By Sara Fischer.

Feature Image Credit: Aïda Amer/Axios

By Sara Fischer.

Sourced from AXIOS

By Kipp Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan.

As a startup founder or marketing leader, you’ve likely heard the mantra “distribution is everything.” But what does that really mean, and how do you put it into practice?

Building a great product is hard, but it’s only half the battle. The real challenge is getting that product in front of the right customers — repeatedly, and at scale.

For most startups, this is where things fall apart. In my experience, many founders either get stuck trying to sell to fewer customers at a higher price or chase thousands of lower-priced customers. As a result, they end up stretching their resources too thin and fail to create sustainable growth.

The solution is to build a scalable distribution engine. But how do you set up a system that consistently delivers results, while still balancing your current channels and marketing strategy?

In a recent Marketing Against the Grain episode, Kieran and I unpack why startups need to prioritize distribution from day one — and how to design a distribution system that works.

Check Your Numbers: Why a Startup Distribution Strategy is Critical

Let’s get real about the math. Most Series A or B startups are selling to mid-market companies with annual contract values of $5,000-$12,000. To achieve the growth investors expect, you have two options:

1. Go upmarket and increase your ACV to $250,000+. This is incredibly difficult and, in my experience, most fail.
2. Acquire thousands of customers at your current price point. This requires a powerful distribution engine.

The reality is, most startups never invest enough time in building that engine — and without it, they’re at a standstill.

The key is to design a distribution system that’s both predictable and high-leverage. Why? Because predictability gives you forecasting power, while leverage allows you to acquire customers efficiently.

Here’s how to approach it.

How to Build a Startup Distribution Engine

Having worked with countless startups (and helped build HubSpot’s own distribution engine from the ground up), Kieran and I have learned a thing or two about mastering distribution. Here are our top four tips.

1. Identify your product-channel fit.

Startups often talk about product-market fit — but just as critical is product-channel fit. In other words: which distribution channels best align with your product, attract customers, and allow for repeatable growth at scale?

At HubSpot, for example, we built our distribution strategy alongside our product development. Since our product was built around inbound marketing, we focused on channels like content marketing and SEO, which attracted our target audience while simultaneously (and conveniently) showcasing the actual value of our own product.

By aligning our distribution strategy with what HubSpot was designed to do — inbound marketing — we ensured that both our product and channels organically grew together in a way that was scalable and repeatable.

2. Balance predictability and creativity.

One of the toughest challenges of building a startup distribution engine is balancing predictability with creativity. You need reliable, predictable channels to fuel steady growth, but you also need to take creative risks to find the high-leverage opportunities that will propel your business forward.

A great example here is Abercrombie & Fitch. Once a brand in decline, they reimagined their distribution strategy by using influencers and social video to reach a new, younger audience.

While they still relied on predictable channels like social media, they added a creative twist by rebranding their image and using influencers to drive authenticity. This balance helped them thrive — outpacing even fast-growing companies like Nvidia for a period.

At HubSpot, we followed a similar path. In the early days, paid advertising drove about 50% of our demand, providing predictability. But as we scaled, we invested more in creative, high-leverage channels like search, flipping the ratio to where search eventually generated 60% of our demand — an absolute game changer for our scaling strategy.

Pro tip: Look at affiliate programs or creator collaborations to add creative twists to predictable channels. These types of partnerships can offer unique distribution angles that set you apart from competitors.

3. Find unique leverage points.

As Kieran points out during the podcast, the most successful distribution strategies find a unique angle within existing channels. Especially when a channel is already crowded, it’s no longer enough to just participate — you have to stand out.

A great example of this is Genius.com, which became the top lyric site by adding user-generated content like annotations to song lyrics. This feature increased each page’s value and helped them rank higher in search engines — not because they had the best product, but because they found a new way to use user interaction to boost visibility and engagement.

Pro tip: Segment your distribution channels into “known” (predictable) and “unknown” (risky, high-impact) categories. This helps you balance stable growth while testing new, high-upside channels.

4. Find asymmetric opportunities.

Distribution success often comes from identifying asymmetric opportunities — channels or strategies that offer disproportionately high returns with relatively low input. These opportunities typically arise from an ability to see what others miss.

As Kieran explains, “To get real leverage in distribution, you need someone who can creatively explore unproven areas while still applying process and rigor.” This means your team can’t just be focused on optimizing what’s already working — they need to be competitive, inventive, and unafraid to experiment.

A powerful example of this was a company I worked with in Brazil, which was targeting heads of logistics in a niche B2B market. Instead of going after traditional channels, we found an asymmetric opportunity by licensing popular business content (like James Clear’s Atomic Habits) and adapting it into Portuguese. This created a unique, localized offering that resonated with their audience in a way no one else was doing.

Don’t Neglect Distribution

Distribution isn’t a side concern for startups — it’s everything. To scale your business, you need a startup distribution engine that’s both predictable and capable of delivering high-leverage growth.

By focusing on the right channels, balancing predictability with creativity, and always looking for asymmetric opportunities, you’ll be in a much stronger position to grow your business.

To learn more about marketing startup distribution engine strategies, check out the full episode of Marketing Against the Grain below:

By Kipp Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan.

Sourced from hubspot

Edited by Jason Fell.

If you’re ready to take your professional skills up a notch, then get started today with these online courses.

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock

By Entrepreneur Deals Edited by Jason Fell

Sourced from Entrepreneur

By Jamie Johnson

Marketing and advertising focus on promoting products and services, but they do it in different ways.

Marketing and advertising share some similarities, but they have different goals and objectives. Marketing builds brand awareness and offers a perceived value, while advertising promotes a product or service. Learn how marketing and advertising work, how they differ, and how to use both strategies in your business.

What is advertising?

Advertising involves paying to promote a product or service to reach individuals who are the most likely to use it. Advertising focuses on acquiring customers and driving sales. Traditionally, businesses advertised on billboards, TV, and in mailers and magazines. Today, a lot of advertising occurs online through social media, websites, search engines, and emails.

An ad includes a message that’s tailored to a specific target audience. Besides generating sales, advertising makes it possible for a business to differentiate itself from its competitors and gather valuable data about its audience.

What is marketing?

Marketing refers to activities a company undertakes to attract its target audience to its products or services and deliver value to those consumers. Most companies do this by creating high-quality content that provides a compelling benefit to their audience.

Effective marketing entails deeply understanding your audience and what they’re looking for. When you understand your consumers’ wants and needs, you can demonstrate the value your product or service provides in the places where your audience spends most of their time. Some of the primary types of marketing include the following:

• Social media marketing: Businesses market to their customers using social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), or LinkedIn.
• Content marketing: Businesses create informative blog posts to rank higher in search engines and attract their ideal clients to their websites.
• Video marketing: Video marketing involves creating and publishing informative videos for your target audience.
• Email marketing: Businesses market to their target customers through weekly newsletters and promotional emails.

Differences between advertising and marketing

Although there are some similarities between advertising and marketing, they aren’t the same thing. Both involve different goals, responsibilities, and techniques. Here are some of the main differences between the two:

• Goals: The primary goal of marketing is to create and deliver value for the target audience. Businesses can bring in new sales and create long-term customers by providing value. Advertising strives to persuade consumers to take a specific action, mainly to buy a product or service.
• Activities: Marketing involves a wide range of activities, including market research, product development, developing pricing systems, and tracking the return on investment (ROI). Advertising involves pitching ad strategies, creating ad copy, and tracking and monitoring the performance of campaigns.
• Channels: Marketing and advertising use different methods to reach their respective goals. Marketing can employ a variety of efforts, like blog posts, social media posts, and search engine optimization (SEO), to attract more customers to the business and provide an incentive (e.g., information, a free trial, etc.) to the consumer. Advertising traditionally focuses on paid ads, like digital advertising, native ads, and print advertising, to persuade consumers to buy.
• Success: Marketers measure success through key performance indicators like sales revenue, ROI, conversion rates, and brand awareness. Advertising measures success based on ROI, cost per acquisition, engagement metrics, and return on ad spend.

How to integrate advertising and marketing

Every business must develop a personalized strategy that integrates marketing and advertising to achieve its goals. For instance, advertising can’t exist without a high-level marketing strategy that outlines critical elements like brand positioning and defines the target audience.

To formulate an effective, integrated strategy, assess your marketing and advertising goals. Are they aligned with your overarching business goals? Is your messaging and branding consistent across all of your marketing and advertising channels?

Create integrated campaigns that leverage multiple mediums. For example, campaigns can include a mix of social media advertising, email marketing, and content marketing supplemented with print, radio, or TV advertisements. Use data to measure the impact of these campaigns and total ROI.

CO— aims to bring you inspiration from leading respected experts. However, before making any business decision, you should consult a professional who can advise you based on your individual situation.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images/FG Trade 

By Jamie Johnson

Sourced from CO

CO—is committed to helping you start, run and grow your small business. Learn more about the benefits of small business membership in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, here.

By Koushik Mani, Caroline Des Rochers, and Erika Houde-Pearce.

In today’s digital landscape, businesses heavily rely on SMS and email campaigns to engage with customers and deliver timely, relevant messages. The shift towards digital marketing has increased customer engagement, accelerated delivery, and expanded personalization options. Email and SMS marketing is essential to digital strategies according to 44% of Chief Marketing Officers and they allocate approximately 8% of their marketing towards this. Industries face stringent restrictions on the content they can send due to legal regulations and carrier filtering policies.

Messages related to the subjects listed below are considered restricted and are subject to heavy filtering or even being blocked outright. Failing to comply with these restrictions can result in severe consequences, including legal action, fines, and irreparable damage to a brand’s reputation. Marketers need a solution that will proactively scan their content used in campaigns and flag restricted content before sending it out to their customers without facing penalties and losing trust.:

• Gambling
• High-risk financial services
• Debt forgiveness
• S.H.A.F.T (Sex, Hate, Alcohol, Firearms, and Tobacco)
• Illegal substances

In this blog, we will explore how to leverage Amazon Comprehend, Amazon S3, and AWS Lambda to proactively scan text-based marketing campaigns before publishing content . This solution enables businesses to enhance their marketing efforts while maintaining compliance with industry regulations, avoiding costly fines, and preserving their hard-earned reputation, conforming to best practices.

Solution Overview

AWS provides a robust suite of services to meet the infrastructure needs of the booming digital marketing industry, including messaging capabilities through email, SMS, push, and other channels through Amazon Simple Email Service, Amazon Simple Notification Service, or Amazon Pinpoint.

The main goal for this approach is to flag any message that contains restricted content mentioned above before distribution.

Figure 1: Architecture for proactive scanning of marketing content

Following are the high-level steps:

1. Upload documents to be scanned to the S3 bucket.
2. Utilize Amazon Comprehend custom classification for categorizing the documents uploaded.
3. Create an Amazon Comprehend endpoint to perform analysis.
4. Inference output is published to the destination S3 bucket.
5. Utilize AWS Lambda function to consume the output from the destination S3 bucket.
6. Send the compliant messages through various messaging channels.

Solution Walkthrough

Step 1: Upload Documents to Be Scanned to S3

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the Amazon S3 console
2. In the navigation bar on the top of the page, choose the name of the currently displayed AWS Region. Next, choose the Region in which you want to create a bucket.
3. In the left navigation pane, choose Buckets.
4. Choose Create bucket.
   • The Create bucket page opens.
5. Under General configuration, view the AWS Region where your bucket will be created.
6. Under Bucket type, choose General purpose.
7. For Bucket name, enter a name for your bucket.
   • The bucket name must:
     • Be unique within a partition. A partition is a grouping of Regions. AWS currently has three partitions: aws (Standard Regions), aws-cn (China Regions), and aws-us-gov (AWS GovCloud (US) Regions).
     • Be between 3 and 63 characters long.
     • Consist only of lowercase letters, numbers, dots (.), and hyphens (-). For best compatibility, we recommend that you avoid using dots (.) in bucket names, except for buckets that are used only for static website hosting.
     • Begin and end with a letter or number.
8. In the Buckets list, choose the name of the bucket that you want to upload your folders or files to.
9. Choose Upload.
10. In the Upload window, do one of the following:
    • Drag and drop files and folders to the Upload window.
    • Choose Add file or Add folder, choose the files or folders to upload, and choose Open.
    • To enable versioning, under Destination, choose Enable Bucket Versioning.
    • To upload the listed files and folders without configuring additional upload options, at the bottom of the page, choose Upload.
11. Amazon S3 uploads your objects and folders. When the upload is finished, you see a success message on the Upload: status page.

Step 2: Creating a Custom Classification Model

Custom Classification Model

Out-of-the-box models may not capture nuances and terminology specific to an organization’s industry or use case. Therefore, we train a custom model to identify compliant messages.

A custom classification model is a feature that allows you to train a machine learning model to classify text data based on categories that are specific to your use case or industry. It trains the model to recognize and sort different types of content which is used to power the endpoint. A custom classification model is designed to save costs and promote compliant messages and further prevent marketing companies from potential fines.

Requirements for custom classification:

• Dataset creation
  • A CSV dataset with 1000 examples of marketing messages, each labelled as compliant (1) or non-compliant (0).
  • Designed to train a model for accurate predictions on marketing message compliance.

Figure 2: Screenshot of dataset – 20 entries of censored marketing messages

• Creating a Test Data Set
  In addition to providing a dataset to power your customer classification model, a test dataset is also required to test the data that the model will be running on. Without a test dataset, Amazon Comprehend trains the model with 90 percent of the training data. It reserves 10 percent of the training data to use for testing. When using a test dataset, the test data must include at least one example for each unique label (0 or 1) in the training dataset.

1. Upload the data set and test data set to an S3 Bucket, by following the steps in this user guide.
2. In the AWS Console, search for Amazon Comprehend.
3. Once selected, select custom classification on the left panel.
4. Once there, select Create new model.
5. Next specify model settings:
   • Model name
   • Specify the version (optional)
   • Language: English
6. Specify the data specifications:
   • Training model type: Plain Text Documents
   • Data format: CSV File
   • Classifier Mode: Using Single-Label Mode
   • Training Dataset: Give the name of the bucket you created in step 1
   • Test Data set: Autosplit, i.e. how much of your data will be used for training and testing.

1. Specify the location of the model output in S3

1. Create an IAM Role
   • Permissions to access: Train, Test and output data (if specified in your S3 Buckets)
   • 
     
2. Once all parameters have been identified, select Create.
   • 
3. Once the model has been created, you can view it under Custom Classification. To check and verify the accuracy and F1 score, select the version number of the model. Here, you can view the model details under the Performance tab.

Step 3: Creating an Endpoint in Amazon Comprehend

Next, an endpoint needs to be created to analyse documents. To create an endpoint:

• Select endpoint on the left panel in Amazon Comprehend.
• Select Create endpoint in the left panel.
• Specify Endpoints Settings :
  • Provide a name
  • Custom model type: Custom Classification
  • Choose a custom model that you want to attach to the new endpoint. From the dropdown, you can search by model name.
  • Figure 8: Amazon Comprehend – Endpoint settings
• Provide the number of inference units (IUs): 1
• Once all the parameters have been provided, ensure that the Acknowledge checkbox has been selected.
• Finally, select Create endpoint.
• 

Step 4: Scanning Text with the Custom Classification Endpoint

Once the endpoint has been successfully created, it can be used for real-time analysis or batch-processing jobs. Below is a walkthrough of how both options can be achieved.

Real-time analysis:

• On the left panel, select Realtime Analysis.
• Pick Analysis type: custom, to view real-time insights based on the custom models from an endpoint you’ve created
• Select custom model type
• Select your Endpoint
• Insert your input text.
  • For this example, we have used a non-compliant message: Huge sale at Pine County Shooting Range 25% off for 6mm and 9mm bullets! Lazer add-ons on clearance too
• Once inserted, click Analyse.
• Once analysed, you will see a confidence score under Classes. Because the dataset is labelled as 0 for non-compliant and 1 for compliant. The message that was inserted was non-compliant, the result of the real-time analysis is a high confidence score for non-compliant.

Real-time analysis in Amazon Comprehend:

• On the left panel in Amazon Comprend, select Analysis Jobs.
• Select the Create Job button.
• Configure Job settings:
  • Enter the Name
  • Analysis Type: Custom Classification
  • Classifications Model: The model you have created for your Classifier, as well as the version number of that model you would like to use for this job.
  • 
• Enter the location of the Input Data and Output Data in the form of an S3 bucket URL.
• 
• Before creating a job the last thing, we want to do is provide the right access permission, by creating an IAM role that give access permissions to the S3 input and output locations.
• 
• Once the batch processing job shows a status of completed, you can view the results in the output S3 bucket which was identified earlier. The results will be in a json file where each line represents the confidence score for each marketing message.
• 

Step 5 (optional): Publish message to communication service

The result from the batch processing is automatically uploaded to the output S3 bucket. For each json file uploaded, S3 will initiate an S3 Event Notification which will inform a Lambda function that a new S3 object has been created.

The Lambda function will evaluate the results and automatically identify the messages labeled as compliant (label 0). These compliant messages will then be published to communication services using one of the following three APIs, depending on the desired service:

• Using the Amazon SES API to send email
• Send email by using the Amazon Pinpoint API
• Send SMS by using Amazon SNS API

To automatically trigger the AWS Lambda function, which will read the files uploaded into the S3 bucket and display the data using the Python Pandas library, we will use the boto3 API to read the files from the S3 bucket.

1. Create an IAM Role in AWS.
2. Create an AWS S3 bucket.
3. Create the AWS Lambda function with S3 triggers enabled.
4. Update the Lambda code with a Python script to read the data and send the communication to customer.

Conclusion

Proactively scanning and classifying marketing content for compliance is a critical aspect of ensuring successful digital marketing campaigns while adhering to industry regulations. Leveraging the powerful combination of Amazon Comprehend, Amazon S3, and AWS Lambda enables the automatic analysis of text-based marketing messages and flagging of any non-compliant content before sending them to your customer. Following these steps provides you with the tools and knowledge to implement proactive scanning for your marketing content. This solution will help mitigate the risks of non-compliance, avoiding costly fines and reputational damage, while freeing up time for your content creation teams to focus on ideation and crafting compelling marketing messages. Regular monitoring and fine-tuning of the custom classification model should be conducted to ensure accurate identification of non-compliant language.

To get started with proactively scanning and classifying marketing content for compliance, see Amazon Comprehend Custom Classification.

By Koushik Mani,

Koushik Mani is an associate solutions architect at AWS. He had worked as a Software Engineer for two years focusing on machine learning and cloud computing use cases at Telstra. He completed his masters in computer science from University of Southern California. He is passionate about machine learning and generative AI use cases and building solutions.

Caroline Des Rochers,

Caroline is a Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services, based in Montreal, Canada. She works closely with customers, in both English and French, to accelerate innovation and advise them through technical challenges. In her spare time, she is a passionate skier and cyclist, always ready for new outdoor adventures.

Erika Houde-Pearce

Erika Houde-Pearce is a bilingual Solutions Architect in Montreal, guiding small and medium businesses in eastern Canada through their cloud transformations. Her expertise empowers organizations to unlock the full potential of cloud technology, accelerating their growth and agility. Away from work, she spends her spare time with her golden retriever, Scotia.

Sourced from AWS

By Mason Cosby,  Edited by Chelsea Brown.

Inbound marketing has its place, but account-based marketing (ABM) is a winning strategy to consider for B2B brands and the entrepreneurs who lead them.

By Mason Cosby, 

Sourced from Entrepreneur

Same time while maximizing output

By Amanda Caswell.

Sourced from tom’s guide

By Michael Crider.

YouTube’s ads are horrible, and so is its treatment of both viewers and creators. I’m not paying for Premium, ever.

I block every single ad on YouTube. And I’m a hypocrite for doing it. But I’m not ashamed. Because through a series of blunders and malicious decisions, Google has systematically made YouTube a worse and worse viewing experience, abusing its monopoly position as the de facto home of video on the web.

I’m a hypocrite for blocking ads

Let’s start off this rant with a little context. As a web writer, I should never block advertising on the internet. The majority of the money I’ve been paid over the last 13 years has come from web ads, like the ones you’re probably seeing above, below, and around these words. A modern writer for a free-to-read site blocking advertising is kind of like a vegan butcher: problematic at best.

Advertising is how the majority of content on the internet is sustainable. Google, Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn, TikTok, the social media service formerly known as Twitter — if you’re accessing information for free, it’s almost always being paid for by ads. Google isn’t a search company, it’s the biggest advertising company on the planet. And yes, that includes Google’s subsidiary services like Gmail, Google Docs, and YouTube.

But the fact that advertising is literally vital to the web doesn’t take away its problems. Modern web ads are targeted towards people with a shocking degree of specificity. Your advertising profile, curated and updated via tracking cookies, probably includes far more data than you’d feel comfortable with if you saw it.

Ads clutter up pages and obscure the content they’re supposed to be supporting, bogging down performance with unnecessary videos and animations. And that’s when they’re not being actively malicious, spreading malware or targeted disinformation, or just plain selling scams. Google officially tries to police what gets advertised with its systems, as do other advertising giants, but this largely automated system has built-in holes that are constantly leaking the stuff of nightmares.

So yeah, I use an ad blocker in my browser, hypocritical as it is for me. And I don’t blame anyone else for doing it, either. It’s become an essential tool for any user of modern technology.

To hold on to a shred of dignity, I don’t block all ads. I use a “reverse allowlist,” only manually blocking ads on websites that bog down my PC with a glut of performance-sapping videos and animations, and only when I don’t have an alternative. As someone who works online and keeps dozens of tabs and windows open concurrently, I really don’t have an option not to block a lot of ads, even on my beefy desktop with 32GB of memory. The reverse allowlist feature is one of the reasons I recommend AdGuard over more popular alternatives like AdBlock Plus.

Based on that criteria, I shouldn’t block ads on YouTube. They don’t sap performance (much), and as annoying as they are, they pay for the content I watch for free. Open and shut case, right?

Google makes YouTube worse so you’ll pay to undo it

Wrong. Over the last few years Google has abused YouTube, its viewers, and its creators at every opportunity, and I’m sick of it. And since YouTube is an effective monopoly on the web (and hardly the only one Google is abusing), I feel zero shame about skirting around its attempts to make me pay for it with either dollars or attention. Vive la resistance.

Years ago I watched ads on YouTube, patiently waiting for the “skip” button to appear, gritting my teeth as that took longer and longer. I first considered blocking them when I started getting unskippable 30-second advertisements in front of movie trailers posted by Hollywood studios — ads to watch ads, in a twisted mirror of bloated theatre previews. But the final straw was when Google began showing two ads at once before pretty much every video.

As it happens, I started seeing double the advertising at exactly the same time that YouTube Premium became an option in 2018. Of course that wasn’t a coincidence. Google decided to make the experience of YouTube materially worse at the same time that it introduced a paid option to make it better.

We’ve seen the same thing happen with most of the mainstream video platforms: a cheap, ad-supported tier appears, and suddenly the ad-free experience is “premium.” Amazon didn’t even try to hide it — they simply made everything on Prime Video ad-supported, and told everyone to pay up if they didn’t like it. Pay more, I should say, since Prime was already a paid service.

Arbitrarily making your service worse so you can pay to undo the malfeasance really gets my goat. I resolved to begin blocking every YouTube ad I could and never pay for it, simply out of spite. And I succeeded.

How I block every YouTube ad — even the ones YouTube doesn’t pay for

On the desktop the easiest way to go about this is with a standard ad-blocker. Again, I prefer AdGuard, which has generally been reliable for this purpose. And it works in pretty much every browser, including my new bestie Vivaldi.

Once you’ve made that jump, there are other ways to enhance your experience that Google probably wouldn’t appreciate. You can skip past repetitive channel intros and outros, even automatically jump past the paid sponsorships that channels are forced to use when YouTube doesn’t pay them enough (the ads upon ads upon ads). The promo page for SponsorBlock says the extension has auto-skipped over thousands of years of integrated ads for its users.

But that’s just the desktop. What about mobile, where most of the world is actually watching YouTube? On Android this is fairly easy, if not straightforward. You can use a tool like ReVanced to patch the official app, baking those ad-blocking tools right into a customized version. In addition to blocking ads and skipping sponsored segments, it can even unlock the features that Google has placed behind the Premium adwall, like the ability to play audio in the background while you use other apps or have your phone off entirely.

In the interest of total transparency: This is something Google would probably call stealing, and it’s definitely against YouTube’s terms of service. Which is why they fight so hard against these apps.

Are you using an iPhone instead of Android, or aren’t keen on the slightly daunting task of messing with the official app? Then there are other options. You can view YouTube through a mobile browser like DuckDuckGo for easy access to ad-blocking and background audio. There are even a few apps like PopTube that are essentially third-party YouTube clients, doing their best to get around Google’s restrictions.

If all else fails, you can use a VPN to pretend you’re in a country where Google doesn’t think it’s worth it to run ads. And because I still need to earn a pay check, here are some VPNs you might consider. As it happens, the VPN service I pay for every month is cheaper every month than a YouTube Premium subscription.

Playing cat and mouse with Google

Google is doing its best to get around these methods as they become more popular. The keeper of the keys has been experimenting with a lot of ways to make sure you’re either paying or watching ads — the original “Vanced” app had to shut down for fear of legal repercussions. Google has slowed down the performance of YouTube for users who are blocking ads, trying to make it as frustrating as possible. And every time, the ad blockers have won out. Because YouTube might be powered by money, but ad-blocking developers are powered by spite.

Google’s next attempt to out-fox ad-blockers is baking advertising right into the base of the video stream, encoding the ads into the same file as the video itself. This is a huge technical overhead, something that will put some serious strain on YouTube’s data centers. And I don’t think it’ll work, even if they get it functional. The ability to bypass sponsored ads hard-coded into the videos already exists, and shows up within a few hours of a new video being posted on a popular channel.

If all this seems like a lot just to skip out on $15 a month, well, I suppose it is. Especially since I watch far more YouTube than I do any streaming service I actually pay for. But I’m not the only one who’s fed up with the platform, and sadly has no real alternative. YouTube’s own creators are sick of it too.

Even YouTube creators are sick of YouTube

You can’t watch any professional YouTube channel for long without hearing about videos getting taken down for overzealous and questionably legal copyright claims, as the automated systems leave the actual enforcement of fair use to humans. There are also elaborate methods of flagging videos with copyright notices and, instead of removing the video, simply leaving it in place and taking (or stealing) the revenue it creates. This is a system designed to end YouTube’s freewheeling pre-Google days as an open haven for piracy, but now it’s been weaponized as a way for gigantic corporations to fleece genuine creators out of the fruits of their labour.

And that’s assuming that advertisers are willing to pay for it in the first place. YouTube’s demonetization system, by which Google simply refuses to pay a creator because advertisers don’t want to be associated with controversial topics, is just as big a menace for anyone actually trying to make a living on the platform. You’ll see creators censor their own speech to avoid swearing too early, or using ridiculous euphemisms like “unalive” for kill or “self-delete” for suicide, topics that appear next to highly paid advertising on television every single day.

The following (demonetized) video has lots and lots of swearing. Fair warning. See how easy that was?

Try to make a video about true crime without saying “murder,” and you’ll see why YouTube creators are always begging you to subscribe to them on Patreon. Because it’s becoming harder and harder to actually make money on YouTube…and there’s no one to blame for that, except YouTube.

And for what? When I use YouTube in another browser or with extensions disabled, I still see some of the same trash ads I used to. Blatant “training methods” for get-rich-quick scams, the same kind of garbage that was stealing people’s money on late night TV thirty years ago. Mobile game ripoffs straight-up lying about what their actual gameplay looks like. “Dating ads” with Photoshopped models that seem like they’re either fake or victims of human trafficking. And just recently, endless, endless political ads with zero standards for either production or truth.

I even get advertising for ad blockers. So Google is accepting money to advertise products on YouTube…that it absolutely forbids you to use on YouTube, according to its Terms of Service. YouTube seems to have much lower standards for the people buying ads it than for the people who make the content that enables those ads to function.

Dropout.tv

To try and alleviate my conscience, I do pay for some of the content I watch. Indeed, I use Patreon to support some of my favourite channels like Drawfee and Second Wind. The YouTube monopoly is the only way they can actually get their content seen and I don’t want them to disappear. I’ve bought D&D merchandise from creators like Pointy Hat when they advertise their own stuff, just as a means of showing my appreciation. And I’m subscribed to the comedy channel Dropout, which evolved out of College Humour, and has become possibly the only self-sustaining streaming service that’s actually worth what it charges.

But pay for YouTube directly? Not a chance. I’ve given Google too much money for phones and tablets in the past, I paid for Google Play Music for years before they once again scrapped it for a worse and more expensive service. Until Google starts respecting both the users that it serves and the creators that it depends upon, it doesn’t get any more of my cash.

Feature Image Credit: NiP STUDIO/Shutterstock.com

By Michael Crider.

Michael is a 10-year veteran of technology journalism, covering everything from Apple to ZTE. On PCWorld he’s the resident keyboard nut, always using a new one for a review and building a new mechanical board or expanding his desktop “battlestation” in his off hours. Michael’s previous bylines include Android Police, Digital Trends, Wired, Lifehacker, and How-To Geek, and he’s covered events like CES and Mobile World Congress live. Michael lives in Pennsylvania where he’s always looking forward to his next kayaking trip.

Sourced from PCWorld

Enter the Websites You Want to Search

Now, fill out the What to search box. It will give you examples of how to enter the websites you’d like to include. For example, entering www.makeuseof.com/* will include the entire makeuseof.com website, and entering *.bbc.co.uk will search the entire BBC domain, including television, radio, news, etc. You can add as many sites as you like here and always add more or remove some later.

 

Next, fill in your search settings. There are just two boxes here. Turn Image Search on if you want to include images in your search, and turn Safe Search on if you want it to block adult content from your searches.

Now, confirm that you are not a robot and click Create; your search engine is ready. There is a small code snippet on this page, but you only need it if you want to add it to your website.

Bookmark Your Custom Search Engine

Click Back to all engines in the top left of the page. Here, you will see a link to your search engine and any others you’ve created. Click the search engine’s name to edit, add or remove sites, or change settings.

Click on the link symbol under Public URL to open your search engine in a new window. You can bookmark this page to use your new search engine whenever needed—press CTRL + D on Google Chrome to bookmark the current page.

Programmable search engines can be a great way to get higher quality Google search results faster and with less combing through ads and bad results. They narrow your news search to trusted sites, focus work searches on industry publications, restrict study searches to professor-approved sources, create one for job searching, one for shopping to search only retailers you know and trust, or help you make sure kids search only kid-friendly, educational sites.

Because custom programmable search engines are so fast and easy to create, you can even make one to speed you through a particular project faster and delete it when finished. Experiment and get your search the way you want, without all the clutter.

Feature Image Credit: Gavin Phillips/MakeUseOf

Sourced from MUO

By Jose Enrico

A staggering $15.5 million for just a URL.

In a savvy business move, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman kept attention this week with a single, innocuous tweet: chat.com. Clickers were neatly redirected to OpenAI’s much-touted AI-powered chatbot ChatGPT.

Far from simply a redirect, the acquisition of this domain speaks to the continued effort of OpenAI to consolidate its branding and expand its influence within the conversational AI space. It’s just a URL, but its price is enough to give you the shock value you need for a week.

How Much is Chat.com Domain?

Feature Image Credit: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

By Jose Enrico

Sourced from TECH TiMES