marketing officer at Ervia, with responsibility for Irish Water and she will share some of her own views on the topic.

Tea, coffee and biscuits will be served on arrival and there’ll also be a glass of wine on offer later to wrap up the evening.

As seats are limited apply for your FREE ticket and be in with a chance on the night to win two full delegate passes to the 2020 Shark Awards in Kinsale: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/apres-advertising-tickets-82181528163

Read More
By
In News

Does Dwell Time Really Affect Your SEO? The Answer May Surprise You

No Comments

By

Dwell time is one of those ranking factors which is proven to impact your overall site’s SEO.

It is a user-based metric that refers to the period or length of time that a user spends on a page after a click. It is not the most talked-about metric. But it is an important measurement that every marketer should be paying attention to.

Dwell time is a good indicator that can help in evaluating the quality of your website traffic. However, the results of this metric can be misleading at times.

In this article, we will discover more about dwell time and its relationship with SEO.

What is Dwell Time?

The concept of dwell time was first introduced in 2011 in a Bing article. The blog post written by Duane Forrester indicated how to build quality content. This was the first time that the idea of dwell time was talked about and now it seems that the whole digital marketing community is raving about the concept.

In the blog, dwell time was defined as the actual time duration that a visitor spends on a page before going back to SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Suppose I’m researching “Best digital marketing practices for startups in 2019”, I’ll type this into the search engine box. I’ll likely click on the results that interest me the most. Let’s say it took me 5 minutes to read the article I land on, and after reading the whole article, I return to the SERPs. The time between these two clicks is what dwell time is. So in this instance, 5 minutes is my dwell time.

Longer dwell times are considered as beneficial for businesses. If a person spends one minute or more on your page, then it is considered positive, and it concluded that the visitor is consuming the content. Duane considered it as a good signal. On the other hand, less than a couple of seconds time period is considered a poor result.

Traffic From Google for dwell time

It is also important to understand that all three metrics, namely, dwell time, bounce rate, and average time-on-page are indicators of different results. These terms are not interchangeable.

  • Dwell time is not the bounce rate of the website.
  • It is not the average time a user spends on your page.
  • It is not the click-through rate. The role of dwell time only measures the results of what happens after the click. It does not measure or calculate the percentage of users who click on a result.
  • It is not session duration. The session duration is the amount of time a user is spending in clicking around your website. And in this case, the session didn’t begin with a keyword search. Therefore, it cannot end back at the SERPs, and it won’t calculate the time between those clicks.

Does dwell time really affect your SEO?

Now, let’s understand the relationship between dwell time and SEO. First of all, dwell time is a metric that we cannot measure. Only Google has access to measure the length of clicks. You can track a user’s engagement with the help of Google Analytics but can only measure dwell time with a third-party tool.

Dwell time and SEO relation for dwell time

Classification of dwell time:

  • 30 seconds or less than – The content was not up to the mark, and the user was not satisfied. So, he/she went back to find something better.
  • 1 to 2 minutes – The content was useful for the user because they spent a couple of minutes reading the information.
  • 15 minutes – The user finds the content super-useful.

On the basis of the above classifications, we can say that dwell time is a good indicator of the relevance and the quality of the content. It can have a big impact on SEO as it is an indicator of engagement and SEO is all about creating more engagement. Low dwell time is a clear sign that the users are not getting the desired or useful information on your site.

We all know the fact that every click is a visit. But as a businessman, all of us would like to engage with our customers for a longer duration of time and the dwell time is an exact measure of that time.

However, even if you click back after 15-20 minutes, Google will consider it as a bounce. Therefore, it is clear that bounce rate cannot give results about the level of engagement.

Instead of bounce rate, dwell time can be used as a ranking signal because people can bounce for a number of reasons. Also, it is easier for Google to calculate the data and measure the dwell time.

Dwell time can be measured by taking two other metrics into consideration – time on page and bounce rate. If the time on page is high and there is a low bounce rate, then it will be considered as high dwell time.

Factors which affect dwell time

Here are some of the factors which may affect dwell time:

  • Slow page load speed.
  • Your website is not mobile-friendly (Since a lot of users are using mobile phones, it is important for you to ensure that your site is mobile-friendly).
  • The title tag and description are inaccurate.

Improve your dwell time by improving your content and working on the above factors.

By

Guest author: Aditya works as a Growth Assistant at AirTract.Com, a social platform wherein people ask questions and get answers, share knowledge and experience. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science Engineering and has been working in the field of Digital Marketing for the past two years. He is also a voracious reader and a big sports fan.

Sourced from JeffBullas.com

Read More
By
In News

Two Important Lessons Learned From Spending $70 Million On Marketing

No Comments

By Joy Gendusa

I spend about $100,000 every week marketing my company to businesses nationwide. Spending that much per week on marketing may strike many business owners as excessive. And for some businesses, it is.

Obviously, I wasn’t spending $100,000 on marketing when I first started out in 1998. I didn’t have much working capital back then (just a $5,000 credit card, if you can call that capital), and I bootstrapped everything. I paid myself a minuscule salary for years in order to invest as much as possible in marketing. As a result, I’ve closely tracked my marketing returns — and failures — from the beginning.

Here are the two biggest, most business-defining lessons I’ve learned since spending my first dollar on marketing.

Lesson 1: Any decrease in your overall marketing can have a similar effect on your revenue.

I learned this lesson early on. Back then, my only marketing strategy was sending 1,000 postcards per week to businesses around me.

As those 1,000 postcards brought in new leads and those leads turned into revenue, I started to increase the quantity of my weekly outflow — first to 2,500 and then to 5,000. Each time I increased my weekly marketing expenditure, leads and revenue followed after about four to six weeks, like clockwork. Since then, I haven’t missed a mailing in 21 years, and we mail about 180,000 postcards each week.

My point is that your marketing sets a pace for leads and revenue. This includes cutbacks. I learned this in 2008. The housing market crashed, and I lost virtually all of my mortgage clients, who made up 46% of my entire client base.

I was advised to cut my marketing budget midway through 2008, and I reluctantly agreed in order to avoid layoffs. Shortly after, incoming leads started to slip. At the close of 2008, gross revenue was down 7.2%.

That was the first and last year our revenue ever decreased. In early 2009, I returned our marketing budget to its rightful place. By the end of that year, we had regained all lost ground and then some with a 14.5% increase in revenue.

How much your business should allocate toward marketing will vary, but it typically will be a percentage of your gross annual revenue. From what I’ve seen, larger businesses hover somewhere between 5% and 25%, with an average of about 12%.

Small businesses, on the other hand, often spend a significantly smaller portion on marketing. In fact, 50% of small business owners don’t even have a marketing plan. And the majority (55%) spend less than 5% of their annual revenue on marketing.

If you’re a small business owner reading this and want to increase leads and sales and grow your business, I recommend increasing your marketing budget by at least 3%.

Finding the right number for your business will require testing and (most importantly) close tracking and monitoring.

Lesson 2: If you have any competition whatsoever, you likely need a unique selling proposition (USP).

Your USP can set your business apart and give prospects a reason to choose you. Without one, you’re effectively surrendering to the buying process and relying on luck (or worse — being the cheapest) to attract new business.

I learned this lesson not long after founding my company. To compete with other direct mail companies, and ensure that we wouldn’t become another commodity racing to the bottom on price, we had to develop a USP.

Now, a real USP goes beyond merely positioning your business and actually offers something unique and tangible. Let’s say you’re a dentist. It’s the difference between statements like “We put dental health first with excellent board-certified care and attention” and “We put dental health first — if you develop a cavity within six months of your last appointment, we’ll fill it for free.”

The first merely positions the dentist as an expert. The second offers a real and tangible selling point: “No worrying about cavities as long as you’re with us.”

To develop your USP, start with competition research. Blind shop them. That means going through the entire customer journey, from new lead to buyer. Along the way, note what you like about their processes and what could improve.

Then, repeat the process within your own business. Compare notes to see what differences emerge, and analyze those differences. Do any stand out? Would any actually sway someone to choose you?

For my business, back then, the answer was no. Sure, I could say we did this and that better, but every business claims that. You need something real.

At this point, I suggest listing the pain points in your industry. What do consumers dread about your industry? If you can eliminate that from their experience with you, you can really stand out.

For my business, a marketing agency, consumers usually dread wasting money and getting zero results. I addressed that apprehension with our USP. We created a new position (our results manager), whose role is to compile results from our clients and train staff on successful tactics to ensure expertise from top to bottom.

Formally, we came up with this USP: “PostcardMania is the only marketing company to create your campaign based on the results of thousands of small businesses.”

Not only is this still our USP (though the number of businesses is up to 87,537), but we’ve outlasted and outgrown many of our competitors. So if you’re facing commoditization, don’t wait — run toward a USP for your business now.

There you have it: my two biggest marketing lessons. Hopefully, you’ve gained some insight to help you grow your business with smart, well-spent marketing dollars.

By Joy Gendusa

Sole Founder/CEO of PostcardMania. Joy bootstrapped her business to $59 million in 2018 with only a phone, a computer and postcards.

Sourced from Forbes

Read More
By
In News

Organic Reach in a Free Fall? Here’s Exactly Where You Should Spend Your Social Media Budget

No Comments

By Amanda Pressner Kreuser

Customers are dramatically more likely to engage with ads on Instagram than Twitter or Facebook. If you choose to place your bets–and your budget–on IG stories, here’s how to ensure a bigger payoff.

In case you hadn’t heard, consumers love Instagram Stories. And because of that, brands do too.

There are over 500 million daily active Stories users worldwide. Younger users are particularly active on the platform: 59 percent of millennials and 70 percent of Gen Z watch stories, and many engage with brands by swiping up on content and clicking through to shop.

For those new to the platform, Instagram Stories are images and videos located at the top of the Instagram app that last for 24-hours then disappear. When users finish a story, the next one starts playing immediately.

The nature of IG stories–one image or clip appearing on your screen right after the other, makes the medium ideal for advertising. Since the ads flow along with the organic content, some users don’t even realize they are watching them at all. Others actually welcome the interaction from brands that they like. A recent study reveals that a quarter of millennials and Gen Z check out IG Stories for the products and services they may want to buy.

That level of brand integration and user engagement can be huge for brands–particularly those that make the most of their advertising opportunities while the platform is still fresh and consumers are open to messaging.

As you plan your IG Stories strategy and budget for 2020, here are three recommendations to keep in mind.

Engage Your Target Audience

Here’s an eye-opening stat for marketers and brands: consumers are 58 times more likely to interact with branded content on Instagram than on Facebook.

But consumers don’t stop to engage with just any type of advertisement. To grab users’ attention, you need a combination of powerful images, clear content, and a persuasive call-to-action (CTA). If your CTA effectively communicates where the user should go next, they will be more likely to swipe up on your advertisement and head to your linked content (this could be a landing page, product page, blog, etc.).

There are seven objectives that companies can select from for their Instagram story ads: brand awareness, reach, video views, conversions, app installs, lead generation, and traffic.

Be sure to choose the objective that best falls in line with your business goals, and build your content around that.

Make Your Ads Memorable

With a quick swipe of the finger, users can disregard your advertisement and move into the next story. For this reason, your advertising needs to command their attention right away.

One way to create memorable ads is by using storytelling that plays to consumers’ emotions. You can make your advertisement funny, interesting, nostalgic, or educational. Making users feel something builds a connection between them and your brand.

Use high-quality, eye-catching videos and images. Make sure you include your brand name and use clear wording so that users understand what your business does and how you can solve their problems in a matter of seconds.

Be aware: captivating videos and photos can come at a cost so you should set aside some real marketing dollars for creative (an intern with an iPhone probably isn’t going to get the job done).

Go for Videos

Advertising with videos instead of images on Instagram Stories is more effective for a simple reason: you have more time to capture users’ attention. With videos, you get one whole minute to sell to consumers whereas images only are featured for five seconds.

Your videos must communicate what your company does and focus on how your products can fix users’ pain points. They should be short, sweet, and most importantly, entertaining. Remember, users can click out of your ad at any time. Think about what you can do to make them want to watch your video until the very last moment.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Amanda Pressner Kreuser

Sourced from Inc.

Read More
By
In News

Brands have new ways to measure the success of influencer marketing campaigns now that fake Instagram followers are so easy to buy

No Comments

By Amanda Perelli.

  • On Instagram, influencers can buy followers, comments, and likes on a post.
  • So instead of using these metrics to measure the success of an influencer marketing campaign, many brands are instead focusing on other metrics, like saves and comment sentiment.
  • Influencers also promote products on YouTube, and on that platform, many brands want to see how many viewers are engaging with a product’s website link, which points they are watching at, and where they are from.
  • But even with these new measurements, some influencers have figured out tricks for inflating the numbers.
  • Click here for more BI Prime stories.

As concerns about fake Instagram followers grow, many brands working with influencers are focusing more on performance metrics like saves and comment sentiment, which are harder to manipulate and can more accurately reflect the impact of a campaign.

Evan Asano, the CEO of the influencer marketing agency Mediakix, told Business Insider that many brands were looking at the quality of comments left on a sponsored Instagram post and the level of engagement from an influencer’s fans.

“As influencer marketing has exploded, brands are looking less and less for the biggest influencer, as they don’t always have the highest engagement or have time to engage with their fans,” Asano said. “Brands are starting to evolve their strategies to do longer-term partnerships with influencers who they consider ambassadors and love the brand. They are looking for a balance of influencers who engage with their fans, create authentic content, and partner with brands authentic to them, rather than anyone who will just pay them.”

Brands will usually come back after a campaign is over and ask for certain performance metrics from the influencer. These metrics vary based on platform, like YouTube or Instagram, and will often determine whether or not that brand will continue a relationship with an influencer.

 

Performance metrics on Instagram, from saves to comments

On Instagram, brands often want to see that an influencer’s followers are engaging with the post. They can measure this by asking for metrics like saves, comments, and likes.

Katy Bellotte, a YouTube creator (470,000 subscribers) and Instagram influencer (166,000 followers), earns money through a variety of ways online, with brand sponsorships at the top, she told Business Insider. In Bellotte’s experience, brands pay more for a package than a single post, she said. A package typically includes one post on Instagram, a story, and sometimes a 30- to 60-second mention in a YouTube video.

Bellotte said that after she posts sponsored content to Instagram, a company typically comes back and asks for specific performance metrics, and recently, she has noticed companies asking for how many views a story got and how many people saved the post to their personal account.

“You’ll notice there are some creators out there who are getting smart about this,” Bellotte said. “Saying, ‘To enter my giveaway, you have to save the post and then do X, Y, Z.’ Then, when brands ask for the save numbers, they have an inflated number because they’ll do things like that.”

Asano said brands were now looking at comments as a part of engagement, and if a majority of the comments are in a different language, then it’s possible the influencer bought comments. He said brands also track if followers are mentioning the company within the comments, or have any intent on purchasing the product mentioned.

Performance on YouTube, from links to viewer demographics

Another way influencers earn money is by promoting products within a YouTube video. In a YouTube sponsorship, a brand can request a timed mention (typically 60 seconds) or a dedicated video.

Dan Levitt, the CEO of the digital-talent management firm Long Haul Management, told Business Insider that he has noticed more brands tracking how many viewers are clicking on a brand’s website after a YouTube video sponsorship.

“Let’s say a creator is doing a video about new product X. In the past, the brand might only care about views, especially in the demographic they care about,” Levitt said. “Now, in addition, they might include a trackable Bitly link to the brand website to buy the product and would track how many visitors to the website the link brought, and how many of those visitors actually made a purchase.”

Mathew Micheli, a cofounder and managing partner at the influencer marketing agency Viral Nation, said brands still have a hard time understanding the value they are receiving from an influencer campaign. He said Viral Nation provides tools to measure in-depth video and post information, like which platform a viewer is watching from, where they are, and which point in a video they are dropping off at.

Other industry insiders told Business Insider there has been an increase in brands asking about the geographic information of an influencer’s audience. Typically, a YouTube manager or agent will send the brand their client’s demographic percentage from their YouTube analytics page. US brands are looking for a majority of viewers to be from the US.

Reed Duchscher, the CEO of the digital-talent-management firm Night Media, told Business Insider that brands ask his clients for channel demographics.

“Most want to see the percentage based in the US,” he said. “A few have also asked for the mobile watch time, like on apps. We get a lot of inquiries about case studies and past brand collabs as well.”

For more on the business of influencers, according to YouTube and Instagram stars, check out these Business Insider Prime posts:

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock

By Amanda Perelli

Sourced from Business Insider

Read More
By
In News

As TikTok’s popularity rises, buyers say the ad team needs to grow to keep up

No Comments

By Kristina Monllos.

TikTok is looking to grow as media buyers say the app needs to expand its U.S. team to keep up with demand. The company is currently seeking candidates for at least 17 positions for its ads business: two brand strategists, two influencer campaign managers, an ad products specialist, an ad operations manager, a trust and safety policy manager, among others, in its U.S. headquarters of Los Angeles, as well as offices in New York, San Francisco and Mountain View, California, according to jobs listings on LinkedIn.

The Bytedance-owned short-form video app launched in the U.S. in 2018 but its popularity has skyrocketed in recent months, drawing more big-name advertisers like Ralph Lauren and Chipotle, as well as a number of beauty companies like Eos, Too Faced and Elf to the app.

The allure of TikTok for advertisers isn’t just the potential to be among the first major advertising wave on the app, which has captured the attention of younger audiences, but the ability to run campaigns with sound as it is native to the way users watch content on the app, according to media buyers.

Buyers say the company is in a growth phase and that TikTok’s ad business now resembles early Snap Ads with low CPMs, a buggy self-serve platform (for those who have access to it), few metrics and unproven sustainability. Buyers have other complaints, like wait times of up to 24 hours for campaigns to appear on the platform and a junior ads team in need of help, too. For advertisers expecting the maturity of an ad platform like Google, TikTok will be a letdown. But for advertisers looking for a new platform to experiment on while it’s still growing, even with the current hiccups, buyers are bullish.

“They need to scale up a bit to meet the demand on the platform,” said one media buyer who has run multiple TikTok campaigns for clients. “We saw the same thing with Snap and Snap Ads a few years ago.”

“They don’t have the ad tools built out or measurement tools to really help us figure this out and justify it to compare it to some of the more established digital platforms,” said Matthew Rednor, founder and CEO of Decoded Advertising. “That’s a big complaint and one of the biggest reasons that big advertisers and agencies are not yet on the platform, even though everyone is there.”

It’s standard for new platforms to have immature ads businesses early on and TikTok is no different, according to buyers who say that while ad reps are kind and easy to work with, they aren’t as seasoned as reps at Google or Facebook. At the same time, the company’s main headquarters are in China and some decisions are still run through that team making the time difference a pain. That can, in turn, lead to a slower campaign implementation with some campaigns taking at least 24-hours to be live on the app, according to the first buyer.

It’s unclear how large the current U.S. ad team is or how it is organized, as a spokesperson for TikTok declined to share that figure or share current user numbers; buyers weren’t certain of the size. In February, Digiday obtained a deck that said TikTok had more than 27 million users opening the app eight times a day. The company offers video ads, brand takeovers, brand lenses, “top view” video and its signature hashtag challenge.

The difficulty advertisers and agencies face with TikTok currently makes sense to Shann Biglione, evp of Americas and global strategy at platformGSK, who said that clients’ expectations for platforms ads teams are often something like Google’s, which is “the gold standard” of ads teams. Dealing with that comparison, “it’d be surprising if TikTok didn’t struggle,” said Biglione.

Biglione has worked with TikTok’s ad team in China but hasn’t yet worked with the team in the U.S. “When you have up and coming platforms, especially one that doesn’t have [its main] headquarters in the U.S. [it can be hard],” said Biglione. “Operationalizing in China versus the U.S. is a bit different. China is much more fast-paced. Decisions can happen very, very quickly in China versus the U.S.”

Multiple buyers compared TikTok’s current ads offering to early Snap Ads as costs are low — CPMs are generally around $1.50, according to a buyer — but the tools and measurement capabilities aren’t built out yet, making it hard to prove the value of being on the platform. The company’s self-serve ad platform is still in beta as well as its interest-based targeting, according to a spokesperson, who said that “everything we’re doing is still in beta,” that the company is “in an experimental phase” and that it is “still figuring out what works for the brand and the community.”

The self-serve ad platform is bare-bones at the moment, with capabilities that allow buyers to get ads on the platform but there’s nothing flashy, no advanced capabilities and that it’s “a little bit buggy,” said the first buyer. “To be fair, they did let us know in advance that that was the case. It had been ported over from the Chinese version. We’ve also been helping them and flagging bugs we run into.”

The lack of results to showcase could keep buyers away for the moment; currently, the company’s ads site doesn’t offer any case studies for prospective advertisers to check out. Metric Digital CEO Kevin Simonson said that the shop hasn’t yet worked with TikTok but likely will in the first quarter of next year. “[The] reason being is that the people I’ve seen who have tested it, paid ads not influencer, haven’t seen good results,” wrote Simonson in an email. “I have a feeling it’ll only work like Snap only works, cheap AOV in beauty for the youngins’.”  

Still, even with that comparison and the lack of clarity into what the platform delivers for brands, there’s lots of interest from advertisers and agencies and that will likely continue to grow, according to buyers.

“We know a ton of people are there, we know it’s a hot platform, so we should be experimenting and dabbling there versus waiting for them to have mature measurement systems because we know people are there, and this is the time to get on,” said Rednor. “To reject it because they don’t have a full team of reps yet or any of the things that the mature platforms do is kind of crazy at this point. You’re going to be somewhat left behind.”

 

By Kristina Monllos

Sourced from DIGIDAY

Read More
By
In News

The Claim That Facebook’s Libra Is A Cryptocurrency Is False Advertising

No Comments

By David B. Black

“Everyone” says that Facebook’s Libra is a cryptocurrency. Long before Libra had been imagined, Bitcoin pioneered and established the brand new world of cryptocurrency. Bitcoin created the category, and has always been its leading exemplar. The white paper by the still-unknown Bitcoin creator and inventor spelled out his design goals and the main aspects of Bitcoin that supported those goals. Once you read and understand what cryptocurrency is, it becomes very clear that, whatever Libra may be, it is NOT a cryptocurrency. To claim that it’s a cryptocurrency is like claiming that a locked desk drawer is a bank vault—yes, they both have keys and are supposed to keep things safe, but other than that…

Satoshi, the brilliant creator of Bitcoin, designed a currency that involves cryptography. If you want to be extremely loose, you could say that Libra is the same thing, because it’s also a currency that somehow involves cryptography. But that’s like saying that the thing you use to “buy” properties and hotels in the board game Monopoly is “money.” Try depositing some of it at an ATM and see how far you get.  Let’s explore the basics of what makes a cryptocurrency the way Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency.

First and foremost, there’s the concept that in Bitcoin, no one is in charge. How can you possibly make a computer system that works, does lots of computing, keeping lots of financial transactions and makes sure everyone’s account balance is correct … without anyone being in charge?? These things are hard to do when someone IS in charge! There’s quite a bit involved in making this happen, as I illustrate here, but here are some of the key points:

  • Anyone who wants to can sign up to be a “miner,” who are the folks that make Bitcoin work.
  • A miner has to put money into buying fast computers, running the mining software, and connecting with all the other miners to share work.
  • Miners get new transactions that Bitcoin users want to perform and “make them happen.”
  • This means that miners race each other to solve complex problems involving cryptography, the net result of which is a new page (block) of transactions that have been vetted, and “locked” by crypto-key.
  • Every piece of work a miner does is paid for by newly-minted Bitcoin – the miners are paid with Bitcoin!
  • Miners are highly incented to do the work and do it right, because they want to get lots of Bitcoin, and they want Bitcoin to continue to be viable.
  • Miners come and go as they see fit – no one “approves” them, literally no one’s in charge.
  • Miners can be anywhere, in any country.

Big corporations and regulators don’t like the unsupervised free-for-all of Bitcoin. They like to control things. And that’s exactly why Bitcoin was invented – to escape the control of a central authority but still have a system that works. It’s a brilliant concept, and Bitcoin’s success shows that it works.

Along comes Facebook and Libra. Facebook is ambitious. They keep trying to invent new things. They mostly fail when they build things themselves, so they buy companies instead. Facebook would LOVE to buy Bitcoin – but it’s not for sale, because no one owns it – darn! They’re forced to try to build it. But being a big corporation, they just can’t stop themselves from building their version of Bitcoin in a style that makes them comfortable – violating every single core principle of Bitcoin – the original cryptocurrency – along the way!

Here’s what Facebook is doing with Libra:

  • In Bitcoin, literally no one is in charge. With Libra, Facebook is designing and building it. Facebook is in charge and owns it.
  • Facebook has gone to considerable lengths to create the illusion that it’s not in charge with this fake Swiss-based consortium of prestigious companies that supposedly control things. Either way, some combination of big name-brand companies are in charge, which is pretty far from Bitcoin’s really-truly NO ONE is in charge.
  • Just like Facebook owns and controls all the computers that run Facebook, Libra will own and control all the computers that run Libra in a private data center. To all the corporate computer types, this is a good thing, but it totally and completely violates a core principle of Bitcoin, leaving it open to the same kind of insider corruption that all such places are rife with. It’s also a silly idea, as explained here. Microsoft and Intel explain the issues here.
  • One of the less pleasant side effects of Bitcoin’s miners and what they do with cryptography is the fact that “proof of work” takes time. It’s a cornerstone of getting all these strangers to play nice and do good things, but it takes a number of minutes to complete a transaction. To Facebook, this is unacceptable. So they’ve blithely discarded the key cryptographic cornerstone of Bitcoin, and replaced it with some light-weight encryption, so they can still say they’re a “cryptocurrency,” even though they’re not.

There’s more to be said, but that should be sufficient to make the basic point that Libra is a cryptocurrency the same way my cousin, who is sometimes allowed to sing in bars, is an opera singer. My cousin likes to think she is, and I’m nice to her. But she’s never so much as attended a performance at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, much less appeared on stage in front of an audience. Similarly, Facebook’s Libra likes to think it’s a cryptocurrency even better than the original, Bitcoin, but it swore off the core principles of Bitcoin from the start, and doesn’t deserve to be called by the same terminology.

Feature Image Credit: INDIA – 2019/08/30: In this photo illustration a popular decentralised digital currency Bitcoin –Libra logo seen displayed on a smartphone. (Photo Illustration by Avishek Das/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

By David B. Black

I started programming computers in high school. Before graduating with honors from Harvard College, I wrote code for oil refinery optimization and the ARPA-net. I then wrote code for compilers, composition systems, operating systems, DBMS internals and applications, large scale financial transaction processing, document processing, workflow and more. The card software I led now handles half a billion cards. I started in venture capital in the early 1990s, investing in the whole stack, from hardware to media. I now concentrate on health care and financial technology investments as tech partner at Oak HC/FT. I blog, and I’ve published five books on software-based innovation.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.

Sourced from Forbes

Read More
By
In News

Scientists have found a way to create energy from the night sky

No Comments

By Marlene Cimons.

The concept of radiative cooling—where the temperature of objects outside at night drops below the temperature of the air—has been known for centuries. Now scientists are harnessing it as an energy source.

Scientist Aaswath Raman long has been keen on discovering new sources of clean energy by creating novel materials that can make use of heat and light.

And lately, he has focused on developing better cooling systems, perhaps inspired by childhood summer visits to his grandparents in Mumbai, where the temperature can hover at 100 degrees F with killer humidity—and where his family refused to add an air conditioner. “It’s not unusually different from Miami, I suppose—just a bit challenging without air-conditioning,” he says.

His interests in clean energy and cooling led him to learn about a phenomenon called “radiative cooling,” which is when objects facing up shed heat into the sky after dark, cooling the surrounding area. This aha moment also recently led to his developing a pollution-free source of electricity.

“I was blown away by how this natural, passive cooling mechanism was ubiquitous, but something I’d never heard of,” he says.

Even more surprising was learning that the concept was centuries old. Ancient Middle Eastern civilizations—especially the Persians—used radiative cooling to make ice, pouring water into a pool as the sun set, collecting the frozen chunks the next morning. Even though the ambient temperature stayed above freezing, the pool would grow colder than the surrounding air as the water radiated heat into the sky. During the day, heat from the sun would have kept the water warm, but at night, it grew colder and colder until it froze over.

A small LED powered by the Raman’s power generator. [Photo: Cerqueira/Unsplash]

Raman, an assistant professor of materials science at engineering at UCLA, wanted to take advantage of this phenomenon to produce clean energy. So he and his colleagues designed a device that can harness nighttime cooling to generate a small amount of power.

For now, the device is too costly and generates too little electricity to compete with other forms of clean energy. To power a 3-watt LED lightbulb, the generator would need to be 1,300 square feet. Raman says he believes scientists could get that number down 60 square feet, and they could also lower costs enough to make it useful in remote areas disconnected from the power grid. A future iteration of the device could allow people without access to electricity to turn on a lightbulb, charge a cell phone, or power some other small device at night.

“There are also low-power sensors: think monitoring oil pipelines, or weather and climate monitoring in the Arctic,” he says. “The combination of remoteness and low power needs make them a great fit for this device, especially in polar, northern regions where you have limited or no sunlight for a large fraction of the year.”

His invention is deceptively simple. It looks like a small disc propped up on four legs. The side facing up radiates heat into the night sky, while the side facing down is warmed by the surrounding air. Sandwiched in between these two surfaces is a thermoelectric generator, which uses the difference in temperature to produce power.

The top side of the black aluminum disc radiates heat into the sky, while the bottom side is warmed by the surrounding air. A thermoelectric generator inside the disc takes advantage of the temperature difference to produce electricity. [Photo: Cerqueira/Unsplash]

A description of the research, co-authored with frequent collaborator Shanhui Fan, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University, was published in the journal Joule.

“This is an excellent demonstration of how the night sky can be used as a thermodynamic resource to do something useful,” says Jeremy N. Munday, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California Davis, who has proposed using radiative cooling to combat climate change. He says that more research is needed to know if the technology could someday provide a workable alternative to wind or solar power, for instance.

Raman has also looked for ways to take advantage of radiative cooling during the day. For a long time, most experts had dismissed this as improbable, insisting that the cooling effect only worked at night, but Raman was convinced he could create substances that could take the concept of radiative cooling and make it work during the day.

Ultimately, he and his colleagues created ultra-thin, hair-like materials—known as metamaterials—that successfully produced daytime cooling by acting as a mirror, reflecting the sun and heat back into the sky during the daytime hours, essentially removing the heat. It’s the same principle at work as natural nighttime radiative cooling, but with a little boost from materials created by the scientists.

Raman and his colleagues designed these cooling panels, which use a special material that radiates heat into the sky during the day. Water is cooled as it runs through the panels, and they are integrating such panels into air-conditioning systems to help them run more efficiently. [Photo: Cerqueira/Unsplash]

The scientists have since incorporated this material into panels that use radiative cooling to improve the efficiency of existing air-conditioning and refrigeration systems, helping to save energy. This is an important development as climate change will fuel more stifling and unrelenting heat waves, so the need for cooling—especially during the day—is going to increase, upping demand for electricity.

Initially, Raman did not spend a lot of time thinking about how to use radiative cooling to reengineer existing air conditioners and refrigeration systems—and then, always up for a challenge, he changed his mind.

“It always seemed like such a mature and well-developed field,” he says. But, then, Raman asked himself: “Was there anything we could do to make it better? Turns out, yes!”

Feature Image Credit: [Photo: Cerqueira/Unsplash]

By Marlene Cimons

Marlene Cimons writes for Nexus Media, a syndicated newswire covering climate, energy, policy, art, and culture.

Sourced from FastCompany

Read More
By
In News

7 essential Google Alerts you need to set up now

No Comments

By David Nield.

The best tool against the fear of missing out.

Among all the Google products, Google Alerts is perhaps one of the least known, but definitely one of the most powerful. It taps into Google’s endless crawling of the web—done to power its search engine—but flags up terms as they’re indexed, not when you get around to looking for them. Think of it as Google results coming to you.

Instead of running a search every day to see if your favorite band is touring, for instance, or to see if any new rumors have been reported about the new iPhone, you can sit back while those stories get straight into your inbox.

How to set up a Google Alert

Setting up Google Alerts is easy and straightforward. From your computer or mobile device, head to the Google Alerts page, and sign in with your Google account if you haven’t already.

Type the search phrase or words you want to keep tabs on into the Create an alert about… box at the top of the screen. Note that you can use the standard search operators here, the same you would use when searching on Google—quotation marks around a phrase will match that exact phrase; a plus symbol in front makes sure your search will always include that word, and a minus symbol in front of a word tells Google to return matches that don’t include it. So, entering “dolphins -miami” would get you results about the aquatic mammal but not the football team, for example.

As you type, sample results will appear so you know if you need to further refine your search. When you’ve got an alert you’re happy with, choose Show Options. Here you can choose how often your alerts appear, and whether you want to see all the results to your query, or only the most relevant. The latter option takes into account several factors, including the site it was published on, and how many times people click on it, among others. This option is much more helpful if you’re looking for something that returns a lot of hits.

When you’re happy, select Create Alert, and the results will start arriving in your inbox as frequently as you want (as they’re found, once a day, or once a week). Once you create your alerts, you can go to the Google Alerts page to modify or remove it.

Some trial and error might be required to find the right balance between getting overwhelmed with results and not getting any at all, but you should quickly get a feel for how specific you need to make your search terms and how often you need to receive your various Google Alerts.

Searching on Google is easy, but you know what’s easier? Having Google do the searching for you.David Nield

1. Important news topics

Google Alerts are ideal for keeping in touch with news stories, especially on topics that don’t often make the headlines. Maybe you’re interested in archaeological digs in one part of the world, or a specific type of art, or in a certain fashion trend—Google Alerts can bring articles on these topics straight to you.

2. Your favorite bands, shows, and authors

With so much music to listen to these days, it can be all too easy to miss a new album or a new tour from that band you were really into a couple of years back—but Google Alerts can keep you in the loop whenever something new happens.

But this extends beyond musical artists—you can check for new seasons of your favorite show on Netflix, or new books from your favorite authors, etc. Whatever type of cultural content you’re interested in, Google Alerts can serve it up.

3. Watch out for plagiarism

If you or the company you work for are in the writing business, then Google Alerts is a fantastic way of watching out for plagiarism. You can easily make sure no one else is passing off your work as their own, or borrowing your regular turns of phrase, or trying to impersonate you—create alerts using your name, or the titles of your articles, or some text from inside them to try and catch plagiarism (or discover who is quoting your content).

4. Check for company mentions

This one is work-related, but it’s still interesting—you can use Google Alerts to monitor what other people are saying about your company on the web, good or bad. Google Alerts is also useful for keeping up with industry news, and if your firm is a big name in your chosen industry, you should get plenty of news results too.

If you don’t want to get notifications about online mentions of your company, you can key in your name instead (this is one of the alerts recommended by Google itself). It might seem a somewhat egotistical move, but at least you’ll know if other people are talking about you (and maybe you’ll come across some other people with your name, too).

Wait, you did what? Oh, no… that’s just someone else with your exact same name.Omar Medina Films via Pixabay

5. Your personal details

Has your postal address or your email address leaked out on the web? A simple Google Alert can tell you. Remember no one else can see these alerts, so your privacy is not at risk here. If you do find your email address is out there for everyone to see, you might have been the victim of a hack, or have been listed in an online directory—whatever the context, Google Alerts helps you take action quickly.

6. Keep tabs on people

Who are you interested in? Whether it’s your long-lost brother, a particular politician, a celebrity, or a sports star, Google Alerts will deliver news on this person right to your inbox. For the most popular searches you might have to reduce the frequency of your notifications and stick to the Only the best results option, but this also works well for searches that don’t return many results at all—if someone suddenly comes back into the public eye, you’ll know about it first.

7. Local news

We’ll finish as we started, with news—the area where Google Alerts can perhaps be the most useful. In some parts of the world, finding news about your hometown isn’t always easy, but a quick Google Alert can help—if something significant happens in your area, you’ll know about it. If you live somewhere that does get plenty of news coverage, you might want to be more specific with your keywords (looking for stories on transport or crime, for example).

Feature Image Credit: Cytonn Photography via Unsplash

By David Nield

Sourced from Popular Science

Read More
By
Load More