In News

Four Ways Old SEO and New SEO Are Different

July 27, 2017 No Comments

To cut a long story short, what used to work wonders back in the old days just doesn’t anymore.

But the good news is that, at its core, the goals and basic tenets of SEO haven’t changed. Sure, some tactics and best practices may be different, but SEO is still about connecting your brand with your target audience by increasing your search rankings.

Perhaps the best way to describe new school SEO is that it’s about optimising for real people instead of search engines. But then again, this school of thought has already existed even in the old days of SEO.

So, how do you know which practices to avoid, and which ones you should be spending more time and resources on? Here are a few key differences between old and new SEO, which should tell you everything about the kind approach to take when marketing.

Today’s SEO is About Engaging Customers, Not Just Rankings

In the past, the thrust behind SEO was to focus on a few keywords and trying to rank for them on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Some search marketers believed that it didn’t matter how you did it, as long as you managed to grab and keep top rankings on Google.

However, Google’s Penguin and Panda updates saw to it that marketers could no longer game the system with link farming and keyword spamming.

Today, SEO is about managing your brand’s reputation, and making people want to interact with your brand by spreading quality content about your products and services.

For law firms, this means creating content that attracts your target audience and nurturing them until they become your actual clients. If you have this down pat, your rankings should improve through organic sharing/mentions, and natural linking across the internet.

To put it simply, SEO is now rooted in traditional marketing and public relations, in that you’re trying to build your law firm’s authority through reputation management and savvy PR.

Keywords are Still Important, But They’re Not the Only Thing Going On

Anyone who’s been engaged in SEO before 2011 knows that for many years, the industry was always focused on one thing: keywords.

In the past, search marketers would focus on just one major keyword, hinging all their efforts on getting ranked for that specific search term, and only that term.

But as search engines continue to get smarter, the goal is now to think of what search engine users think and want when typing into the search engine. This has given rise to semantic SEO, which focuses on keyword intent and long tail keywords.

For law firms, this means the days of gaming Google with keywords are over, with the context behind searches now being taken into account when showing search results. In turn, this means your content has to be top notch and relevant in order to generate traffic and improve your site’s rankings.

Relevance will be the primary factor affecting how effective your website content is. This will be both a challenge and opportunity for providers of legal services, possibly requiring them to change their website content and marketing campaigns. But it can also place you in a prime position to beat your competitors in the SERPs.

SEO Copywriting: How To Write Content That Both Google And Your Visitors Will Love

July 14, 2017 No Comments

Sourced from Inbound Rocket.

Building an audience for your company can be achieved in a couple of different ways. In the old days, you would buy ads in your (local) newspaper; you did radio ads, tv ads or any other ad you could afford with your marketing budget.

Then came the internet and the same old advertising model moved along to the web.

But people are getting blinder every day for these types of companies trying to scream for attention. In a recent piece on Medium Jeremy Ettinghausen even called it “Why Does Digital Advertising Suck?”

He states:

The reason most digital advertising isn’t very good is because most people in advertising don’t really get the internet.

So unless you’re creative and have the potential budget to act upon it, how can you and your small business still generate business online?

That’s where Content Marketing came in over the last couple of years. After all, you know your market in which you’re operating best, right? So why can’t you help your potential customer solve their problems in the same way your product helps them only through media you are creating and promoting?

One of the biggest challenges faced by people doing Content Marketing though is how can you build an audience when your content is not being indexed properly by search engines. And if you do try to optimise your content too much for search engine indexation will it still appeal to your readers?

As we wrote in an earlier topic, SEO content isn’t that complicated, once you understand that with whatever you write the readers comes first, the user is more important than any search engine robot, you’ve already won the first battle.

Winning in Content Marketing, means you need to go further than just producing content for the sake of creating content. It needs to appeal to the reader by helping them solve their problems, AND it needs to appeal to search engines, so you get a good ranking.

But how can you create content that ranks well in Google and other search engines and still appeals to your readers? That is where SEO Copywriting comes in. It helps you to write content for people and at the same time optimising for Google.

What is SEO

But before we can start we first have to get our basics right. What is SEO?

SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization.” It is the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines.

So in other words, by using SEO, you’re trying to make sure that your website has a higher position in search results. SEO seeks to optimise your website in such a way that the algorithms of Google, Bing and others rate your site in such a way that you get a higher ranking.

Although the actual way this ranking works has always been (and probably will always be) a secret, over the years more and more people started to figure out what kind of things are necessary to get a higher ranking.

These items that can help you rank better can be divided into two categories. On-page SEO factors and Off-page SEO factors.

On-page SEO factors are the things you can change and optimise on your own website. Like technical changes, or the way you write your copy.

Off-page SEO is slightly more complicated because it involves things that are not happening on your domain and have little to no control over. Although the most important off-page factor is probably getting backlinks to your website. The more (relevant) sites link to your site; the higher your ranking will be.

In this article, we will be focusing on on-page SEO, and specifically how to write better copy.

Copywriting?

At its core copywriting is re-arranging words to make your products or services sell better. It is like that salesman who makes all the sales at your company, only then in writing form.

Copywriting is the art and science of creating copy, creating content that prompts the reader to either buy your product, subscribe to your email list, or take any action that you want as a result after reading that copy.

What drives a reader of your copy to take action? A good copywriter does, copywriting is all about:

Getting them to WANT to engage with you….not spamming them with offers.
Generously giving something valuable to the person….not just “greedily asking” for stuff.
Getting them to WANT to buy from you….not out of pressure, but because they enjoy your content and help.

Being a good copywriter first starts by understanding your audience. A good copywriter knows what his or her audience likes and chooses the words that will appeal to them. The headline, words, phrases, quotes used in the content are there to persuade and cause the reader to take action.

Next, to that, an SEO copywriter not only understands his human audience, but he also understands how search engines feel about certain words and phrases.

The beautiful thing is, in theory, everyone can become a good copywriter, just like everyone can be a good storyteller. The only way to become one though is by lots and lots of practice.

How to write copy for SEO?

Writing copy for SEO, just means that you want to create content with the goal of attracting search engine traffic. After all:

As you can see, if you do any business online, it is important that you optimise your content for search engine.

The better optimised it is, the better the ranking of your content. It could bring you to the holy grail, that first page of search results. Or even the first position. You will get more click, shares, likes, engagement and conversions. If nobody can find your website, then even the best-written content is pointless.

Writing SEO friendly content though sounds simpler than it might be seen. There are some steps involved, next to just producing content if you want it to be able to rank well.

At it’s core writing copy for SEO can be done in four steps:

Keyword research – if you want people to be able to find your content, you first need to figure out what it is that you want to get found on. If you do the research for quality keywords at the start, you can start to produce content that you know people are looking for.
Keyword optimisation – Now that you know what words, or combination of words work best for your company, you can start to figure out where and how to use these keywords in your content.
Content organisation – Even though you want to include the keywords into your content, you just don’t want to stuff your entire piece with the same keywords. A good piece of content is organised in a logical way. This will help the robots to better understand what the content is about and next to that it will also help your visitors to consume the content better and as a result stay longer on your site.
Content promotion – Content creation is only half the battle – the rest is gaining notice. After you published your new piece, be sure to promote and share it on different places to build visibility and backlinks.

Keyword research

A keyword is a word (or a phrase) that one might type into a search engine to find what you’re looking for. There could be thousands of words and phrases related to the content that you’re creating, so the challenge is the find the best ones for you that will drive the most traffic to your site.

So what makes a keyword a unique keyword? People tend to think that a good keyword is a popular one automatically. Popularity is not the primary focus you should have though; the main focus should be relevancy, followed by popularity.

Finding relevancy, first starts by thinking what you want to rank about. Write down in one sentence what you want to be find for. The next step will be coming up with questions related to that one sentence. The more questions you can think of the better. And finally you can imagine what it is you would type into a search engine if you want to get an answer to those questions.

Let’s give a concrete example. Say you want to create a page that talks about the best exercises you can do at home, without the need of any gym equipment. The first step is coming of with a statement, a one sentence describing what you want to talk about: “How to build muscle and strength at home without lifting weights”

Potential questions this page might answer are: “How can you become stronger without lifting weights?”, or “How can you use your body for weightlifting?”, or “What exercises can you do without gym equipment?”.

Potential search queries could include “losing weight”, “building muscle”, “easy steps to become stronger”, “workouts at home”, “workouts for men”, “workouts for women”, “beginner home workouts”, “best home workout”, etc.

While you now have a list of potential keywords. The next step is to identify the most important ones for you. Using the Google Adwords Keyword Planner you can get an estimate, based on real data, of the total number of searches that people are doing for these keywords each month. Next to that as an added bonus you also get a list with up to 800 keywords that are similar to the one you entered.

Other great tools are SEMRush (both paid and free) and KeywordTool.io.

Keyword Overview lead generation on SEMRush

Using SEMRush to do Keyword research

Using this information you can refine your list, deleting the ones that at the end don’t seem that optimal. In an ideal situation, you want to end up with no fewer than two and no more than maximum eight keywords for your piece of content.

Not sure which keywords to delete and which ones to keep? Remove any keywords or phrases that don’t sound natural that sound like some bad copywriter tried to write and advertisement. Or phrases that mention a competing brand by name.

The final step you need to take with the narrowed down list, is identifying your primary keyword (or long tail keyword). Again, this one doesn’t have to be the most popular keyword from the list of remaining items. But it is the one that describes your piece of content, your page the best. When it does that, you know your page will address the unique needs of the person searching for it and ending up on your site.

Now that you’ve chosen your primary keyword, the next task will be to select a handful of secondary or short tail keywords. These keywords should expand the range of people’s search to which your page could still be considered relevant, without losing too much of it’s focus.

After that, it’s time to optimise your content.

Keyword optimisation

The first step is often the hardest, so also in this case. Identifying the correct keywords for which you want to rank is the hardest part, now we need to start tweaking our page, by putting those keywords in the right spots.

The most important places for your keywords to appear in are:

Body copy
Your headings and subheadings
Your page title
Your meta description
Your URL or permalink
Alt texts of your images

Don’t go crazy by putting to much of your keywords (both long and short tail) in your content though. A good ratio is 1-2% of your text maximum should be your keywords. So, that means in a 500-word article, you should include the keywords no more than 5-10 times.

Integrate them naturally in your content, as we stated in an earlier article search engines are becoming better and better in understanding human writing. If the placement of your keywords look to weird, to unnatural Google and other will notice this and may punish you for it.

A great way to check if you did not over optimise is by using a free tool like Keyword Density Checker.

Content organisation

The third step is making sure your content is organised in such a way that it makes it easy for the reader ready to consume your piece of content. How can you optimise it in such a way that it is easy to the eye and easy on the mind to consume?

Let’s first start with the readability of your content. There are some great tools out there that can help you improve your writing.

Hemingway Editor

The Hemingway Editor is available as web app, but also as desktop application

The Hemingway Editor is a great tool for almost all of your writing tasks. You don’t want to bore people with difficult words, with large unreadable sentences. That’s how you scare away your readers! Hemingway Editor analyses your text to find any sentences that are difficult, or even “very difficult”, to read.

It highlights these sentences. Next, to that, it also highlights instances where your copy is too passive. The easier it is to consume a piece of content, the longer people will stay on your site to consume the entire piece of content and the higher the chances of them sharing your content.

More shares, means of course more people getting your content presented to them and the articles that get shared the most get the best SEO rating.

Read-Able

Read-Able Readability Test Tool

Read-Able is quite similar to Hemingway editor. It also analyses your copy based on readability, but instead of highlighting individual sentences that need improving, it gives your text and overall readability score. This score tell you what age group will be able to easily read your content. If you’re article is already online, you can also enter your URL instead op copy pasting the text.

Help.Plagtracker

Plagtracker – Professional Editing Assistance

If you’re writing content of course a lot of people look around on the web nowadays for inspiration. Sometimes you’re inspiration however, might be a bit to literal resulting in content that looks and sounds to much like other content already out there. Although it is perfectly fine to get some inspiration online, it is never okay to plagiarise content. Plagtracker will analyse your piece of content, looks for any instances of plagiarism, and replaces them with new, original content.

Other items to focus on with the organisation of your content, having a clear structure, adding visuals to make it visually more attractive, internal linking, etc.

Content promotion

Even if you produce the best content in the world, so is everyone else. According to research done in 2012 by the Content Marketing Institute (so probably by now these numbers are even higher) 90% of B2B marketers use content marketing.

So when everyone is doing it? How can you stand out above the rest? How can you get your content noticed faster and better than your competitors?

The answer is content promotion.

Creating and optimising your content on your website is only part of the process; once you’ve created it, content promotion helps you get in front of the right audience at the right time.

Thankfully, most traditional marketers have no idea how to promote their content (next to putting advertisement budget behind it), so it has only a small portion of the reach it could have.

If you want to be better than your competitor start promoting your content on all the channels you can after it is published. This means social media, specialised communities for around your topics, email newsletter. And not just on your company channels, using tools like Social Seeder, you can use the power of your employees and your brand ambassadors to share and amplify your content.

Creating content requires a lot of time, skill and knowledge. If you want to start getting better search traffic to your website, you’re going to put in the work.

The success of your content and its marketing value, however, will first depend on the quality of the content itself. Next to that the “small” details as outlined in this article will help you push your content further.

Don’t start with the optimisation of your content though; you want your content to read and feel natural.

So, first put down all your thoughts in an article, post, page or any other piece of content you want to create and only then start using the above techniques to make those final tweaks to make sure it ranks even better.

What’s your take on SEO copywriting? Do you think it’s a major factor for online content marketing success? How are you optimising your content at your company? Leave a comment below!

Sourced from Inbound Rocket.

In News

Google Says It Won’t Creep On Your Emails Anymore

July 14, 2017 No Comments

By Catherine Trautwein.

Google will stop scanning your emails in order to customize the advertising you see in Gmail, the company announced Friday.

“G Suite’s Gmail is already not used as input for ads personalization, and Google has decided to follow suit later this year in our free consumer Gmail service,” Google Cloud senior vice president Diane Greene wrote in a blog post. “Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change.”

The move means Gmail users — all 1.2 billion of them — will get the same treatment when it comes to this aspect of email privacy as the 3 million companies that pay for access to G Suite, according to the blog post.

“This decision brings Gmail ads in line with how we personalize ads for other Google products,” Greene wrote.

Google makes an overwhelming majority of its money on advertising. The search giant raked in more than $21.4 billion in advertising revenue during the first quarter of 2017, which represented a nearly 20 percent increase year-over-year.

By Catherine Trautwein.

Sourced from TIME

In News

Google will stop scanning your Gmail messages to sell targeted ads

July 11, 2017 No Comments

By Nick Statt

Google will stop its long-standing practice of scanning the contents of individual Gmail users for advertising purposes, the company announced in a blog post today. The practice, something Google has done nearly since the launch of its email service, allows the company to digest the contents of email messages and use them to deliver targeted ads within Gmail itself.

Users are allowed to opt out, and Google also reserves the practice only for personal Gmail users and not those of corporate accounts. However, the practice has made it difficult for Google to find and retain corporate clients for its cloud services business, according to Diane Greene, Google’s cloud division head, who spoke with the Financial Times. This is due to general confusion over Google’s business tactics and an overall apprehension to trust the company with sensitive data, the report says.

“G Suite’s Gmail is already not used as input for ads personalization, and Google has decided to follow suit later this year in our free consumer Gmail service,” Green wrote in today’s blog post. “Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change. This decision brings Gmail ads in line with how we personalize ads for other Google products.”

Greene’s role, since her hiring in November 2015, has been to convince more companies to rely on Google’s G Suite and to move more data off competitors’ services and onto Google’s cloud. This has been a bit of an uphill battle for Google, as both Microsoft and Amazon have emerged as two of market leaders in providing cloud services, with Amazon primarily providing hosting and Microsoft providing corporate productivity services. Now, Google hopes it can bring more customers on board by convincing them that its practices won’t jeopardize corporate privacy.

The move to end targeted advertising in Gmail doesn’t mean users won’t still see ads. Google can still parse search histories, YouTube browsing, and other Chrome activity as long as you’re signed into your Gmail account. But for those who might have been wary of Google’s ad-targeting practices in the past, this may put those worries to rest. The company certainly hopes it will do so for potential corporate clients.

By Nick Statt

Sourced from The Verge

In News

At Cannes, advertisers are still hunting for an alternative to Google and Facebook

July 11, 2017 No Comments

By Kurt Wagner

Plus new attendees, two ways to look at live video and a Snapchat-branded Ferris wheel.

The biggest spenders and personalities from the advertising and media worlds descended on the French Riviera this past week for Cannes Lions, an extravagant week-long party full of elaborate dinners, exclusive concerts and a limitless supply of rosé.

Tech companies like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter rented out sprawling beachside cabanas for the week to host meetings and schmooze with business partners.

Others, like Spotify and Verizon’s newly formed AOL-Yahoo tie-up, Oath, threw big parties with expensive musical performances. (In Oath’s case it was Fleetwood Mac front-woman Stevie Nicks; Spotify had Solange Knowles, sister of Beyonce.) Medialink and iHeartMedia threw their very exclusive dinner party again this year where R&B star The Weeknd performed for celebrities like Ryan Seacrest and CEOs like Twitter’s Jack Dorsey.

But despite all the distractions — and there were plenty — Cannes is also a place where actual deals get done. Many ad buyers and ad sellers use the week to plan out spending for the second half of the year, and who shows up and who makes a scene can give you a good idea of the current pecking order for the industry.

Recode attended, too. Here’s a glimpse from our notebook at some of the biggest themes of the week.

Who’s No. 3?

The big, 60,000-foot takeaway from dozens of conversations this week is something that we’ve all known for a while: Facebook and Google are absolutely dominating the digital ad market, and buyers are eager for a third player to offer some competition.

What was different this year from years past is that folks no longer believe that the third player, if one ever emerges, will be another platform, like a Twitter or Snapchat. Instead, it feels like No. 3 might be a content provider, a company like Verizon-owned Oath or Comcast-owned NBCUniversal*, that has more control over the content they distribute.

There are a couple of reasons why this matters. One is that advertisers claim they don’t get enough data from Facebook and Google about who, specifically, they’re reaching with their ads.

The hope is a third player might share more of that info. But the other important reason is “ad adjacency,” which is ad industry speak for making sure your ads don’t appear next to something offensive, like an ISIS video.

Google and Facebook are platforms that carry content created by other people. A media company would theoretically have more control over said content, and thus ensure the ads are shown in the appropriate context. Still, no one expects that a third player will emerge quickly. That means we’ll probably be having similar discussions with ad buyers next year.

Could Facebook’s Live video problem become an advertising problem?

Speaking of adjacency … People are using Facebook Live for all kinds of horrible things, including suicides and beatings. And while the company is just starting to roll out ads within Facebook Live videos (and only from videos produced by hand-selected partners), two ad buyers we spoke with said their clients are already starting to question whether or not they’d want want to buy a Facebook Live video ad and be associated with the product at all.

The ads are so new that this is not yet a significant problem, but it’s also not a great sign for Facebook, which is finally making its big push into mid-roll video ads.

Twitter, meanwhile, is selling “live”

Virtually everyone in Twitter’s upper ranks was at Cannes this year. CEO Jack Dorsey spoke on a panel mid-week and, surprisingly, wasn’t asked much of anything about Twitter’s business. But we chatted with VP of Global Revenue Matt Derella at the company’s fancy beach cabana and he explained that Twitter is trying to sell video ads to accompany the live video content it’s been gathering for the past year. (Twitter spent time at Cannes selling ads for its NFL streaming package last year, but it doesn’t have those same streams this year.)

Derella says selling video ads for its live video streams is similar in process to selling traditional TV ads, but Twitter’s video ads are different in that they’re more targeted than TV ads, and mostly built for mobile devices.

“I don’t think it’s going to be as simple as TV 2.0,” he explained. “Some of the biggest CPG marketers in the world are taking their 15 and 30 [second ads], and we’re working with them and actually re-cutting them for Twitter.”

Twitter’s beach cabana at Cannes Lions in France - 2017.

Jeffrey Katzenberg has an idea for “New TV”

DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg was in town to pitch advertisers on his idea for what he’s calling “New TV.” The idea is to turn what has traditionally been a multi-hour program — a three-hour movie, for instance — into multiple shorter episodes and deliver that to people on mobile devices. He described it like cutting a book into short chapters.

But Katzenberg, who spoke with us from a suite on the top floor of the Carlton Hotel overlooking the marina, said he doesn’t want to create the kind of quick-to-produce internet videos that might do well for sites like NowThis or BuzzFeed’s Tasty unit. He wants to spend millions and produce videos that compare in quality to what you might see in the movie theatre.

The problem? The existing platforms that would be logical fits to distribute something like this — Facebook or YouTube — don’t offer an advertising model that can support that kind of production budget, Katzenberg says. That means he might try and build a platform himself, or work with an existing player to build something together.

“I don’t know. I’m in that process right now,” he said. “Over the last eight weeks I have met with what I believe are all of the potential enterprises that this might be a good fit for.”

Snapchat may not be doomed after all

Snapchat, whose presence in Cannes included an exclusive meeting compound surrounded by bushes and body guards (again) plus a giant yellow Ferris wheel, missed its Q1 revenue estimates this year, but ad buyers we spoke to in Cannes aren’t as concerned about the company’s business prospects as investors are.

Each of the five ad buyers we spoke with said their clients are eager to spend money on Snapchat, and one said he recommends Snapchat in every media package he sends to his clients.

So if everyone wants to give Snap money, why isn’t the company’s business bigger? These buyers claim that it’s a combination of things. Snap is still building its ad technology, like automated ad-buying software and better measurement tools. And it also takes bigger advertisers a long time to adopt anything new — and Snapchat’s business, which is just three years old, is still very new.

New arrivals

Reddit sent its sales team to Cannes for the first time this year alongside founder Alexis Ohanian. Pinterest has been at Cannes the past four years, but this was by far the company’s biggest presence. It rented a fancy beach pier, and executives told us that they are pushing their new search advertising units in conversations with marketers. (For more on that, and the rest of Pinterest’s business, you can read our profile of Pinterest’s President Tim Kendall here.)

Facebook Messenger was also in Cannes selling ads for the first time. It’s also showing advertisers its new inbox ads that it started testing back in January.

“We are selling mostly News Feed ads that push people to Messenger but we [are] also starting to educate … and teach people about those [inbox] ads coming inside Messenger as well,” explained Messenger’s product boss Stan Chudnovsky over breakfast on Facebook’s beach pier.

The New York Times is not opposing Donald Trump

The Times’s Deputy Publisher, AG Sulzberger, defended the paper’s reporting on President Trump during a panel at a beachside cabana hosted by media giant OMD this week.

Sulzberger, who will eventually take over as publisher, said that while the Times’ coverage isn’t flattering of Trump, the paper is not trying to actively oppose him either. Eventually, opposition groups come into power, Sulzberger explained, and he doesn’t want the paper to be fighting for any particular side. “The New York Times is nobody’s lapdog,” he added.

Feature Image: Solange Knowles performing at Spotify’s beach party during Cannes LionsTony Barson / Getty Images Entertainment

By Kurt Wagner

Sourced from recode

In News

Oath CEO Tim Armstrong slightly backed off his claim of challenging Google and Facebook in online advertising

July 6, 2017 No Comments

By Mike Shields

Oath CEO Tim Armstrong is slightly backing off his bold attack on Facebook and Google. Meanwhile, the company also seems to be somewhat downplaying its Verizon relationship in its pitch to advertisers.

Those were two of the takeaways from a press conference hosted at the Cannes advertising festival by Oath–the Verizon-owned company’s first public sit down since the telecom giant completed its acquisition of Yahoo.

Armstrong has spoken openly about taking on Google and Facebook, the two giants of online advertising. But at the event, Armstrong said, “Our goal is not to directly compete with Google and Facebook. Our goal is to basically open up new relationships with consumers in a differentiated way.”

Instead, Armstrong looked to paint the company as being a safe company for marketers, without mentioning the challenge that Google and others have had when it comes to ads landing in the wrong place (like next to hate videos on YouTube or on Breitbart articles without their knowledge).

“You hear the advertising world really, vocally crying out for trusted relationships,” he said. “We feel very strongly that from our current position from what the marketplace wants today, we’re going to be able to deliver a very trusted safe audience experience.”

Still, Armstrong acknowledged that brand safety may not be a huge selling point long term. Thus, hinted that over the next year, the company is planning to introduce a set of ad products that “include the consumer in a disruptive way,” and that the future is about “two way relationships between consumers and brands.”

Yet, when asked about the power of using Verizon’s robust consumer data for ad targeting, Oath president Tim Mahlman quickly steered the question toward the company’s plans to use Yahoo’s data from its registered users and other third party data sources for advertising.

A big motivation for Verizon’s acquisition of AOL and later Yahoo was to take advantage of Verizon’s vast pools of data on its subscribers — it knows where they live, what apps they use, where they go, etc. — and use that for powerful ad targeting. Ideally that asset puts the company in a better spot to compete with Facebook and Google, which also boast of powerful consumer data sets that help set the companies apart in the ad business.

The executives behind Verizon’s Oath gathered in Cannes on Monday Business Insider

It may be that Oath wants to be cautious when talking up using its wireless customer data, given the tough regulatory environment in Europe when it comes to ad targeting.

Still, Oath’s goals are lofty. By 2020 the company wants its sea of brands, from HuffPost to Yahoo Sports to TechCrunch, to reach 2 billion consumers and pull in $10 to $2o billion in revenue.

To get there, besides integrating Yahoo, Verizon wants to grow its global footprint, Armstrong said, while also “disrupting” brand marketing. “I like to say, ‘Google is search, Facebook is social and we’re going to be brands,” he said.

“Our challenge is, we have to do more than meet the market growth rates,” Armstrong said. “We have to take [market] share overall … Our engines need to fly faster than the tailwind.”

Feature Image: AOL CEO Tim Armstrong speaking at IGNITION 2016. Michael Seto/Business Insider

By Mike Shields

Sourced from Business Insider UK

In News

Google Chrome to block all adverts on websites that annoy users with intrusive pop-ups

June 23, 2017 No Comments

By Associated Press

Websites that run annoying ads such as pop-ups may find all ads blocked by Google’s Chrome browser starting next year.

The digital-ad giant’s announcement comes as hundreds of millions of internet users have already installed ad blockers on their desktop computers and phones to combat ads that track them and make browsing sites difficult.

These blockers threaten websites that rely on digital ads for revenue. Google’s version will allow ads as long as websites follow industry-created guidelines and minimize certain types of ads that consumers really hate. That includes pop-up ads, huge ads that don’t go away when visitors scroll down a page and video ads that start playing automatically with the sound on.

Google says the feature will be turned on by default, and users can turn it off. It’ll work on both the desktop and mobile versions of Chrome.

Google says that even ads it sells will be blocked on websites that don’t get rid of annoying types of ads.

But there might not be vast changes online triggered by the popular browser’s efforts. It’s a “small number of websites that are disproportionately responsible for annoying user experiences,” Google spokeswoman Suzanne Blackburn said.

“I’m sure there are some publishers who will get hurt,” said Brian Wieser, an ad analyst with Pivotal Research Group. But in the long term, he says, cracking down on irritating ads should make the internet experience better, encouraging people to visit sites and click on links. That, in turn, benefits Google.

The company is also starting a program that could help publishers deal with users who have downloaded popular ad blockers. Some individual websites have come up with their own countermeasures. Forbes.com, for example, won’t let you read stories without disabling your ad blocker or logging in with Facebook or Google accounts, so the site can track you.

Google would work with websites to set up messages telling users to disable their blockers for the site or pay for a version of it with no ads. It’ll take a 10 percent cut of those payments.

To protect its ad business, Google has tried to improve user experiences in other ways. It launched a way for websites to load faster on phones. And it used its sway as the dominant search engine to push companies to make their sites mobile-friendly. Such sites show up higher in mobile searches.

Google also has tried to address advertisers’ concerns about their ads running next to offensive content by banning its ads from some objectionable videos on YouTube, like those that promote discrimination or advocate illegal drug use. Google also won’t place its ads on web pages with objectionable content — porn, for example, and or sites that promote suicide or violence.

Facebook, too, is trying to make links from inside its universe less spammy for users. It says it’s trying to cut down on posts and ads in the news feed that lead to junky pages with “little substantive content” and “disruptive, shocking or malicious ads.”

Image: Google’s ad blocker will allow ads as long as websites follow industry-created guidelinesLeon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

By Associated Press

Sourced from International Business Times

In News

Apple’s new anti-tracking system will make Google and Facebook even more powerful

June 20, 2017 No Comments

By Russell Brandom.

The brutal logic of online advertising

The internet is an ad-tracking machine. It’s been true for long enough that we rarely talk about it anymore, but it bears repeating. For all the free speech and free information, nearly any site you visit will come with a dozen different tracking cookies, enabling uniquely tailored ads to follow you from site to site. Targeted advertising is still the best way to make money on the internet, so those cookies are everywhere. (The Verge is no exception; that VR room isn’t cheap.) Sites try not to be creepy about it, some harder than others, but the overarching logic is hard to escape. It’s a multibillion-dollar business, and it pays for nearly everything you see online.

Yesterday at WWDC, Apple threw a wrench into that system. Alongside new autoplay blockers, the latest versions of Safari (currently in beta) will have a new tool for blocking third-party ad trackers, aggressively identifying and blocking any cookies used to track users across the web. As Craig Federighi said onstage, “It’s not about blocking ads, but your privacy is protected.”

It’s an important move, particularly for the mobile web, where Safari manages just under 30 percent of browsing sessions. When Safari added the option for ad-blocking with iOS 9, it was a day of reckoning for many web companies — raising hard questions about the future of mobile browsing. This week’s announcement is primed to make a similar splash.

According to Marc Al-Hames, who works on the privacy-focused browser Cliqz, companies are already scrambling to figure out the best way around the new restrictions. “This is a cat-and-mouse game, and it always has been,” Al-Hames says. “Users try out different things to protect themselves, and there’s a multibillion-dollar ad tech industry thinking of ways to circumvent it.”

Surprisingly, Google and Facebook are poised to come out of that game ahead. But to understand why, we need to dig into how the new policy works. Safari has had some version of cookie-blocking for years, but the previous default was to allow cookies “from websites I visit.” The new policy goes further, using machine learning to identify tracking behavior no matter how the cookies are served. In many cases, blocking those cookies outright would break basic functionalities. Instead, Safari puts a strict time limit on how long the cookie can stick around, keeping cookies available for 24 hours after a visit and outright deleting anything older than 30 days.

The crucial distinction is between the first-party sites you’re purposefully visiting and the third-party trackers that come along for the ride. As long as a cookie is associated with a website you’ve visited in the last 24 hours, Safari won’t change much — which gives popular sites like Facebook and the various Google services an easy way around the new restrictions. The systems hit hardest by Safari’s new policy will be third-party systems like Criteo or Adroll, which silently coordinate cookies in the background of thousands of sites. Not coincidentally, Criteo’s stock plummeted in the wake of the announcement.

That’s much less of a problem for Google and Facebook, which already dominate online ads. Most people visit Facebook or a Google service every day, and those users will never be too far outside the 24-hour window. Both services also work as a kind of permanent login, used to access sites like Twitter or WordPress without a separate password. As a result, most users stay logged in to Google and Facebook as long as they’re online. Combine that with omnipresent Like buttons, and you’ve got an easy way to see what people are doing on the web. And as long as you’re visiting Facebook once a day, Safari won’t get in the way of that tracking.

Google and Facebook’s biggest challengers in ad-targeting are telecom companies like Verizon and Comcast, which were given a huge boost by recent shifts in US telecom policy. But those companies should fare just as well. Both Verizon and Comcast invested heavily in web media alongside advertising tech, which means they can take advantage of the same first-party exception as Google and Facebook. (Disclosure: One of Comcast’s media investments is a minority stake in Vox Media, parent company of The Verge.) As long as you’re visiting AOL or Huffington Post sites once a day, Verizon will have no problem targeting ads, and cookie-serving deals may extend that reach even further.

At the same time, ad networks that aren’t attached to popular websites will take a serious hit. It won’t be a total blackout, since most modern networks supplement cookies with more advanced fingerprinting techniques that profile visitors without transmitting any data. They can also try to make cookie-serving agreements with websites, collecting data at the same time that they serve the ads themselves. But the new Safari policy will still put those ad companies at a permanent disadvantage to more powerful players like Google and Facebook. Those companies were already outmatched — with Google and Facebook capturing 90 cents of every new dollar spent on online ads — and the new browser moves will make it even harder for them to survive. The result will tip the balance even farther toward the handful of giant companies that already dominate the web.

Apple isn’t the only force pushing the web in that direction. The European Commission’s recent anti-tracking proposals would establish a similar distinction between first and third parties. Only last week, Google announced an ad-blocker for Chrome that’s likely to edge out small players even further. It’s still hard to say what that will mean for smaller websites and everyday users, but Google and Facebook will only become more central to the business of the web.

Underneath it all is the basic logic of consolidation. These players — Google, Facebook, Verizon, and Comcast — control huge portions of how we connect to the web, from the servers to the fiber to the device, ending with the browser itself. Now, they’re using that control to play for advantage in ad-tracking, with users stuck in the middle. iOS and Safari are incredibly powerful tools in that fight, and by all appearances, Apple is using them to try to craft a less invasive web experience for its users. But after more than a decade of ad tech, untangling that knot may be harder than the company realizes.

By Russell Brandom

Sourced from THE VERGE

In News

Two cheers for Google’s native Chrome ad-blocker

June 19, 2017 No Comments

By John E Dunn.

Publishers and internet users will have given a half-hearted cheer to last week’s news that Google is to build a form of advertising control technology into Chrome from 2018.

Cheering, perhaps, but each group will have been doing so for different reasons and with little enthusiasm.

Notice we said control – not blocking. But before untangling the difference, let’s acknowledge why ad-blocking has become so appealing: visiting many websites often means being swarmed by ad and tracking systems that noticeably slow browsing performance.

Publishers claim this is a fringe problem caused by aggressive companies getting carried away, but that’s not entirely true. There are plenty of mainstream sites that happily leave users in the slow lane.

Google’s top ad executive, Sridhar Ramaswamy, describes the outcome:

These frustrating experiences can lead some people to block all ads – taking a big toll on the content creators, journalists, web developers and videographers who depend on ads to fund their content creation.

So, people start using ad blockers which block out almost everything, encouraging publishers to deploy anti-blocking technology which simply annoys readers even more.

Without giving a history lesson, suffice it to say that the model’s futility occurred to ad-blocking companies, which also needed revenue. Their solution was to let some advertisers pay not to be blocked.

This went down badly with many publishers, who felt they were being extorted, an argument that continues to this day. Savvy users responded by disabling whitelisting anyway.

Google’s alternative is slightly different and has two elements. The first is to allow Chrome to control ads that don’t adhere to rules agreed by the industry Coalition for Better Ads.

Arguably, this isn’t blocking because it only stops ads that transgress in very specific ways, such as auto-playing videos, prestitial ads with countdown timers (which block a homepage for a given period) and sticky ads (which persist even after scrolling).

It won’t address the wider issue of the way ads drain performance or – the other reason ad-blockers became popular – stop users from being tracked across websites to the detriment of their privacy and, sometimes, their security.

Given this, the second element Google, Funding Choices, might be particularly galling. Still in limited beta, this is a way to charge users who refuse to turn off their ad-blocker. The revenue from this, stored in a Google digital wallet, will be split between the publisher and – you guessed it – Google.

Doubtless, a few publishers will see this as a handy revenue stream, assuming enough bother to enable it. It might raise pennies.

For most, however, it will stick in the craw for publishers to pay Google at all, the very company many privately blame for using its search engine algorithms, advertising system and dominance of mobiles to slowly drain their brands of importance – and revenue.

To date, only one other mainstream browser maker, Opera, has dabbled with integrated ad blocking. Google’s plans are more potent even if its ad control tech ends up as a halfway house that merely enforces sanity on publishers.

What it can’t yet do is stop people using ad-blockers without driving them away from Chrome itself. For now, ad-blockers remain the last stand of browser users who refuse to cede all control.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

By John E Dunn.

Sourced from naked security by SOPHOS

In News

Facebook And Google Shareholders Make Noise About Fake News

June 2, 2017 No Comments

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Fake news was “both widely shared and heavily tilted in favour of Donald Trump” in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, according to a March 2017 NYU/Stanford study. Their database detected 115 pro-Trump fake stories shared on Facebook 30 million times, and 41 pro-Clinton fake stories shared 7.6 million times. Nearly a quarter of web content shared on Twitter by users in the battleground state of Michigan during the final days of last year’s U.S. election campaign was fake news, according to a University of Oxford study.

These are mind-boggling statistics.

Facebook and Alphabet Inc. (the parent company of Google) are now currently under pressure. The perception is that they have not done enough to curb the online epidemic of “fake news.” And shareholders are starting to worry. They are pressing for Facebook and Alphabet Inc. to issue detailed reports.

Investment advisor Arjuna Capital engaged both companies to evaluate the impact that fabricated content is having on their platforms and business. Arjuna Capital is an investment firm focused on sustainable and impact investing.

Natasha Lamb, managing partner at Arjuna Capital, said: “Fake news is not about spin or confirmation bias – It’s about fabrication. And when fabrication is disseminated so easily at scale, the way we have seen through social media, it represents a threat to our democracy. If Facebook maintains a platform of confusion and distortion it will lose the trust of its users, in which case they will simply move on to the next thing. And that’s what concerns long-term investors. We need to know this is being handled responsibly over time. It will not be solved through a simple algorithm tweak or better user education—those are merely pieces of a larger puzzle. Right now, we think the issue is being fumbled.”

Michael Connor, executive director of Open MIC, a non-profit organisation that works with investors on media and technology issues said: “Issues like fake news and hate speech aren’t going to go away any time soon – and Facebook’s responses to them thus far are perfect examples of too little, too late. The company needs to start reporting regularly – and in a consistent fashion – about the impact its policies and practices have on billions of Facebook users all around the globe.”

According to Pew, 64 percent of U.S. adults say fabricated news stories cause a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current issues and events. The confusion cuts across political lines: 57 percent of Republicans say completely made-up news causes a great deal of confusion compared to 64 percent of Democrats.

Fake news is a problem. But since the beginning of news media, there has always been a problem with subjective bias. Are we ever going to be able to argue that some news, any news, is more genuine than other news? Probably not.