Archiv für den Autor: Andreas

Apple Search

Google, Google, Google

For well over a decade Google has dominated search to where most stories in the search sphere were about Google or something on the periphery.

In 2019 Google generated $134.81 billion in ad revenues.

When Verizon bought core Yahoo three years ago the final purchase price was $4.48 billion. That amount was to own their finance vertical, news vertical, web portal, homepage, email & web search. It also included a variety of other services like Tumblr.

Part of what keeps Google so dominant in search is their brand awareness. That is also augmented by distribution as defaults in Chrome and Android. Then when it comes to buying search distribution from other players like Mozilla Firefox, Opera or Apple’s Safari they can outbid everyone else as they are much better at monetizing tier 2 markets and emerging markets than other search companies are since they have such strong ad depth. Even if Bing gave a 100% revshare to Apple they still could not compete with Google in most markets in terms of search monetization.

Apple as a Huge Search Traffic Driver

In 2019 Google paid just under £1.2 billion in default payments for UK search traffic. Most of that went to Apple. Historically when Google broke out their search revenues by region typically the US was around 45% to 46% of search ad revenue & the UK was around 11% to 12%, so it is likely Google is spending north of $10 billion a year to be the default search provider on Apple devices:

Apple submitted that search engines do not pay Apple for the right to be set as the primary default search engine on its devices. However, our assessment is that Google does pay to be the primary default on Apple devices. The agreement between Google and Apple states that Google will be the default web search provider and the same agreement states that Google will pay Apple a specified share of search advertising revenues. We also note that Google does not pay compensation to any partners that set Google Search as a secondary option. This further suggests that Google’s payment to Apple is in return for Apple setting Google as the primary default.

Apple is glad to cash those checks & let Google handle the core algorithmic search function in the web browser, but Apple also auto-completes many searches from within the address bar via various features like website history, top hit, news, Siri suggested website, suggested sites, etc.

A Unique Voice in Search

The nice thing about Apple powering some of those search auto-complete results themselves is their results are not simply a re-hash of the Google search results so they can add a unique voice to the search marketplace where if your site isn’t doing as well in Google it could still be promoted by Apple based on other factors.

High-traffic Shortcuts

Apple users generally have plenty of disposable personal income and a tendency to dispose of much of it, so if you are an Android user it is probably worth having an Apple device to see what they are recommending for core terms in your client’s markets. If you want to see recommendations for a particular country you may need to have a specialized router targeted to that country or use a web proxy or VPN.

Most users likely conduct full search queries and click through to listings from the Google search result page, but over time the search autocomplete feature that recommends previously viewed websites and other sites likely picks up incremental share of voice.

A friend of mine from the UK runs a local site and the following shows how the Apple ecosystem drove nearly 2/3 of his website traffic.

His website is only a couple years old, so it doesn’t get a ton of traffic from other sources yet. As of now his site does not have great Google rankings, but even if it did the boost by the Apple recommendations still provides a tailwind of free distribution and awareness (for however long it lasts).

For topics covered in news or repeat navigational searches Apple likely sends a lot of direct visits via their URL auto-completion features, but they do not use the feature broadly into the tail of search across other verticals, so it is a limited set of searches that ultimately benefit from the shortcuts.

Apple Search Ranking Factors

Apple recently updated their search page offering information about Applebot:

Apple Search may take the following into account when ranking web search results:

  • Aggregated user engagement with search results
  • Relevancy and matching of search terms to webpage topics and content
  • Number and quality of links from other pages on the web
  • User location based signals (approximate data)
  • Webpage design characteristics

Search results may use the above factors with no (pre-determined) importance of ranking. Users of Search are subject to the privacy policy in Siri Suggestions, Search & Privacy.

I have seen some country-code TLDs do well in their local markets in spite of not necessarily being associated with large brands. Sites which do not rank well in Google can still end up in the mix provided the user experience is clean, the site is useful and it is easy for Apple to associate the site with a related keyword.

Panda-like Quality Updates

Markets like news change every day as the news changes, but I think Apple also does some Panda-like updates roughly quarterly where they do a broad refresh of what they recommend generally. As part of those updates sites which were once recommended can end up seeing the recommendation go away (especially if user experience declined since the initial recommendation via an ad heavy layout or similar) while other sites that have good engagement metrics get recommended on related searches.

A friend had a website they sort of forgot that was recommended by Apple. That site saw a big jump on July 9, 2018 then it slid back in early August that year, likely after the testing data showed it wasn’t as good as some other site Apple recommended. They noticed the spike in traffic & improved the site a bit. In early October it was widely recommended once again. That lasted until May of 2019 when it fell off a cliff once more. They had monetized the site with a somewhat spammy ad network & the recommendation mostly went away.

The recommendations happen as the person types and they may be different for searches where there is a space between keywords and the word is ran together. It is also worth noting Apple will typically recommend the www. version of a site over the m. version of a site for sites that offer both, so it makes sense to ensure if you used separate URLs that the www version also uses a responsive website design.

Indirect Impact on Google

While the Apple search shortcuts bypass Google search & thus do not create direct user signals to impact Google search, people who own an iPhone then search on a Windows computer at work or a Windows laptop at home might remember the site they liked from their iPhone and search for it once more, giving the site some awareness that could indirectly bleed over into impacting Google’s search rankings.

Apple could also eventually roll out their own fully featured search engine.

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Source:: seobook.com

New Age Cloaking

user interest in news paywalls.

Historically cloaking was considered bad because a consumer would click expecting a particular piece of content or user experience while being delivered an experience which differed dramatically.

As publishers have become more aggressive with paywalls they’ve put their brands & user trust in the back seat in an attempt to increase revenue per visit.

Below are 2 screenshots from one of the more extreme versions I have seen recently.

The first is a subscribe-now modal which shows by default when you visit the newspaper website.

The second is the page as it appears after you close the modal.

Basically all page content is cloaked other than ads and navigation.

The content is hidden – cloaked.

hidden content.

That sort of behavior would not only have a horrible impact on time on site metrics, but it would teach users not to click on their sites in the future, if users even have any recall of the publisher brand.

The sort of disdain that user experience earns will cause the publishers to lose relevancy even faster.

On the above screenshot I blurred out the logo of the brand on the initial popover, but when you look at the end article after that modal pop over you get a cloaked article with all the ads showing and the brand of the site is utterly invisible. A site which hides its brand except for when it is asking for money is unlikely to get many conversions.

Many news sites now look as awful as the ugly user created MySpace pages did back in the day. And outside of the MySpace pages that delivered malware the user experience is arguably worse.

a highly satisfied online offer, which does the needful.

Each news site which adopts this approach effectively increases user hate toward all websites adopting the approach.

It builds up. Then users eventually say screw this. And they are gone – forever.

a highly satisfied reader of online news articles.

Audiences will thus continue to migrate across from news sites to anywhere else that hosts their content like Google AMP, Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News, Twitter, Opera or Edge or Chrome mobile browser new article recommendations, MSN News, Yahoo News, etc.

Any lifetime customer value models built on assumptions around any early success with the above approach should consider churn as well as the brand impact the following experience will have on most users before going that aggressive.

hard close for the win.

One small positive note for news publishers is more countries are looking to have attention merchants pay for their content, though I suspect as the above sort of double modal paywall stuff gets normalized other revenue streams won’t make the practice go away, particularly as many local papers have been acquired by PE chop shops extracting all blood out of the operations through interest payments to themselves.

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Source:: seobook.com

The One Thing Your Business Can Immediately Take Away from Google I/O

Google I/O conference

The One Thing Your Business Can Immediately Take Away from Google I/O was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Google leads the world in technological advances that affect the way we live and do business. At the Google I/O developer conference this week, we glimpse a preview of how people will interact with computing in the near future.

Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, CA, scene of the 2017 Google I/O conference

Kicking off the conference, CEO Sundar Pichai opened a two-hour keynote to a packed audience of developers, tech reporters and others who were joined by viewers in 85 countries watching online to hear what was new from the tech giant, including one overarching announcement:

We have shifted from a mobile first to an AI first world.

This shift into an “artificial intelligence first” world will impact the way customers find your business AND the way you interact with those customers.

Lots of articles no doubt list the many Google feature announcements coming out of the I/O conference. But here, we zero in on something that all business owners should be aware of as we move forward into this AI-powered, machine learning-based new world…

Focus on solving user problems

One thing becomes clear as you watch the tech giant unveil feature after feature: Each new product is designed to solve a problem. You could say this is the key to Google’s success.

During yesterday’s keynote alone, Google announced many coming AI-enabled features that exemplify this problem-solution strategy. Here are just a few.

  • Google Assistant will be much more connected, even allowing people to type their interactions through a phone instead of speaking them — because there are times you don’t want people to overhear what you’re saying.
  • Google Photos is getting Photo Sharing, a new feature that can recognize people in your photo and proactively suggest sending them the file — because people have a problem following through and sharing their photos.
  • Google Visual Positioning Service will be able to guide your indoor movements through a store such as Lowes to help you find what you want — which solves a big problem for visually impaired people, not to mention the rest of us who need help navigating aisles.
  • Google Lens is a fascinating new AI feature that takes visual identification to new heights. In one application, Lens can remove obstructions in front of a subject, such as a chain link fence (see demo tweeted below), and fill in the missing elements — because people want to be able to take better pictures.

Yes, this is a real thing real people at Google are working on. #Googleio2017 pic.twitter.com/vZJqkHBtH3

— Golden Krishna (@goldenkrishna) May 17, 2017

Let’s apply Google strategy to your business. In a nutshell:

“Your greatest opportunities as a business are probably hiding under the cloak of user problems.”
Click To Tweet

To find the opportunities awaiting discovery for your own business, ask yourself two questions:

  1. What do people complain about in my industry? Complaints expose problems just waiting for a new product, service or technology to solve. This kind of negative feedback also provides clues for how to best engage your prospective customers.
  2. What is difficult or time-consuming for prospective customers to accomplish today? In addition to listening for pain points, also just observe. Look for processes that everyone just accepts, but which require a lot of time and effort to do.

If your business innovates a solution to a problem, you can make people’s lives or jobs easier, potentially jump ahead of your competition, and grow your business.

But even if you’re not going to invent the next great product, by understanding people’s needs better you can offer solutions more effectively. Your marketing campaigns will ring truer (and have better click-through rates!) if they come from a point of empathy.

Solving people’s problems underlies the majority of Google’s advancements. Make it your business’s mantra, too.

Note: You can watch Google I/O to see various presentations live May 17–19 (check out the schedule here).

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Source:: bruceclay.com

Käuflich oder nicht zu verkaufen

Wer etwas verschenken will, muss jemanden finden, der diesem Geschenk immerhin so viel Wert zumisst, dass er es in seinen Besitz aufnehmen möchte. Alles, was wir uns zurechnen, kann sowohl als Bereicherung wie auch als Belastung empfunden werden. Besitz ist das, was uns anhaftet und somit in unterschiedlicher Konsequenz unser Leben bestimmt.

Jeder Austausch verändert – wenn manchmal auch nur mit minimalen Folgen – unsere Beziehung zu anderen Menschen. Wer Geschenke annimmt, geht meist auch eine Art Verpflichtung ein. Wir bleiben, im Sinne etlicher gesellschaftlicher Konventionen dem, der uns etwas geschenkt hat, etwas schuldig. Im Rahmen vieler gegenwärtiger kommunikativer Situationen werden wir mit Botschaften nicht nur »beschenkt“, sondern überhäuft. Es fällt uns nicht leicht, diese »Geschenke“ abzulehnen, denn sie hinterlassen bereits Spuren in unserem Gedächtnis, noch bevor wir uns entscheiden können, sie abzulehnen oder zu ignorieren.

Jene, die wahrnehmbare Signale in die Welt setzen, machen dies meist mit einem bestimmten Ziel. Das Mindeste, was als Gegenleistung erwartet wird, ist Aufmerksamkeit. Indem jemand auf die Aufmerksamkeit von bestimmten Personen zielt, fordert er diese Körper in ihrer Gesamtheit heraus, denn Wahrnehmung aktiviert nicht nur Sinne und Gehirn, sondern verändert, wenn auch nur in geringfügiger Form, eine Unmenge von Zellen in allen Bereichen des Körpers. Nicht wenige Botschaften fordern von den Menschen jedoch mehr als nur Aufmerksamkeit, sondern hoffen auf eine wirkungsvolle Modifikation mentaler Modelle, um auf diesem Weg auf das zukünftige Handeln der Menschen Einfluss zu nehmen. Der immer dichter werdende »Kokon“ von wahrnehmbaren Zeichen, der viele Menschen permanent umgibt, fordert von diesen zwar keine unmittelbaren finanziellen Opfer, wurde jedoch gesponnen, um sie in einem Informationsnetz gefangen zu halten. Die Möglichkeiten, einem solchen Netz zu entrinnen, sind gering, da wir immer in unserem Handeln auch auf Informationen angewiesen sind, die wir nicht aus uns selbst heraus generieren können. In allen Aspekten der Kooperation mit anderen Menschen brauchen wir Orientierungshilfen. Umso erstaunlicher ist es, dass viele heute zwar bereit sind, für jedes Angebot und jede Dienstleistung einen bestimmten Preis zu bezahlen, aber auf der Ebene der Entscheidungshilfen sich im Wesentlichen mit »kostenlosen“ Informationen zufrieden geben.

Wann immer Informationen wahrnehmbar gemacht werden sollen, für dessen Erstellung die Zielpersonen nichts bezahlen müssen oder wollen, müssen im Falle professioneller Aktivitäten entsprechende Finanziers einspringen. Diese bezahlen jedoch Gestalterinnen und Gestalter meist nicht, ohne eigene Interessen ins Spiel zu bringen. Der Berufsstand des Medien- und Kommunikationsdesigns geriet deshalb auch in den Verruf, »käuflich“ zu sein. In den letzten Jahrzehnten wurden Agenturen beauftragt, Formen zu entwickeln, um Inhalte wahrnehmbar zu machen, da angenommen wurde, sie würden ein Wissen darüber besitzen, auf welche Signale so genannte »Zielgruppen“ ganz besonders ansprechen. Solange über eine beschränkte Anzahl von Kommunikationskanälen weitgehend uniforme Botschaften transportiert wurden, ließ sich im Umkehrschluss behaupten, dass diese allgemein üblichen Ausdrucksformen auch den Bedürfnissen der Menschen entsprechen würden. Selbst in noch so raffinierten Umfragen lässt sich ja nicht herausfinden, wie jemand auf Zeichen reagieren würde, die er noch nie wahrgenommen hat. Geschlossene Systeme tendieren dazu, sich selbst zu bestätigen.

Inzwischen hat sich die Situation jedoch geändert. Die klassische Abfolge sah folgendermaßen aus: Jemand nimmt etwas wahr, entwickelt auf Basis dieser Wahrnehmungen ein mentales Modell, vergleicht dieses Modell mit anderen bereits vorhandenen Modellen und entwickelt so eine Botschaft, um diese wiederum in eine für andere wahrnehmbare Form zu bringen. Die Medien- und Kommunikationsbranche hat diesen Markt dominiert. Ein Heer an Gestalterinnen und Gestalter konnte sein Wissen und seine Fähigkeiten an diesen Markt verkaufen, um Orientierungshilfen aller Art zu produzieren.

Die aktuell an Dominanz gewinnende Abfolge sieht demgegenüber so aus: Vielfältigste Sensoren sammeln Unmengen an Daten. Programme vergleichen diese Daten und berechnen daraus Prognosen auf Basis von Wahrscheinlichkeiten. Die Nutzer solcher Systeme wählen aus unterschiedlichen Angeboten jene Verarbeitungsprogramme mit entsprechend automatisierten Visualisierungen aus, die sich aufgrund eigener Erfahrungen als erfolgsversprechende Orientierungshilfen erwiesen haben. Das jeweils eigene Verhalten verändert, durch die Spuren, die so entstehen, die Informationen, die uns ein solches System als vermutlich attraktiv übermittelt. Diese selbstlernenden und personalisierten Systeme optimieren sich durch jede einzelne Interaktion. Ein Heer an Programmiererinnen und Programmierern entwickelt noch solange diese Systeme, als sie sich noch nicht selbst programmieren können.

Diese Veränderungen kamen nicht über Nacht, sondern haben sich langsam entwickelt. Vergleichbare Schritte haben wir schon öfter erlebt. So verloren jene Schreiberinnen und Schreiber, für die Buchseiten noch kunstvoll gestaltete »Textbilder“ waren, durch die Entwicklung des Buchdrucks an Bedeutung. Umso mehr Texte geschrieben und vervielfältigt wurden, desto automatisierter werden diese gestaltet und übermittelt. Eine individualisierte Bereitstellung von Informationen für breite Bevölkerungsschichten lässt sich nur auf Basis von Templates und automatisierten Abläufen realisieren.

Haben Gestalterinnen und Gestalter deshalb »nichts mehr zu verkaufen“? Einen Ausweg haben einzelne darin gefunden, wahrnehmbare Zeichen zu entwickeln, die vorderhand als »unverkäuflich“ erscheinen. Befreit von der Aufgabe, »Sprachrohr“ von Auftraggeberinnen und Auftraggebern sein zu müssen, kann im Rahmen von Gestaltungsarbeit nach Sprachen und Modellen gesucht werden, die herkömmliche Anschauungsmuster sprengen, um so neue Sichtweisen zu ermöglichen. Für eine solche Tätigkeit hat sich »Kunst“ als Bezeichnung durchgesetzt. Die Bereitschaft der Menschen, ihre vorhandenen Orientierungsmuster in Frage zu stellen, hält sich selbstverständlich in Grenzen. Sobald wir uns selbst der Argumente für unser bisheriges Verhalten entledigen, müssten wir Eingeständnisse machen, die nicht leicht zu verkraften sind. Wie die Geschichte zeigt, sind Menschen eher bereit, gewaltige Belastungen auf sich zu nehmen, als sich einzugestehen, dass sie einem massiven Irrtum erlegen sind und sich in die Irre haben führen lassen.

Da sich Gestalterinnen und Gestalter früher oder später dann doch wieder verkaufen müssen, um zu überleben, hat sich ein weiteres Lösungsmodell entwickelt. Diese neue Form wird als »kreative Gestaltung“ bezeichnet. Es handelt sich dabei in den meisten Fällen um harmlose Darstellungsformen, die den Eindruck erwecken, sich jeder Instrumentalisierung zu erwehren, ohne dabei konventionelle Weltbilder zu dekonstruieren. Diese Arbeiten zeichnen sich gerade dadurch aus, dass sie sich nicht als Orientierungshilfen benutzen lassen. Aus einem Fundus von Klischees können immer wieder neue Formcollagen entwickelt werden, die vorgeben, sich einer unmittelbaren Lesbarkeit zu entziehen. Beliebt sind diese Formspiele vor allem in jenen gesellschaftlichen Kreisen, die ihre Privilegien anderen gegenüber zu legitimieren versuchen. So wie einst einmal der »gepflegte grüne Rasen“ dem Adel als sichtbares Zeichen diente, auf landwirtschaftliche Nutzflächen verzichten zu können, so verweist eine Aneignung von »kreativen Gestaltungsformen“ darauf, auf »nützliche Denk- und Handlungsweisen“ nicht angewiesen zu sein, um ein erfülltes und erlebnisreiches Dasein zu genießen. So fällt es der »Kreativszene“ leicht, große Menschengruppen als »kulturlose“ Masse zu identifizieren, um sie in der einen oder anderen Form auszugrenzen. Immer schon haben sich Menschen nur jenen gegenüber solidarisch verhalten, die sie dem eigenen »Kulturkreis“ zugerechnet haben.

Der aktuelle Wunsch, sich jeder »Käuflichkeit“ zu entziehen und sich bewusst nicht in den Dienst einer Sache zu stellen, hat zu einem sich ständig verhärtenden Wettkampf aller gegen alle geführt. So sinkt gerade in einer Phase der Geschichte, in der die kognitiven als auch körperlichen Fähigkeiten einer wachsenden Zahl von Menschen gegenüber technologischen Entwicklungen an Wert verlieren, auch das Vermögen, sich als Teil einer Solidargemeinschaft zu erleben. Wäre es nicht gerade heute notwendig, nach Möglichkeiten Ausschau zu halten, wie Menschen nach wie vor für andere Menschen von »Wert“ sein können? Welche Art der Formgebung könnte so lebensunterstützend sein, dass viele bereit wären, dafür freiwillig zu bezahlen? Die Antwort ist so einfach wie unpopulär. Was heute so dringend wie noch nie gebraucht wird, sind wahrnehmbare Modelle, die uns Handlungsoptionen aufzeigen, wie wir in globaler Kooperation jene Probleme bewältigen können, die gelöst werden müssen, um als Menschheit zu überleben. Es gäbe unendlich viel zu tun. Nachdem aber in unserer von ökonomischem Denken bestimmten Welt nur das geschieht, wofür jemand bezahlt, ist für Weltbilder abseits partikularer Interessen kein Raum vorhanden. Die ökonomischen Systeme der Gegenwart versorgen uns zu günstigen Konditionen mit allen nur denkbaren, jedoch verzichtbaren Angeboten, können aber jene Lösungen nicht finanzieren, die von grundlegendem und allgemeinem Interesse sind.

Source:: designmadeingermany.de

Google & Facebook Squeezing Out Partners

Sections

Just Make Great Content…

Remember the whole shtick about good, legitimate, high-quality content being created for readers without concern for search engines – even as though search engines do not exist?

Whatever happened to that?

We quickly shifted from the above „ideology“ to this:

The red triangle/exclamation point icon was arrived at after the Chrome team commissioned research around the world to figure out which symbols alarmed users the most.

Search Engine Engineering Fear

Google is explicitly spreading the message that they are doing testing on how to create maximum fear to try to manipulate & coerce the ecosystem to suit their needs & wants.

At the same time, the Google AMP project is being used as the foundation of effective phishing campaigns.

Scare users off of using HTTP sites AND host phishing campaigns.

Killer job Google.

Someone deserves a raise & some stock options. Unfortunately that person is in the PR team, not the product team.

Ignore The Eye Candy, It’s Poisoned

I’d like to tell you that I was preparing the launch of https://amp.secured.mobile.seobook.com but awareness of past ecosystem shifts makes me unwilling to make that move.

I see it as arbitrary hoop jumping not worth the pain.

If you are an undifferentiated publisher without much in the way of original thought, then jumping through the hoops make sense. But if you deeply care about a topic and put a lot of effort into knowing it well, there’s no reason to do the arbitrary hoop jumping.

Remember how mobilegeddon was going to be the biggest thing ever? Well I never updated our site layout here & we still outrank a company which raised & spent 10s of millions of dollars for core industry terms like [seo tools].

Though it is also worth noting that after factoring in increased ad load with small screen sizes & the scrape graph featured answer stuff, a #1 ranking no longer gets it done, as we are well below the fold on mobile.

Below the Fold = Out of Mind

In the above example I am not complaining about ranking #5 and wishing I ranked #2, but rather stating that ranking #1 organically has little to no actual value when it is a couple screens down the page.

Google indicated their interstitial penalty might apply to pop ups that appear on scroll, yet Google welcomes itself to installing a toxic enhanced version of the Diggbar at the top of AMP pages, which persistently eats 15% of the screen & can’t be dismissed. An attempt to dismiss the bar leads the person back to Google to click on another listing other than your site.

As bad as I may have made mobile search results appear earlier, I was perhaps being a little too kind. Google doesn’t even have mass adoption of AMP yet & they already have 4 AdWords ads in their mobile search results AND when you scroll down the page they are testing an ugly „back to top“ button which outright blocks a user’s view of the organic search results.

What happens when Google suggests what people should read next as an overlay on your content & sells that as an ad unit where if you’re lucky you get a tiny taste of the revenues?

Is it worth doing anything that makes your desktop website worse in an attempt to try to rank a little higher on mobile devices?

Given the small screen size of phones & the heavy ad load, the answer is no.

I realize that optimizing a site design for mobile or desktop is not mutually exclusive. But it is an issue we will revisit later on in this post.

Coercion Which Failed

Many people new to SEO likely don’t remember the importance of using Google Checkout integration to lower AdWords ad pricing.

You either supported Google Checkout & got about a 10% CTR lift (& thus 10% reduction in click cost) or you failed to adopt it and got priced out of the market on the margin difference.

And if you chose to adopt it, the bad news was you were then spending yet again to undo it when the service was no longer worth running for Google.

How about when Google first started hyping HTTPS & publishers using AdSense saw their ad revenue crash because the ads were no longer anywhere near as relevant.

Oops.

Not like Google cared much, as it is their goal to shift as much of the ad spend as they can onto Google.com & YouTube.

Google is now testing product ads on YouTube.

It is not an accident that Google funds an ad blocker which allows ads to stream through on Google.com while leaving ads blocked across the rest of the web.

Android Pay might be worth integrating. But then it also might go away.

It could be like Google’s authorship. Hugely important & yet utterly trivial.
Faces help people trust the content.
Then they are distracting visual clutter that need expunged.
Then they once again re-appear but ONLY on the Google Home Service ad units.
They were once again good for users!!!

Neat how that works.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

Or it could be like Google Reader. A free service which defunded all competing products & then was shut down because it didn’t have a legitimate business model due to it being built explicitly to prevent competition. With the death of Google reader many blogs also slid into irrelevancy.

Their FeedBurner acquisition was icing on the cake.

Techdirt is known for generally being pro-Google & they recently summed up FeedBurner nicely:

Thanks, Google, For Fucking Over A Bunch Of Media Websites – Mike Masnick

Ultimately Google is a horrible business partner.

And they are an even worse one if there is no formal contract.

Dumb Pipes, Dumb Partnerships

They tried their best to force broadband providers to be dumb pipes. At the same time they promoted regulation which will prevent broadband providers from tracking their own users the way that Google does, all the while broadening out Google’s privacy policy to allow personally identifiable web tracking across their network. Once Google knew they would retain an indefinite tracking advantage over broadband providers they were free to rescind their (heavily marketed) free tier of Google Fiber & they halted the Google Fiber build out.

When Google routinely acts so anti-competitive & abusive it is no surprise that some of the „standards“ they propose go nowhere.

You can only get screwed so many times before you adopt a spirit of ambivalence to the avarice.

Google is the type of „partner“ that conducts security opposition research on their leading distribution partner, while conveniently ignoring nearly a billion OTHER Android phones with existing security issues that Google can’t be bothered with patching.

Deliberately screwing direct business partners is far worse than coding algorithms which belligerently penalize some competing services all the while ignoring that the payday loan shop funded by Google leverages doorway pages.

„User“ Friendly

BackChannel recently published an article foaming at the mouth promoting the excitement of Google’s AI:

This 2016-to-2017 Transition is going to move us from systems that are explicitly taught to ones that implicitly learn.“ … the engineers might make up a rule to test against—for instance, that “usual” might mean a place within a 10-minute drive that you visited three times in the last six months. “It almost doesn’t matter what it is — just make up some rule,” says Huffman. “The machine learning starts after that.

The part of the article I found most interesting was the following bit:

After three years, Google had a sufficient supply of phonemes that it could begin doing things like voice dictation. So it discontinued the [phone information] service.

Google launches „free“ services with an ulterior data motive & then when it suits their needs, they’ll shut it off and leave users in the cold.

As Google keeps advancing their AI, what do you think happens to your AMP content they are hosting? How much do they squeeze down on your payout percentage on those pages? How long until the AI is used to recap / rewrite content? What ad revenue do you get when Google offers voice answers pulled from your content but sends you no visitor?

The Numbers Can’t Work

A recent Wall Street Journal article highlighting the fast ad revenue growth at Google & Facebook also mentioned how the broader online advertising ecosystem was doing:

Facebook and Google together garnered 68% of spending on U.S. online advertising in the second quarter—accounting for all the growth, Mr. Wieser said. When excluding those two companies, revenue generated by other players in the U.S. digital ad market shrank 5%

The issue is NOT that online advertising has stalled, but rather that Google & Facebook have choked off their partners from tasting any of the revenue growth. This problem will only get worse as mobile grows to a larger share of total online advertising:

By 2018, nearly three-quarters of Google’s net ad revenues worldwide will come from mobile internet ad placements. – eMarketer

Media companies keep trusting these platforms with greater influence over their business & these platforms keep screwing those same businesses repeatedly.

You pay to get likes, but that is no longer enough as edgerank declines. Thanks for adopting Instant Articles, but users would rather see live videos & read posts from their friends. You are welcome to pay once again to advertise to the following you already built. The bigger your audience, the more we will charge you! Oh, and your direct competitors can use people liking your business as an ad targeting group.

Worse yet, Facebook & Google are even partnering on core Internet infrastructure.

In his interview with Obama tonight, @billmaher suggested the news business should be not-for-profit. Mission accomplished, thank Facebook.— Downtown Josh Brown (@ReformedBroker) November 5, 2016

Any hope of AMP turning the corner on the revenue front is a „no go“:

“We want to drive the ecosystem forward, but obviously these things don’t happen overnight,” Mr. Gingras said. “The objective of AMP is to have it drive more revenue for publishers than non-AMP pages. We’re not there yet”.

Publishers who are critical of AMP were reluctant to speak publicly about their frustrations, or to remove their AMP content. One executive said he would not comment on the record for fear that Google might “turn some knob that hurts the company.”

Look at that.

Leadership through fear once again.

At least they are consistent.

As more publishers adopt AMP, each publisher in the program will get a smaller share of the overall pie.

Just look at Google’s quarterly results for their current partners. They keep showing Google growing their ad clicks at 20% to 40% while partners oscillate between -15% and +5% quarter after quarter, year after year.

In the past quarter Google grew their ad clicks 42% YoY by pushing a bunch of YouTube auto play video ads, faster search growth in third world markets with cheaper ad prices, driving a bunch of lower quality mobile search ad clicks (with 3 then 4 ads on mobile) & increasing the percent of ad clicks on „own brand“ terms (while sending the FTC after anyone who agrees to not cross bid on competitor’s brands).

The lower quality video ads & mobile ads in turn drove their average CPC on their sites down 13% YoY.

The partner network is relatively squeezed out on mobile, which makes it shocking to see the partner CPC off more than core Google, with a 14% YoY decline.

What ends up happening is eventually the media outlets get sufficiently defunded to where they are sold for a song to a tech company or an executive at a tech company. Alibaba buying SCMP is akin to Jeff Bezos buying The Washington Post.

The Wall Street Journal recently laid off reporters. The New York Times announced they were cutting back local cultural & crime coverage.

If news organizations of that caliber can’t get the numbers to work then the system has failed.

The Guardian is literally incinerating over 5 million pounds per month. ABC is staging fake crime scenes (that’s one way to get an exclusive).

The Tribune Company, already through bankruptcy & perhaps the dumbest of the lot, plans to publish thousands of AI assisted auto-play videos in their articles every day. That will guarantee their user experience on their owned & operated sites is worse than just about anywhere else their content gets distributed to, which in turn means they are not only competing against themselves but they are making their own site absolutely redundant & a chore to use.

That the Denver Guardian (an utterly fake paper running fearmongering false stories) goes viral is just icing on the cake.

Look at this brazen, amazing garbage. Facebook has become the world’s leading distributor of lies.https://t.co/oueWUiydJO— Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce) November 6, 2016

many Facebook users wish to connect with people and things that confirm their pre-existing opinions, whether or not they are true. … Giving people what they want to see will always draw more attention than making them work for it, in rather the same way that making up news is cheaper and more profitable than actually reporting the truth. – Ben Thompson

These tech companies are literally reshaping society & are sucking the life out of the economy, destroying adjacent markets & bulldozing regulatory concerns, all while offloading costs onto everyone else around them.

The crumbling of the American dream is a purple problem, obscured by solely red or solely blue lenses. Its economic and cultural roots are entangled, a mixture of government, private sector, community and personal failings. But the deepest root is our radically shriveled sense of “we.” … Until we treat the millions of kids across America as our own kids, we will pay a major economic price, and talk of the American dream will increasingly seem cynical historical fiction.

And the solution to killing the middle class, is, of course, to kill the middle class:

„We are going to raise taxes on the middle class“ -Hillary Clinton #NeverHilla… (Vine by @USAforTrump2016) https://t.co/veEiZnfbkH— JKO (@jko417) November 6, 2016

An FTC report recommended suing Google for their anti-competitive practices, but no suit was brought. The US Copyright Office Register was relieved of her job after she went against Google’s views on set top boxes. Years ago many people saw where this was headed:

„This is a major affront to copyright,“ said songwriter and music publisher Dean Kay. „Google seems to be taking over the world – and politics … Their major position is to allow themselves to use copyright material without remuneration. If the Copyright Office head is towing the Google line, creators are going to get hurt.“
…
Singer Don Henley said Pallante’s ouster was „an enormous blow“ to artists. „She was a champion of copyright and stood up for the creative community, which is one of the things that got her fired,“ he said. … [Pallante’s replacement] Hayden „has a long track record of being an activist librarian who is anti-copyright and a librarian who worked at places funded by Google.“

And in spite of the growing importance of tech media coverage of the industry is a trainwreck:

This is what it’s like to be a technology reporter in 2016. Freebies are everywhere, but real access is scant. Powerful companies like Facebook and Google are major distributors of journalistic work, meaning newsrooms increasingly rely on tech giants to reach readers, a relationship that’s awkward at best and potentially disastrous at worst.

Being a conduit breeds exclusives. Challenging the grand narrative gets one blackballed.

Mobile Search Index

Google announced they are releasing a mobile first search index:

Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results. Of course, while our index will be built from mobile documents, we’re going to continue to build a great search experience for all users, whether they come from mobile or desktop devices.

There are some forms of content that simply don’t work well on a 350 pixel wide screen, unless they use a pinch to zoom format. But using that format is seen as not being mobile friendly.

Imagine you have an auto part database which lists alternate part numbers, price, stock status, nearest store with part in stock, time to delivery, etc. … it is exceptionally hard to get that information to look good on a mobile device. And good luck if you want to add sorting features on such a table.

The theory that using the desktop version of a page to rank mobile results is flawed because users might find something which is only available on the desktop version of a site is a valid point. BUT, at the same time, a publisher may need to simplify the mobile site & hide data to improve usability on small screens & then only allow certain data to become visible through user interactions. Not showing those automotive part databases to desktop users would ultimately make desktop search results worse for users by leaving huge gaps in the search results. And a search engine choosing to not index the desktop version of a site because there is a mobile version is equally short sighted. Desktop users would no longer be able to find & compare information from those automotive parts databases.

Once again money drives search „relevancy“ signals.

Since Google will soon make 3/4 of their ad revenues on mobile that should be the primary view of the web for everyone else & alternate versions of sites which are not mobile friendly should be disappeared from the search index if a crappier lite mobile-friendly version of the page is available.

Amazon converts well on mobile in part because people already trust Amazon & already have an account registered with them. Most other merchants won’t be able to convert at anywhere near as well of a rate on mobile as they do on desktop, so if you have to choose between having a mobile friendly version that leaves differentiated aspects hidden or a destkop friendly version that is differentiated & establishes a relationship with the consumer, the deeper & more engaging desktop version is the way to go.

The heavy ad load on mobile search results only further combine with the low conversion rates on mobile to make building a relationship on desktop that much more important.

Even TripAdvisor is struggling to monetize mobile traffic, monetizing it at only about 30% to 33% the rate they monetize desktop & tablet traffic. Google already owns most the profits from that market.

Webmasters are better off NOT going mobile friendly than going mobile friendly in a way that compromises the ability of their desktop site.

Mobile-first: with ONLY a desktop site you’ll still be in the results & be findable. Recall how mobilegeddon didn’t send anyone to oblivion?— Gary Illyes (@methode) November 6, 2016

I am not the only one suggesting an over-simplified mobile design that carries over to a desktop site is a losing proposition. Consider Nielsen Norman Group’s take:

in the current world of responsive design, we’ve seen a trend towards insufficient information density and simplifying sites so that they work well on small screens but suboptimally on big screens.

Tracking Users

Publishers are getting squeezed to subsidize the primary web ad networks. But the narrative is that as cross-device tracking improves some of those benefits will eventually spill back out into the partner network.

I am rather skeptical of that theory.

Facebook already makes 84% of their ad revenue from mobile devices where they have great user data.

They are paying to bring new types of content onto their platform, but they are only just now beginning to get around to test pricing their Audience Network traffic based on quality.

Priorities are based on business goals and objectives.

Both Google & Facebook paid fines & faced public backlash for how they track users. Those tracking programs were considered high priority.

When these ad networks are strong & growing quickly they may be able to take a stand, but when growth slows the stock prices crumble, data security becomes less important during downsizing when morale is shattered & talent flees. Further, creating alternative revenue streams becomes vital „to save the company“ even if it means selling user data to dangerous dictators.

The other big risk of such tracking is how data can be used by other parties.

Spooks preferred to use the Google cookie to spy on users. And now Google allows personally identifiable web tracking.

Data is being used in all sorts of crazy ways the central ad networks are utterly unaware of. These crazy policies are not limited to other countries. Buying dog food with your credit card can lead to pet licensing fees. Even cheerful „wellness“ programs may come with surprises.

Want to see what the future looks like?

For starters…

About 2 months ago I saw a Facebook post done on behalf of a friend of mine. Gofundme was the plea. Her insurance wouldn’t cover her treatment for a recurring breast cancer and doctors wouldn’t start the treatment unless the full payment was secured in a advance. Really? Really. She was gainfully employed, had a full time, well paying job. But guess what? It wasn’t enough although hundreds of people donated.

This last week she died. She was 38 years old. She died not getting access to a treatment that may or may not have saved her life. She died having to hustle folks for funds to just have a chance to get access to another treatment option and she died while worrying about being financially ruined by her illness. Just horrid.

Is this the society we want? People forced to beg friends on gofundme for help so they can get access to medical treatment? Is this the society we are? Is this truly the best we can do?

Click here to read more.

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Source:: seobook.com