#at least a quarter of all the software job postings are for AI development now

[skyborneveggie]

.

[astrowonder98]

Turning 25, and about time for a quarter-life crisis.

What a mess social media has found itself in. Facebook and Twitter are either seen as a joke or in disrepair, Places like DeviantART want to experiment with AI art and it has hindered the site, and no one is in a prime position to take over and be the new place we can all hang out. The internet is going though a major painful metamorphosis and I am not sure how to feel about it... cause who the heck knows the result? Not me!

It's probably a fitting time as ever. This month will mark the big 25 (specifically July 7th, give Ringo Starr my birthday cheer, too.) and I have been doing a lot of thinking in my life about what I want to do and how I can do it while still being able to survive. And the honest to goodness fact is that I haven't come up with any answers, at least not any good answers that I can work with.

I'm going to try and make my thoughts on what is going on with me as simple as possible.

I've worked in the same dead end part-time job for the past two years. It's above minimum wage, sure, but it's not a living wage either. It's also a highly physical job. Most of the time I'm in the parking lot outside. In the burning sun. Lifting heavy objects and pushing carts. Despite it being part-time, I feel wiped out after the fact and not want to do anything else. This has frustrated people who wonder why this can possibly happen (my workplace and a couple of my close family.) The only reason I am still here at this point is because I need the healthcare.

In spite of a degree in Computer Science, virtually every application sent with using it in mind has never been acted upon, not even getting to the interview phase. Just rejected. What's ironic is that applications sent to other retail places have gotten quick responses back. People look at my resume with my degree and see more readily a sales representative than a software developer and it doesn't make me feel great...

All of this culminates in coming back home without feeling a thing. Completely emotionless. I'm in therapy for this, but it's been a slow progress to get to this point. And unless I do something drastic I might be stuck in a loop for a while longer, which stinks.

It was a mistake thinking that making art and creating stuff for people to enjoy would do anything to change that and hoping, somehow, it could turn into an actual career. I really held out hope in this avenue but have now reached a conclusion that it will just be nothing more than a hobby I do on the side. The fact that any original material (Always Lagging Behind, Rocket Board, and other original character art) I've created has gotten less attention and praise than fanart does not help in me reaching this conclusion (especially with my involvement in Pokemon Mystery Dungeons and Dragons: Dark Heroes.)

By extension, I accidentally made things I like to do for fun or should be relaxing as work I must do, and that's just not good for my mind, let alone anyone's mind. It's probably why I don't feel happy when trying to relax and try to enjoy things, but it also might be more complicated than that...

All of this has made me reach this conclusion: I need to make a change immediately. There are a number of things I'll be doing, but here are three things that are relevant to the internet world specifically:

Howie's Convenience - Clean Up After Yourself! will continue as I planned before making this... post? monologue? snapping point? I'll let you pick. I will pick the voices for the characters in late July, record with the cast, and then animate the thing whenever I get a chance to do so when I'm not doing whatever I can do get myself out of this hole I dug.

I'm now only going to use social media to post things I want to post. That's it. No looking at what everyone else is doing and liking and sharing.

Twitter and YouTube are now considered cold turkeys. YouTube will only be used for when I'm uploading something to the site. My Twitter accounts will just not be used altogether and will be closed July 31st.

I know those of you who care about what I do might find it very sudden. It honestly is. I have a bad habit of putting things off on most days and then somehow finding the will in me to actually make a drastic step to change my life. With how I worded some of this stuff, you might come to the conclusion that I hate my audience or other people for just liking what they do and they don't match up with what I want them to like. I do not. I hate myself for even wanting to humor that notion. It's not my fault people just have different tastes and likes. It just means I should just keep drawing what I like in that moment and be proud of what I make.

I'll keep posting here on Tumblr to keep you updated on that Howie's Convenience project I've only just now told you about on this site (another bad habit) but for the most part, consider this post as me acknowledging the mistakes I've made and doing what I can to get out of it.

I'll be seeing you around.

Erin Strouder (HeyStrouder/AstroWonder98)

[magzoso-tech]

Sales startup People.ai lays off 18% of staff, raises debt round amid COVID-19 uncertainty

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/sales-startup-people-ai-lays-off-18-of-staff-raises-debt-round-amid-covid-19-uncertainty/

Sales startup People.ai lays off 18% of staff, raises debt round amid COVID-19 uncertainty

Another startup has turned to downsizing and fund raising to help weather the uncertainty around the economy amid the global coronavirus health pandemic. People.ai, a predictive sales startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Iconic, Lightspeed and other investors and last year valued at around $500 million, has laid off around 30 people, working out to about 18% of staff, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed.

Alongside that, the company has quietly raised a debt round in the “tens of millions of dollars” to make strategic investments in new products and potentially other moves.

Oleg Rogynskyy, the founder and CEO, said the layoffs were made not because business has slowed down, but to help the company shore up for whatever may lie ahead.

“We still have several years of runway with what we’ve raised,” he noted (it has raised just under $100 million in equity to date). “But no one knows the length of the downturn, so we wanted to make sure we could sustain the business through it.”

Specifically, the company is reducing its international footprint — now, big European customers that it already has on its books will now be handled from its US offices rather than local outposts — and it is narrowing its scope to focus more on the core verticals that make up the majority of its current customer base.

He gave as an example the financial sector. “We create huge value for financial services industry but have moved the functionality for them out to next year so that we can focus on our currently served industries,” he said.

People.ai’s software tracks the full scope of communication touch points between sales teams and customers, supposedly negating the tedious manual process of activity logging for SDRs. The company’s machine learning tech is also meant to generate the average best way to close a deal – educating customer success teams about where salespeople may be deviating from a proven strategy.

People.ai is one of a number of well-funded tech startups that is making hard choices on business strategy, costs and staffing in the current climate.

Layoffs.fyi, which has been tallying those losing their jobs in the tech industry in the wake of the Coronavirus (it’s based primarily on public reports with a view to providing lists of people for hire), says that as of today, there have been nearly 25,000 people laid off from 258 tech startups and other companies. With companies like Opendoor laying off some 600 people earlier this week, the numbers are ratcheting up quickly: just seven days ago, the number was just over 16,000.

In that context, People.ai cutting 30 may be a smaller increment in the bigger picture (even if for the individuals impacted, it’s just as harsh of an outcome). But it also underscores one of the key business themes of the moment.

Some businesses are getting directly hit by the pandemic — for example, house sales and transportation have all but halted, leaving companies in those categories scrambling to figure out how to get through the coming weeks and months and prepare for a potentially long haul of life and consumer and business behaviour not looking like it did before January.

But other businesses like People.ai, which provides predictive sales tools to help salespeople do their jobs better, is (for now at least) falling into that category of IT is still in demand, perhaps even more than ever in a shrinking economy. In People.ai’s case, software to help salespeople have better sales conversations and ultimately conversions at a time when many customers might not be as quick to buy things, is an idea that sells right now (so to speak).

Rogynskyy noted that more than 90% of customers that are up for renewal this quarter have either renewed or expanded their contracts, and it has been adding on new large customers in recent weeks and months.

The company has also just closed a round of debt funding in the “tens of millions” of dollars to use for strategic investments.

It’s not disclosing the lender right now, but it opted for debt in part because it still has most of its most recent round — $60 million raised in May 2019 led by Iconic — in the bank. Although investors would have been willing to invest in another equity round, given that the company is in a healthy position right now, Rogynskyy said he preferred the debt option to have the money without the dilution that equity rounds bring.

The money will be used for strategic purposes and considering how to develop the product in the current climate. For example, with most people now working from home, and that looking to be a new kind of “normal” in office life (if not all the time, at least more of the time), that presents a new opportunity to develop products tailored for these remote workers.

There have been some M&A moves in tech in the last couple of weeks, and from what we understand People.ai has been approached as well as a possible buyer, target and partner. All of that for now is not something the company is considering, Rogynskyy said. “We’re focused on our own future growth and health and making sure we are here for a long time.”

[cryptoquicknews-blog]

New Post has been published here https://is.gd/HiTtWS

Cornered by Bear Market, Bitmain Is Facing an Unclear Future

This post was originally published here

On Jan. 10, news emerged that Chinese Bitcoin mining giant Bitmain’s co-founders, Jihan Wu and Micree Zhan Ketuan, will step down as co-CEOs of the company. The move follows a streak of reports suggesting that Bitmain has been facing mass layoffs, class action lawsuits and difficulties related to its initial public offering (IPO) during the last quarter of 2018. So what exactly is happening with one of the world’s most influential crypto outfits?

Brief introduction to Bitmain, the world’s most powerful crypto mining giant

Bitmain was founded in 2013 by Jihan Wu and Micree Zhan Ketuan. Prior to that, Wu was a private equity fund manager who studied economics and psychology at Peking University, while Zhan, a graduate of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was trying to raise funds for a startup that allowed users to stream television shows to a computer screen via a set-top box.

After discovering Bitcoin (BTC) in early 2011, Wu allegedly spent all his life savings to buy the cryptocurrency. When the Bitcoin’s price soared in 2013, he decided not only to trade the digital asset, but to create it as well. Wu asked Zhan to join him, and together they began developing an ASIC chip that would mine BTC at maximum efficiency. In November 2013, Zhan, the duo’s technical mastermind, presented their first mining rig, the Antminer S1, and Bitmain’s sales took off.

According to Wu, the company experienced a difficult period close to the end of 2014, when the infamous Mt.Gox crash happened and the whole crypto market collapsed. The situation eventually stabilized when BTC’s price began climbing up again the next year. Consequently, when the 2017 crypto boom kicked in, the business became extremely lucrative.

Thus, Bitmain booked $2.5 billion of revenue in 2017 alone, as Wu told Bloomberg, while this year turned out to be even more profitable: According to the company’s prospectus, its revenue was set at $2.8 billion by the end of June 2018. According to a different report issued by investment research company Bernstein, Bitmain made between $3 billion and $4 billion in operating profit in 2017 and allegedly outraced Nvidia, which made about $3 billion during the same period.

In May 2018, Bitmain announced its expansion to the area of artificial intelligence (AI), where it planned to compete against Nvidia, Intel and AMD using its existing chip designs to power AI systems and software. The plan was disclosed against the backdrop of increasing scrutiny regarding crypto mining operations in China. “As a China company,” said Wu, “we have to be prepared.” He added that Bitmain plans to start earning as much as 40 percent of its revenue from AI chips within five years.

Sales of Bitmain’s mining chips and circuits reportedly account for around 70 to 80 percent of the whole market. As per the company’s LinkedIn page, Bitmain is currently headquartered in Beijing and employs around 2,500 people across the world. However, it is unclear whether this information is up to date, considering the recent reports regarding job cuts.

Current state of affairs: Bear market-induced losses

As of January 2019, the two mining pools operated by Bitmain, AntPool and BTC.com, contribute to almost 23 percent of the total hashing power of the entire Bitcoin mining pool. However, just six months ago, the company’s mining pools represented 41 percent of the market share, meaning that its share has been steadily declining. Indeed, the bear market has been taking its toll, and 2018 turned out to be a problematic year for the mining giant.

According to a BitMEX Research report released on Aug. 30, Bitmain sold a lot of its mining units at a loss throughout 2018. The paper suggested that it was a deliberate strategy “to squeeze out [Bitmain’s] competition by causing them to experience lower sales and therefore financial difficulties”:

“This analysis implies Bitmain are currently loss-making, with a negative profit margin of 11.6% for the main S9 product and a margin of over negative 100% on the L3 product. In reality costs are likely to have declined so the situation may not be as bad, however we think it is likely Bitmain are currently making significant losses.”

As previously noted by Cointelegraph, at the time the BitMEX research was published, the price of Bitcoin was hovering around $7,000, which was still above the breakeven cost of mining. Therefore, the demand was likely to be there, which would make the Bitmain’s price war justified. However, when the full-blown bear market hit in November, and the price of Bitcoin fell below the breakeven cost of mining of $6,900, Bitmain should have started to experience harsher financial difficulties due to lesser demand for mining devices.

Bitmain staff cuts: From Israel division to CEO position

One of the most evident signs that Bitmain’s business has taken a hit are the reported layoffs. On Dec. 26, Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post (SCMP) quoted Bitmain’s alleged statement regarding internal job cuts. The announcement reportedly read:

“A part of [building a sustainable business] is having to really focus on things that are core to that mission and not things that are auxiliary. As we move into the new year we will continue to double down on hiring the best talent from a diverse range of backgrounds.”

As SCMP noted, the exact number of layoffs had not been disclosed, but a spokesperson for the firm reportedly denied that Bitmain would lay off over half of its employees, a suggestion first circulated in Chinese social media.

Previously, on Dec. 23, Blockstream’s chief security officer, Samson Mow, stated that Bitmain fired its entire staff of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) developers, citing Chinese social media. The developers had formed Bitmain’s Copernicus team and were working on the company’s Bitcoin Cash GO client. “Only 1 week notice. Some had just joined the company,” Mow specified.

On Dec. 10, Israeli business news outlet Globes reported that Bitmain was closing its local development center and firing its employees. Dubbed Bitmaintech Israel, it was founded in 2016 to explore the use of blockchain, work on the Connect BTC mining pool, and develop the infrastructure behind Bitmain’s AI project titled “Sophon.” All 23 employees were fired, along with Gadi Glikberg, head of the Israeli branch as well as Bitmain’s vice president of international sales and marketing. Glikberg linked the layoffs to the crypto market collapse:

“The crypto market has undergone a shake-up in the past few months, which has forced Bitmain to examine its various activities around the globe and to refocus its business in accordance with the current situation.”

Finally, according to a series of yet-to-be-finally-confirmed reports, changes occurred even at the senior level of the mining giant. Thus, on Jan. 10, SCMP wrote that both Bitmain’s co-founders, Jihan Wu and Micree Zhan Ketuan, will quit their posts as co-CEOs, but still steer the company’s important decisions. Citing “people familiar with the matter,” the media outlet said Bitmain’s director of product engineering, Wang Haichao, would likely take over as CEO at an unspecified future date, while he has allegedly already taken over some of the duo’s former duties. According to the September IPO filing, Wu and Zhan control 21 and 37 percent of the business respectively.

Bitmain IPO plans become doubtful as well

In June 2018, media started to report that Jihan Wu was planning to conduct an overseas IPO  in a market with United States dollar denominated shares — like Hong Kong — as it would allow early backers to cash in funds. An IPO is a more traditional and regulatory-friendly way for a company to seek investments from a broader audience in the public market, which Cointelegraph has covered in depth before.

Later in July, a research unit for crypto exchange BitMEX analyzed alleged leaked data on Bitmain’s potential IPO and stated that the mining giant had conducted a pre-IPO round that reportedly raised around $14 billion, leading them to believe that it could raise no less than $20 billion at the IPO stage.

Nevertheless, as Cointelegraph reported earlier, there had been a lot of rumors and uncertainty around Bitmain’s upcoming IPO. In December, they were reignited by Hong Kong-based newspaper SCMP, which reported that the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX) is reluctant to allow Bitmain to conduct an offering in the city.

According to the publication’s anonymous sources, the regulator thinks it is “premature for any cryptocurrency trading platform – or business associated with the industry – to raise funds through an IPO in Hong Kong before the proper regulatory framework is in place.” As a result, SCMP suggests current conditions “could be an insurmountable hurdle” for Bitmain and other cryptocurrency companies planning to launch an IPO. Similarly, in November, HKEX lapsed the IPO application of Canaan, Bitmain’s competition on the mining market, which also was going to hold an offering there. Now, the company is looking to move its IPO plans to New York.

Interestingly, just a day prior to the SCMP article, the HKEX told Cointelegraph that any reports regarding hesitation on the part of Bitmain were “rumors,” suggesting that negotiations between the regulator and the mining giant were in progress.

The mining giant is facing two class action lawsuits on top of other problems

In addition to staff cuts and other problems, Bitmain seems to be facing at least two class action lawsuits. The first one was filed by Los Angeles County resident Gor Gevorkyan, who allegedly purchased their devices, including its S9 Antminer machine, in January 2018. According to the filing submitted to the North District Court of California in November, the product was “difficult to configure” and lapsed during a “substantial amount of time.” Gevorkyan claims that before he could fully initialize the devices, they operated at cost-intensive “full power mode” at his expense. The plaintiff is seeking damages in excess of $5 million on behalf of all miners “similarly situated” as Bitmain clients.

The more recent lawsuit was initiated by UnitedCorp, a development and management firm with a focus on telecommunications and information technologies. On Dec. 6, it reported suing Bitmain along with Bitcoin.com, Roger Ver and the Kraken exchange, which reportedly planned a scheme to take control of the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network during the November hard fork.

#crypto #cryptocurrency #btc #xrp #litecoin #altcoin #money #currency #finance #news #alts #hodl #coindesk #cointelegraph #dollar #bitcoin View the website

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[onlinemarketingcourses]

Virtual Real Estate | SEO Book

Wrastlin With The News

The current presidential cabinet includes a WWE co-founder & this passes for modern political discourse:

#FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017

CNN promised vengeance.

Something To Believe In

The pretense of objectivity has been dropped:

These reporters aren’t ideologues. They’re just right-thinking people who lean left. Somewhere along the line, they stopped pretending to be objective about Trump. … People don’t just disagree with each other. They can’t imagine how a decent caring human being could disagree with their own view of race or the minimum wage or immigration or Trump. Being a member of the virtuous tribe means not only carrying the correct card in your wallet to reassure yourself. You have to also believe that the people carrying any other card are irrational, or worse, evil. They’re not people to engage in conversation with. They are barriers to be ignored or pushed aside on the virtuous path to paradise. This intolerance and inability to imagine the virtue of the other side is the road to tyranny and chaos. It dehumanizes a good chunk of humanity and that in turn justifies the worst atrocities human beings are capable of.

The WSJ, typically a right-leaning publication, is differentiating their coverage of the president from most other outlets by attempting to be somewhat neutral.

The news is fake. Even historically left-leaning people are disgusted with outlets like CNN.

“I think the president is probably right to say, like, look you are witch-hunting me. You have no smoking gun, you have no real proof.” – CNN supervising producer John Bonifield

“When you do shitty reporting like CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times & Rachel Maddow especially. When you do that & it is revealed to be bullshit, what you’re doing is building up Trump. There’s no greater way to build up Trump than to falsely report on him. There’s no better way to build up Trump than to make him the victim.” – Jimmy Dore

“Rachel Maddow was given the facts, she ignored them, & she kept right on going. That’s MSNBC, that’s CNN, that’s the New York Times, the Washington Post – they’re all horrible. That’s why we had the Iraq war. That’s why we have the Syria war. That’s why we are still in Afghanistan. That’s why we had Libya. That’s why we have the biggest income disparity since the gilded age. Meanwhile we are spending more on the military than the rest of the world.” – Jimmy Dore

And, since people need something to believe in, there are new American Gods:

“A half hour of cable news delivers enough psychic trauma for a whole year. The newspapers are talking of nothing but treason, espionage, investigations, protests.” … “Stocks are rallying because of how little faith we have in the government. The Mega Blue Chip Corporation is the new Sovereign.”

Current Headwinds for Online Publishing

I struggle to keep up with the accelerating rate of change. A number of common themes in the current ecosystem are:

We are moving toward a world where more things are becoming fake (only accelerated by the demonetization of neutrality & the algorithmic boost associated with reliably delivering confirmation bias in an algorithmic or manual fashion)

risk keeps being radiated outward to the individual while monopoly platforms capture the spoils (forced-place health insurance purchases where the insurance company arbitrarily drops the sick member on the policy even though that is supposed to be illegal, more temp jobs where people don’t get enough hours to get health insurance through their employer, under-funded pensions, outsourcing of core business functions to sweatshops where part-time workers don’t get paid for dozens to hundreds of hours of required training & get to watch beheading videos all day)

the barrier to entry keeps increasing (increased marketing cost due to brand bias, heavy ad loads on dominant platforms, & central platforms making partners do “bet the farm” moves in how they adjust distribution to drive adoption of proprietary formats & temporarily over-promote select content formats)

the increasing chunk size of competition is making it much harder for individuals to build sustainable businesses. (Yes the tools of the trade are improving quickly, BUT the central platforms are demonetizing the adjacent fields faster than publishing tools & business options improve.)

In Europe publishers are aggressively leaning on regulators to try to rebalance power.

Some of this stuff is cyclical. About a decade ago the European Commission went after Microsoft for bundling Internet Explorer. Google complained about the monopolistic practices to ensure Microsoft was fined. And we’ve went from that to a web where Google syndicates native ads that blend into page content while directly funding robot journalism. And then Google is ranking the robot-generated crap too.

Speaking of robot journalists, check out the top 3 results for this query. All 3 are auto-written by automated insights (AI software). Yikes pic.twitter.com/ltFGFXHNiF— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 8, 2017

But to keep the ecosystem clean & spam free, Google is also planning to leverage their web browser to further dictate the terms of online publishing. Chrome will block autoplay audio & will automatically reroute .dev domains to https. Cutting edge developers suggest using a web browser other than Google Chrome to prevent proprietary lock in across the web.

Is this a test, @Google? pic.twitter.com/V9FZ2hL2cA— TNW (@TheNextWeb) September 5, 2017

While Google distributes their Chrome browser as unwanted bundleware, other web browsers must display uninstall links front & center when trying to gain awareness of their product using Google AdWords. Microsoft Edge is coming to Android, but without a BrowserChoice.eu screen it is unlikely most users will change their web browser as most are unaware of what a web browser even is, let alone the limitations of any of them or the tracking embedded in them.

If you go back several years, there was celebration of the fact that the cost of doing a startup was so low. You didn’t have to pay Oracle a million dollars for a server license any more. You didn’t even have to rack your own hardware. Now you can just dial it up on Amazon. But there are now these gatekeepers and toll-takers. Back in 2004, you had the wide-open internet. – Jeremy Stoppelman

The Mobile Revolution

If you are an anti-social work at home webmaster who has dual monitors it is easy to dismiss cell phones as inefficient and chalk most mobile usage up to the following.

Russian man visited Chinese click farm.They make fake ratings for mobile apps and things like this.He said they have 10,000 more phones pic.twitter.com/qE96vgCCsi— English Russia (@EnglishRussia1) May 11, 2017

The reality is cell phones are more powerful than they seem if you are strictly consuming rather than working.

Deflationary impact of technology: everything in this Radio Shack flyer from 1991 adds up to $3,285.12 and can be done today on a smartphone pic.twitter.com/ONh3waWVgq— Jeffrey Kleintop (@JeffreyKleintop) June 23, 2017

And that is how the unstoppable quickly becomes the extinct!

10 years ago. pic.twitter.com/ZCWfHfpedi— Harry Tucker (@harrytuckerr) September 11, 2017

Many people the world over are addicted to their cell phones to where viral game makers are self-regulating before regulators step in: “From Tuesday, users below 12 years of age will be limited to one hour of play time each day, while those aged between 12 years and 18 years will be limited to two hours a day, Tencent said.”

While China is using their various tools to clamp down on Honour of Kings, Tencent is bringing the game to the west, which makes blocking VPN services (with Apple’s help – they must play along or have the phones reduced to bricks) & requiring local data storage & technology transfer more important. Anything stored locally can be easily disappeared: “China’s already formidable internet censors have demonstrated a new strength-the ability to delete images in one-on-one chats as they are being transmitted, making them disappear before receivers see them.”

China has banned live streaming, threatened their largest domestic social networks, shut down chat bots, require extensive multimedia review: “an industry association circulated new regulations that at least two “auditors” will, with immediate effect, be required to check all audiovisual content posted online” AND they force users to install spyware on their devices.

In spite of all those restrictions, last year “Chinese consumers spent $5.5 trillion through mobile payment platforms, about 50 times more than their American counterparts.” In the last quarter Baidu had Â¥20.87 billion in revenues, with 72% of their revenues driven by mobile.

People can not miss that which they’ve never seen, thus platform socialism works. Those who doubt it will be tracked & scored accordingly.

History, as well, can be scrubbed. And insurance companies watch everything in real-time – careful what you post. The watchful eye of the Chinese pre-crime team is also looking over every move.

Last quarter Facebook had revenues of $9.164 billion, with 87% coming from mobile devices.

pic.twitter.com/JlPBSlmKlw— banksy (@thereaIbanksy) September 16, 2017

Simulacrum has ALMOST been perfected:

“We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.” … “Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.” … “Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.”

pic.twitter.com/QBLBXIDDLK— banksy (@thereaIbanksy) August 24, 2017

The web is becoming easier to get addicted to due to personalization algorithms that reinforce our worldviews even as they make us feel more isolated and left out. And the barrier to entry for consumers into one of the few central gatekeeper ecosystems is dropping like a rock due to the falling cost of mobile devices, coupled with with images & video displacing text making literacy optional. As we become more “connected” we feel more isolated:

“Social isolation, loneliness or living alone was each a significant factor contributing to premature death. And each one of these factors was a more significant risk factor for dying than obesity. … No one knows precisely why loneliness is surging, threatening the lives of many millions of people, but it does seem that the burgeoning use of technology may have something to do with it. Personally, I would contend that technology may be the chief factor fueling it.”

The primary role of the big data mining companies is leveraging surveillance for social engineering

Unsettling that according to Mark Zuckerberg purpose of Facebook is forced social engineering. From “World Without Mind” by Franklin Foer: pic.twitter.com/CHRnefg9m2— Murtaza Hussain (@MazMHussain) October 8, 2017

App Annie expects the global app economy to be worth $6.3 trillion by 2021.

The reason those numbers can easily sound fake & mobile can seem overblown is how highly concentrated usage has become: “over 80 percent of consumer time on mobile devices is now spent on the apps, websites and properties” of just five companies: Facebook, Google, Apple, Yelp and Bing.

Maslow 2.0 pic.twitter.com/X1OguQG8Gq— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) October 7, 2017

eMarketer stated Google will have more mobile ad revenue than desktop ad revenue in the US this year. They also predicted Google & Facebook will consume over 2/3 of US online ad spend within 2 years.

The central network operators not only maintain an outsized share of revenues, but also maintain an outsized share of profits. When the home team gets a 30% rake of any sale it is hard for anyone else to compete. Even after buying and gutting Motorola Google bought part of HTC for $1.1 billion. The game plan has never changed: commoditize the compliment to ensure user data & most of the profits flow to Google. Put up arbitrary roadblocks for competing services while launching free parallel offerings to drive lock-in.

For the last YEAR I’ve been battling App Store rejections – we made an app called Animoji with animated emojis…now I know why. https://t.co/jKJXfLMGj2— Ryan Jones (@rjonesy) September 9, 2017

Central data aggregators can keep collecting more user data & offer more granular ad distribution features. They can tell you that this micro moment RIGHT NOW is make or break:

it’s intended to create a bizarre sense of panic among marketers – “OMG, we have to be present at every possible instant someone might be looking at their phone!” – which doesn’t help them think strategically or make the best use of their marketing or ad spend.

The reality is that if you don’t have a relationship with a person on their desktop computer they probably don’t want your mobile app either.

If you have the relationship then mobile only increases profits.

Is iOS 11 specifically designed to make your older iPhones unusable and drain your battery so you have to upgrade to the newest phones?— Eric Jackson (@ericjackson) October 7, 2017

Many people attempting to build “the next mobile” will go bust, but wherever the attention flows the ads will follow.

Those with a broad & dominant tech platform can copy features from single-category devices and keep integrating them into their core products to increase user lock-in. And they can build accessories for those core devices while prohibiting the flow of data to third party devices to keep users locked into their ecosystem.

Smaller Screens, Shallower Attention

People often multi-task while using mobile devices.

When multi-tasking it is easier to accidentally click an ad. This happens 10s of billions of times a year:

This year, in-app mobile ad spend will reach $45.3 billion, up $11 billion from last year, according to eMarketer. And apps are where the money is at for mobile advertising, comprising 80 percent of all U.S. media dollars spent on mobile.

But multi-tasking means doing almost everything else worse. The “always on” mode not only increases isolation, but also lowers our ability to focus:

“while our phones offer convenience and diversion, they also breed anxiety. Their extraordinary usefulness gives them an unprecedented hold on our attention and vast influence over our thinking and behavior. … Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren’t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens. … when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline. … As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased. … Anticipating that information would be readily available in digital form seemed to reduce the mental effort that people made to remember it. … people are all too quick to credit lies and half-truths spread through social media by Russian agents and other bad actors. If your phone has sapped your powers of discernment, you’ll believe anything it tells you.”

Further, the shallow attention stream makes it easy to displace content with ads:

4 Ads 3 map carrousel results 5 organic results 4 Ads

Then “see more results”

4 more Ads 5 organic results 4 more Ads

On desktop devices people don’t accidentally misclick on ads at anywhere near the rate they fat thumb ads on mobile devices.

Desktop ad clicks convert to purchases. Mobile ad clicks convert to ad budget burned: “marketers are still seeing few shoppers purchasing on mobile. The 52% of share in traffic only has 26% share of revenue.”

For traditional publishers mobile users drastically under-monetize desktop users due to

drastically lower conversion rates (true for almost everyone in ecommerce outside of Amazon perhaps)

limited cross-device tracking (how do you track people who don’t even hit your site but hit a cached page hosted via Google AMP or Facebook Instant Articles?)

lower ad load allowed on publisher sites due to limited screen size

aggressive filtering of fat thumb ad clicks on partner sites from central ad networks

For the central network operators almost all the above are precisely the exact opposite.

higher ad CTR by making entire interface ads (& perhaps even disappearing the concept of non-ads in the result set)

great cross-device user tracking

higher ad load allowed by the small screen size pushing content below the fold

more lenient filtering of fat thumb accidental ad clicks

If you look at raw stats without understanding the underlying impact, it is easy to believe the ecosystem is healthy.

Assumption: Google’s ads are more prominent, so organic must be dying.Reality: As of Oct. 2016, 20X more organic clicks than paid ones. pic.twitter.com/FaEBpBZWSw— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) July 1, 2017

However the huge number of “no click” results are demonetizing easy publisher revenues, which have traditionally helped to fund more in-depth investigative reporting. Further, much of the direct navigation which happened in the past is now being passed through brand-related search result pages. You can argue that is an increase in search traffic, or you can argue it is shifting the roll of the address bar from navigation to search.

The first page is nothing but ads

Yep, and here they are in Philly. Home service ads, then AdWords traditional ads, then the local pack (way down below). 🙂 pic.twitter.com/VOVZPWWHsg— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 17, 2017

On mobile so is the second, and most of the third

Hey, only 2.5 screens before you get to the 10 blue links. A full 4 screens if you cannot crack the top 2 organics. pic.twitter.com/bbm1pz8hyF— Jeremy Bochenek (@J_Bochenek) July 17, 2017

If a search query has lots of easy to structure crap around it, a user might need 6 or 7 scrolls to get to an organic result

Very interesting Google SERP for GoT. One barely visible organic result after >70% scroll depth. Oh my… #seo #GameOfThones pic.twitter.com/Z6j7VvJMI4— Bastian Grimm (@basgr) August 24, 2017

Then if third parties go “well Google does this, so I should too” they are considered a low quality user experience and get a penalty.

Emailed a client one month ago when I picked up ultra-aggressive ads (especially on mobile). They just received an ad experiences warning. pic.twitter.com/QLLZci1xKW— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 25, 2017

31% ad coverage on mobile website is excessive / spam / low quality user experience for a publisher, while 301% coverage is reasonable for the central network operators.

Google not only displaces the result set, but also leverages their search suggestion features & algorithmic influence to alter how people search & what they search for.

Ads are getting integrated into mobile keyboards.

The standard keyboard on the HTC 10 has begun showing ads [X-Post from r/mildlyinfuriating] https://t.co/FuXDJzilZ6 #blog pic.twitter.com/VriK54dBHb— Android Facts (@manatweets) July 16, 2017

And when a user finally reaches the publisher’s website (provided they scroll past the ads, the AMP listings, and all the other scrape-n-displace trash) then when they finally land on a publication Google will overlay other recommended articles from other sites.

Whoa -> While you’re reading a page on the Google app for iOS, you’ll now see suggestions for related content https://t.co/n6FjkNqx82 pic.twitter.com/DZYTt8T7fI— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 19, 2017

That feature will eventually end up including ads in it, where publishers will get 0.00% of the revenue generated.

Remember how Google suggested publishers should make their websites faster, remove ads, remove clutter, etc. What was the point of all that? To create free real estate for Google to insert a spam unit into your website?

Continuing coverage of Google’s new content recos. I’m sure Best Buy is thrilled to see Amazon show up while someone is on their page. Ouch. pic.twitter.com/qpDyGKPyYh— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 24, 2017

This wouldn’t be bad if mobile were a small, fringe slice of traffic, but it is becoming the majority of traffic. And as mobile increases desktop traffic is shrinking.

Even politically biased outlets that appear to be nearly perfectly optimized for a filter bubble that promotes identity politics struggle to make the numbers work: “As a result of continued decline in direct advertising, [Salon’s] total revenue in the fiscal year 2017 decreased by 34% to $4.6 million. Following the market trend, 84% of our advertising revenue in fiscal year 2017 was generated by programmatic selling. … [Monthly unique visitors to our website saw] a decrease of 23%. We attribute the decline primarily to the changes in the algorithms used by Facebook.”

I knew the last year was bad for online publishing, but the Salon 10K shows *just how bad* pic.twitter.com/oyH7pdCDNI— josh laurito (@joshlaurito) June 26, 2017

The above sorts of numbers are the logical outcome to this:

we’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content”above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.

Especially when combined with this:

As you scroll through it, you are then given travel ads for flight options through Google Flight search, hotels through Google Hotel search and restaurants through Google Local results. Then towards the bottom of the knowledge graph card, all the way at the end in a small grayish font, you have a link to “see web results.”

Bad news for TripAdvisor.

Google has squeezed out SEO for travel. PCLN/EXPE SEM $ spend and higher conversion is a massive competitive advantage. Bad news for TRIP. pic.twitter.com/39QkxuN780— modest proposal (@modestproposal1) April 17, 2017

And amongst the good news for Expedia, there’s also a bit of bad news for Expedia. The hotels are fighting Airbnb & OTAs. In travel Google is twice as big as the biggest OTA players. They keep eating more SERP real estate and adding more content behind tabs. On mobile they’ll even disappear the concept of organic results.

Room previews in the search results not only means that second tier players are worth a song, but even the new growth players propped up by aggressive ad buying eventually hit a wall and see their stock crash.

As the entire ecosystem gets squeezed by middlemen and the market gets obfuscated with an incomplete selection it is ultimately consumers who lose: “Reservations made through Internet discount sites are almost always slated for our worst rooms.”

The New York Times pitched Yelp as a pesky player holding a grudge:

“For six years, his company has been locked in a campaign on three continents to get antitrust regulators to punish Google, Yelp’s larger, richer and more politically connected competitor. … Yelp concluded that there was no better way to get Google’s attention than to raise the specter of regulation. … something [Mark Mahaney] calls the Death of Free Google. As the internet has migrated to mobile phones, Google has compensated for the smaller screen space by filling it with so many ads that users can have a hard time finding a result that hasn’t been paid for.”

In spite of how quick The New York Times was to dismiss Yelp, the monopoly platforms are stiffing competition & creativity while bundling fake reviews & junk features into their core platforms.

People can literally switch their name to “Loop dee Loop” and leave you terrible, fake reviews. Google’s lack of effort & investment to clean up trash in their local services department highlights that they don’t feel they need to compete on quality. Pay for core search distribution, throw an inferior service front & center, and win by default placement.

As AI advancements make fake reviews look more legit Google’s lack of investment in creating a quality ecosystem will increasingly harm both consumers and businesses. Many low margin businesses will go under simply because their Google reviews are full of inaccurate trash or a competitor decided to hijack their business listing or list their business as closed.

To this day Google is still egregiously stealing content from Yelp:

Yelp said it investigated and found that over one hour, Google pulled images from Yelp’s servers nearly 386,000 times for business listings in Google Maps, which Google exempted from its promise to not scrape content. Yelp then searched Google for 150 of the businesses from those map listings and found that for 110 of them, Google used a Yelp photo as the lead image in the businesses’ listings in search results.

Stealing content & wrapping it in fake reviews is NOT putting the user first.

Facebook has their own matching parallel shifts.

The aggregate quality of mobile ad clicks is quite low. So as mobile becomes a much higher percent of total ad clicks, those who don’t have scale and narrative control are reduced to taking whatever they can get. And mainstream media outlets are reduced to writing puff pieces so the brands they cover will pay to promote the stories on the main channels.

As programmatic advertising, ad blockers, unpatched Android-powered botnets & malware spread each day gets a little uglier for everyone but the central market operators. It is so bad that some of the central market operators offer surveillance apps which claim to protect user privacy! Other app makers not connected to monopoly profit streams monetize any way they can.

The narrative of growth can be sold (we are launching a new food channel, we are investing in our internal video team, we have exclusive real estate listings, and, um, we acquired a food channel) but the competition is a zero sum game with Google & Facebook eating off the publisher’s plates.

That’s why Time is trying to shave $400 million off their expenses & wants to sell their magazine division. Newspaper companies are selling for $1. It is also why Business Insider is no longer chasing growth & the New York Times is setting up a charitable trust.

The rise of ad blocking only accelerates the underlying desperation.

I have some thoughts about why news orgs are finding that people won’t read long articles: pic.twitter.com/G8Zh6GTA6w— Ben Chase (@bbchase) July 4, 2017

I feel terrible for journalists who invest time and effort into doing a hard job well only to have it presented like this. pic.twitter.com/jIZxuJqVAq— Jeff Long (@banterability) October 5, 2017

As long as news websites make their own customer experience worse than what can be found as a cached copy on the monopoly platforms there is no reason to visit the end publisher website. That is why the proprietary formats promoted by the monopoly platforms are so dangerous. They force lighter monetization & offset the lack of revenue by given preferential placement:

click through rate from Google search went from 5.9% (Regular) to 10.3% (AMP), and average search position went from 5.9 (Regular) to 1.7 (AMP). Since then, we have deployed AMP across fifteen of our brands and we have been very pleased with the results. Today, AMP accounts for 79% of our mobile search traffic and 36% of our total mobile visits.

As long as almost nobody is using the new proprietary, ghetto lock-in format the math may work out there, but once many people adopt it then it becomes another recurring sunk cost with no actual benefit:

the only voices promoting AMP’s performance benefits are coming from inside Google. … given how AMP pages are privileged in Google’s search results, the net effect of the team’s hard, earnest work comes across as a corporate-backed attempt to rewrite HTML in Google’s image.

Even if you get a slight uptick in traffic from AMP, it will lead to lower quality user engagement as users are browsing across websites rather than within websites. Getting a bit more traffic but 59% fewer leads is a fail.

No amount of collaborative publisher partnerships, begging for anti-trust exemptions, or whining about Google is going to fix the problem.

“The only way publishers can address this inexorable threat is by banding together. If they open a unified front to negotiate with Google and Facebook-pushing for stronger intellectual-property protections, better support for subscription models and a fair share of revenue and data-they could build a more sustainable future for the news business. But antitrust laws make such coordination perilous. These laws, intended to prevent monopolies, are having the unintended effect of preserving and protecting Google and Facebook’s dominant position.”

Wait a minute.

Wasn’t it the New York Times which claimed Yelp was holding an arbitrary grudge against Google?

The following sounds a lot more desperate:

newspapers that once delivered their journalism with their own trucks increasingly have to rely on these big online platforms to get their articles in front of people, fighting for attention alongside fake news, websites that lift their content, and cat videos.

Well maybe that is just smaller publications & not the gray lady herself

“the temperature is rising in terms of concern, and in some cases anger, about what seems like a very asymmetric, disadvantageous relationship between the publishers and the very big digital platforms.” – NYT CEO Mark Thompson

In unrelated news, there’s another round of layoffs coming at the New York Times.

And the New York Times is also setting up a nonprofit division to expand journalism while their core company focuses on something else.

Apparently Yelp does not qualify as a publisher in this instance.

Or does it?

The Times is backing the move for what is called an anticompetitive safe haven, in part, Mr. Thompson said, “because we care about the whole of journalism as well as about The New York Times.”

Ah, whole of journalism, which, apparently, no longer includes local business coverage.

You know the slogan: “news isn’t news, unless it isn’t local.”

The struggles are all across the media landscape. The new Boston Globe CEO lasted a half-year. The San Diego Union-Tribune resorted to using GoFundMe. The Chicago Sun-Times sold for $1. Moody’s issued a negative outlook for the US newspaper sector. As the industry declines the biggest players view consolidation as the only solution.

These struggles existed even before the largest brand advertisers like P&G cut back on low & no value ad venues like YouTube:

In the fourth quarter, the reduction in marketing that occurred was almost all in the digital space. And what it reflected was a choice to cut spending from a digital standpoint where it was ineffective: where either we were serving bots as opposed to human beings, or where the placement of ads was not facilitating the equity of our brands.

Google & Facebook are extending their grip on the industry with Google launching topical feeds & Facebook wanting to control subscription management.

Best of luck to journalists on the employment front:

The initiative, dubbed Reporters and Data and Robots (RADAR), will see a team of five journalists work with Natural Language Generation software to produce over 30,000 pieces of content for local media each month.

Hopefully editors catch the subtle errors the bots make, because most of them will not be this obvious & stupid.

The Guardian does not seem to know what a 40 is https://t.co/m7Gm1YrbXC pic.twitter.com/Y0sK9r0ltJ— Shuja Haider (@shujaxhaider) July 26, 2017

The cost of parasitic content recycling is coming down quickly:

In a show of strength last year, Microsoft used thousands of these chips at once to translate all of English Wikipedia into Spanish-3 billion words across five million articles-in less than a tenth of a second. Next Microsoft will let its cloud customers use these chips to speed up their own AI tasks.

Voice search makes it even easier to extract the rewards without paying publishers. Throwing pennies at journalists does nothing to change this.

And that voice shift is happening fast: “By 2020 half of search will be via voice”

If Google is subsidizing robotic journalism they are thus legitimizing robotic journalism. As big publishers employ the tactic, Google ranks it.

Checking some Heliograf articles (AI-written) reveals once again they do rank well. Google is in a tough position here. It’s inevitable… pic.twitter.com/g0Etcx3rFj— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 16, 2017

It is almost impossible to compete economically with an entity that rewrites your work & has zero marginal cost of production.

YouTube has perhaps the worst comments on the web. Some mainstream news sites got rid of comments because they couldn’t justify the cost of policing them. That in turn shifts the audience & attention stream to sites like Facebook & Twitter. Some news sites which are still leaving comments enabled rely on a Google filter, a technology Google can use on YouTube as they see fit.

Any plugins publishers use to lower their costs can later disappear. It looked like FindTheBest was doing well financially, but when it was acquired many news sites quickly found out the cost of free as they now have thousands of broken articles in their archives: “Last month, Graphiq announced that features for news publishers would no longer be available after Friday.”

Driving costs toward zero by piling on external dependencies is no way to build a sustainable business. Especially when the central network operators are eating the playing field:

“Between fast-loading AMP articles from major news brands hosted in its domain, full pages of information scraped from outside sites that don’t require you to visit them, basic shopping functions built into ads, YouTube, and a host of other features, the Google-verse is more of a digital walled garden than ever. … If Google continues to choke these sites out, what incentive will there be for new ones to come along?”

Unprofitable partners which were buying growth with artificially cheap pricing eventually find out investors want profits more than growth & either reprice or go away. The longer you use something & the more locked in you are to it the more aggressively it can afford to reprice. Symbiotic relationships devolve into abusive ones:

“for every pound an advertiser spends programmatically on the Guardian only 30 pence actually goes to the publisher.” – Mediatel

“Google wants to cut out the middlemen, which it turns out, are URLs.” – MobileMoxie

“[AMP is] a way for Google to obfuscate your website, usurp your content & remove any personal credibility from the web” – TheRegister

“Though the stated initiative of ads.txt is to stop inventory resale, it achieves this by establishing ‘preferred’ channels, which naturally favors the industry’s most influential companies” – Ad Exchanger

That Apple does extra work to undo AMP says a lot.

Those who think the central network operators are naive to the power structure being promoted by the faux solutions are either chasing short-term goals or are incredibly masochistic.

Arbitraging brand is the core business model of the attention merchant monopoly.

we’ve found out that 98% of our business was coming from 22 words. So, wait, we’re buying 3,200 words and 98% of the business is coming from 22 words. What are the 22 words? And they said, well, it’s the word Restoration Hardware and the 21 ways to spell it wrong, okay?

Publishers buying the “speed” narrative are failing themselves. The Guardian has 11 people working on AMP integration. And what is Google doing about speed? Google shut down Google Instant search results, often displays a screen or two full of ads which mobile users have to scroll past to find the organic search results AND is testing auto-playing videos in the search results.

Facebook is also promoting fast loading & mobile-friendly pages.

To keep bleeding clicks out of the “organic” ecosystem they don’t even need to have explicit malicious intent. They can run a thousand different tests every month (new vertical sitelink formats, swipable sitelinks, showing 8 sitelinks on tiny mobile devices, MOAR sitelinks, message extensions, extensions on call-only ads, price discount labels, frame 3rd party content inline, dramatically ramp up featured snippets +QnA listings, more related searches, more features in ad units, larger ad units, ad units that replace websites & charge advertisers for sending clicks from Google to Google, launch a meta-search service where they over-promote select listings, test dropping URLs from listings, put ads in the local pack, change color of source links or other elements, pop ups of search results inside search results, etc.) & keep moving toward whatever layout drives more ad clicks, keeps users on Google longer & forces businesses to buy ads for exposure, claiming they are optimizing the user experience the whole time.

They can hard-code any data type or feature, price it at free to de-fund adjacent businesses, consolidate market power, then increase rents after they have a monopoly position in the adjacent market.

And they can fund research on how to remove watermarks from images.

Why not make hosting free, get people to publish into a proprietary format & try to shift news reading onto the Google app. With enough attention & market coverage they can further extort publishers into accepting perpetually worse deals. And free analytics & business plugins which are widely adopted can have key features get pushed into the paid version. Just look at Google Analytics – its free or $150,000+/yr.

The above sorts of moves can be done in isolation, or in a combinatorial approach. Publishers aloof of the ecosystem shifts may use microformats to structure their content. They’ll then find it is integrated in Google’s new image search layout, where Google copies the content wholesale & shows it near other third party images framed by Google.

How about some visually striking, yet irrelevant listings for competing brands on branded searches to force the brand ad buy. And, of course rounded card corners to eat a few more pixels, along with faint ad labeling on ads coupled with vibrant colored dots on the organic results to confuse end users into thinking the organic results are the ads.

While Google turns their search results into an adspam farm, they invite you to test showing fewer ads on your site to improve user experience. Google knows best – let them automate your ad load & ad placement.

What is the real risk of AI? Bias.

“It’s important that we be transparent about the training data that we are using, and are looking for hidden biases in it, otherwise we are building biased systems,” Giannandrea added. “If someone is trying to sell you a black box system for medical decision support, and you don’t know how it works or what data was used to train it, then I wouldn’t trust it.”

And how does Google justify their AI investments? Through driving incremental ad clicks: “The DeepMind founders understand that their power within [Alphabet], and their ability to get their way with [Alphabet CEO] Larry Page, depends on how many eyeballs and clicks and ad dollars they can claim to be driving”

No bias at all there!

Truth: Google killed publishing in 2015. What you’re reading now is detritus + new junk posted by crazies walking around empty offices— 11 (@searchsleuth998) August 1, 2017

And if publishing was killed in 2015, things have only got worse since then:

Looking at 2015 vs 2017 data for all keywords ranking organically on the first page, we’ve seen a dramatic change in CTR. Below we’ve normalized our actual CTR on a 1–10 scale, representing a total drop of 25% of click share on desktop and 55% on mobile.

SEOs who were overly reliant on the search channel were the first to notice all the above sorts of change, as it is their job to be hyper-aware of ecosystem shifts. But publishers far removed from SEO who never focused on SEO are now writing about the trends SEOs were writing about nearly a decade ago. Josh Marshall recently covered Google’s awesome monopoly powers.

few publishers really want to talk about the depths or mechanics of Google’s role in news publishing. Some of this is secrecy about proprietary information; most of it is that Google could destroy or profoundly damage most publications if it wanted to. So why rock the boat? … Google’s monopoly control is almost comically great. It’s a monopoly at every conceivable turn and consistently uses that market power to deepen its hold and increase its profits. Just the interplay between DoubleClick and Adexchange is textbook anti-competitive practices. … Is your favorite website laying off staff or ‘pivoting to video’. In most cases, the root cause is not entirely but to a significant degree driven by the platform monopolies

His article details how Google owns many points of the supply chain

So let’s go down the list: 1) The system for running ads, 2) the top purchaser of ads, 3) the most pervasive audience data service, 4) all search, 5) our email. … But wait, there’s more! Google also owns Chrome, the most used browser for visiting TPM.

He also covers the price dumping technique that is used to maintain control

In many cases, alternatives don’t exist because no business can get a footing with a product Google lets people use for free.

And he shared an example of Google algorithms gone astray crippling his business, even though it was not related to search & unintentional:

Because we were forwarding to ourselves spam that other people sent to us, Google decided that the owner of the TPM url was a major spammer and blocked emails from TPM from being sent to anyone.

If the above comes across as depressing, don’t worry. The search results now contain a depression diagnostic testing tool.

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[legit-scam-review]

Cornered by Bear Market, Bitmain Is Facing an Unclear Future

On Jan. 10, news emerged that Chinese Bitcoin mining giant Bitmain’s co-founders, Jihan Wu and Micree Zhan Ketuan, will step down as co-CEOs of the company. The move follows a streak of reports suggesting that Bitmain has been facing mass layoffs, class action lawsuits and difficulties related to its initial public offering (IPO) during the last quarter of 2018. So what exactly is happening with one of the world’s most influential crypto outfits?

Brief introduction to Bitmain, the world’s most powerful crypto mining giant

Bitmain was founded in 2013 by Jihan Wu and Micree Zhan Ketuan. Prior to that, Wu was a private equity fund manager who studied economics and psychology at Peking University, while Zhan, a graduate of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was trying to raise funds for a startup that allowed users to stream television shows to a computer screen via a set-top box.

After discovering Bitcoin (BTC) in early 2011, Wu allegedly spent all his life savings to buy the cryptocurrency. When the Bitcoin’s price soared in 2013, he decided not only to trade the digital asset, but to create it as well. Wu asked Zhan to join him, and together they began developing an ASIC chip that would mine BTC at maximum efficiency. In November 2013, Zhan, the duo’s technical mastermind, presented their first mining rig, the Antminer S1, and Bitmain’s sales took off.

According to Wu, the company experienced a difficult period close to the end of 2014, when the infamous Mt.Gox crash happened and the whole crypto market collapsed. The situation eventually stabilized when BTC’s price began climbing up again the next year. Consequently, when the 2017 crypto boom kicked in, the business became extremely lucrative.

Thus, Bitmain booked $2.5 billion of revenue in 2017 alone, as Wu told Bloomberg, while this year turned out to be even more profitable: According to the company’s prospectus, its revenue was set at $2.8 billion by the end of June 2018. According to a different report issued by investment research company Bernstein, Bitmain made between $3 billion and $4 billion in operating profit in 2017 and allegedly outraced Nvidia, which made about $3 billion during the same period.

In May 2018, Bitmain announced its expansion to the area of artificial intelligence (AI), where it planned to compete against Nvidia, Intel and AMD using its existing chip designs to power AI systems and software. The plan was disclosed against the backdrop of increasing scrutiny regarding crypto mining operations in China. “As a China company,” said Wu, “we have to be prepared.” He added that Bitmain plans to start earning as much as 40 percent of its revenue from AI chips within five years.

Sales of Bitmain’s mining chips and circuits reportedly account for around 70 to 80 percent of the whole market. As per the company’s LinkedIn page, Bitmain is currently headquartered in Beijing and employs around 2,500 people across the world. However, it is unclear whether this information is up to date, considering the recent reports regarding job cuts.

Current state of affairs: Bear market-induced losses

As of January 2019, the two mining pools operated by Bitmain, AntPool and BTC.com, contribute to almost 23 percent of the total hashing power of the entire Bitcoin mining pool. However, just six months ago, the company’s mining pools represented 41 percent of the market share, meaning that its share has been steadily declining. Indeed, the bear market has been taking its toll, and 2018 turned out to be a problematic year for the mining giant.

According to a BitMEX Research report released on Aug. 30, Bitmain sold a lot of its mining units at a loss throughout 2018. The paper suggested that it was a deliberate strategy “to squeeze out [Bitmain’s] competition by causing them to experience lower sales and therefore financial difficulties”:

“This analysis implies Bitmain are currently loss-making, with a negative profit margin of 11.6% for the main S9 product and a margin of over negative 100% on the L3 product. In reality costs are likely to have declined so the situation may not be as bad, however we think it is likely Bitmain are currently making significant losses.”

As previously noted by Cointelegraph, at the time the BitMEX research was published, the price of Bitcoin was hovering around $7,000, which was still above the breakeven cost of mining. Therefore, the demand was likely to be there, which would make the Bitmain’s price war justified. However, when the full-blown bear market hit in November, and the price of Bitcoin fell below the breakeven cost of mining of $6,900, Bitmain should have started to experience harsher financial difficulties due to lesser demand for mining devices.

Bitmain staff cuts: From Israel division to CEO position

One of the most evident signs that Bitmain’s business has taken a hit are the reported layoffs. On Dec. 26, Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post (SCMP) quoted Bitmain’s alleged statement regarding internal job cuts. The announcement reportedly read:

“A part of [building a sustainable business] is having to really focus on things that are core to that mission and not things that are auxiliary. As we move into the new year we will continue to double down on hiring the best talent from a diverse range of backgrounds.”

As SCMP noted, the exact number of layoffs had not been disclosed, but a spokesperson for the firm reportedly denied that Bitmain would lay off over half of its employees, a suggestion first circulated in Chinese social media.

Previously, on Dec. 23, Blockstream’s chief security officer, Samson Mow, stated that Bitmain fired its entire staff of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) developers, citing Chinese social media. The developers had formed Bitmain’s Copernicus team and were working on the company’s Bitcoin Cash GO client. “Only 1 week notice. Some had just joined the company,” Mow specified.

On Dec. 10, Israeli business news outlet Globes reported that Bitmain was closing its local development center and firing its employees. Dubbed Bitmaintech Israel, it was founded in 2016 to explore the use of blockchain, work on the Connect BTC mining pool, and develop the infrastructure behind Bitmain’s AI project titled “Sophon.” All 23 employees were fired, along with Gadi Glikberg, head of the Israeli branch as well as Bitmain’s vice president of international sales and marketing. Glikberg linked the layoffs to the crypto market collapse:

“The crypto market has undergone a shake-up in the past few months, which has forced Bitmain to examine its various activities around the globe and to refocus its business in accordance with the current situation.”

Finally, according to a series of yet-to-be-finally-confirmed reports, changes occurred even at the senior level of the mining giant. Thus, on Jan. 10, SCMP wrote that both Bitmain’s co-founders, Jihan Wu and Micree Zhan Ketuan, will quit their posts as co-CEOs, but still steer the company’s important decisions. Citing “people familiar with the matter,” the media outlet said Bitmain’s director of product engineering, Wang Haichao, would likely take over as CEO at an unspecified future date, while he has allegedly already taken over some of the duo’s former duties. According to the September IPO filing, Wu and Zhan control 21 and 37 percent of the business respectively.

Bitmain IPO plans become doubtful as well

In June 2018, media started to report that Jihan Wu was planning to conduct an overseas IPO  in a market with United States dollar denominated shares — like Hong Kong — as it would allow early backers to cash in funds. An IPO is a more traditional and regulatory-friendly way for a company to seek investments from a broader audience in the public market, which Cointelegraph has covered in depth before.

Later in July, a research unit for crypto exchange BitMEX analyzed alleged leaked data on Bitmain’s potential IPO and stated that the mining giant had conducted a pre-IPO round that reportedly raised around $14 billion, leading them to believe that it could raise no less than $20 billion at the IPO stage.

Nevertheless, as Cointelegraph reported earlier, there had been a lot of rumors and uncertainty around Bitmain’s upcoming IPO. In December, they were reignited by Hong Kong-based newspaper SCMP, which reported that the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX) is reluctant to allow Bitmain to conduct an offering in the city.

According to the publication’s anonymous sources, the regulator thinks it is “premature for any cryptocurrency trading platform – or business associated with the industry – to raise funds through an IPO in Hong Kong before the proper regulatory framework is in place.” As a result, SCMP suggests current conditions “could be an insurmountable hurdle” for Bitmain and other cryptocurrency companies planning to launch an IPO. Similarly, in November, HKEX lapsed the IPO application of Canaan, Bitmain’s competition on the mining market, which also was going to hold an offering there. Now, the company is looking to move its IPO plans to New York.

Interestingly, just a day prior to the SCMP article, the HKEX told Cointelegraph that any reports regarding hesitation on the part of Bitmain were “rumors,” suggesting that negotiations between the regulator and the mining giant were in progress.

The mining giant is facing two class action lawsuits on top of other problems

In addition to staff cuts and other problems, Bitmain seems to be facing at least two class action lawsuits. The first one was filed by Los Angeles County resident Gor Gevorkyan, who allegedly purchased their devices, including its S9 Antminer machine, in January 2018. According to the filing submitted to the North District Court of California in November, the product was “difficult to configure” and lapsed during a “substantial amount of time.” Gevorkyan claims that before he could fully initialize the devices, they operated at cost-intensive “full power mode” at his expense. The plaintiff is seeking damages in excess of $5 million on behalf of all miners “similarly situated” as Bitmain clients.

The more recent lawsuit was initiated by UnitedCorp, a development and management firm with a focus on telecommunications and information technologies. On Dec. 6, it reported suing Bitmain along with Bitcoin.com, Roger Ver and the Kraken exchange, which reportedly planned a scheme to take control of the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network during the November hard fork.

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Wrastlin With The News The current presidential cabinet includes a WWE co-founder & this passes for modern political discourse: #FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017 CNN promised vengeance. Something To Believe In The pretense of objectivity has been dropped: These reporters aren’t ideologues. They’re just right-thinking people who lean left. Somewhere along the line, they stopped pretending to be objective about Trump. … People don’t just disagree with each other. They can’t imagine how a decent caring human being could disagree with their own view of race or the minimum wage or immigration or Trump. Being a member of the virtuous tribe means not only carrying the correct card in your wallet to reassure yourself. You have to also believe that the people carrying any other card are irrational, or worse, evil. They’re not people to engage in conversation with. They are barriers to be ignored or pushed aside on the virtuous path to paradise. This intolerance and inability to imagine the virtue of the other side is the road to tyranny and chaos. It dehumanizes a good chunk of humanity and that in turn justifies the worst atrocities human beings are capable of. The WSJ, typically a right-leaning publication, is differentiating their coverage of the president from most other outlets by attempting to be somewhat neutral. The news is fake. Even historically left-leaning people are disgusted with outlets like CNN. “I think the president is probably right to say, like, look you are witch-hunting me. You have no smoking gun, you have no real proof.” – CNN supervising producer John Bonifield “When you do shitty reporting like CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times & Rachel Maddow especially. When you do that & it is revealed to be bullshit, what you’re doing is building up Trump. There’s no greater way to build up Trump than to falsely report on him. There’s no better way to build up Trump than to make him the victim.” – Jimmy Dore “Rachel Maddow was given the facts, she ignored them, & she kept right on going. That’s MSNBC, that’s CNN, that’s the New York Times, the Washington Post – they’re all horrible. That’s why we had the Iraq war. That’s why we have the Syria war. That’s why we are still in Afghanistan. That’s why we had Libya. That’s why we have the biggest income disparity since the gilded age. Meanwhile we are spending more on the military than the rest of the world.” – Jimmy Dore And, since people need something to believe in, there are new American Gods: “A half hour of cable news delivers enough psychic trauma for a whole year. The newspapers are talking of nothing but treason, espionage, investigations, protests.” … “Stocks are rallying because of how little faith we have in the government. The Mega Blue Chip Corporation is the new Sovereign.” Current Headwinds for Online Publishing I struggle to keep up with the accelerating rate of change. A number of common themes in the current ecosystem are: We are moving toward a world where more things are becoming fake (only accelerated by the demonetization of neutrality & the algorithmic boost associated with reliably delivering confirmation bias in an algorithmic or manual fashion) risk keeps being radiated outward to the individual while monopoly platforms capture the spoils (forced-place health insurance purchases where the insurance company arbitrarily drops the sick member on the policy even though that is supposed to be illegal, more temp jobs where people don’t get enough hours to get health insurance through their employer, under-funded pensions, outsourcing of core business functions to sweatshops where part-time workers don’t get paid for dozens to hundreds of hours of required training & get to watch beheading videos all day) the barrier to entry keeps increasing (increased marketing cost due to brand bias, heavy ad loads on dominant platforms, & central platforms making partners do “bet the farm” moves in how they adjust distribution to drive adoption of proprietary formats & temporarily over-promote select content formats) the increasing chunk size of competition is making it much harder for individuals to build sustainable businesses. (Yes the tools of the trade are improving quickly, BUT the central platforms are demonetizing the adjacent fields faster than publishing tools & business options improve.) In Europe publishers are aggressively leaning on regulators to try to rebalance power. Some of this stuff is cyclical. About a decade ago the European Commission went after Microsoft for bundling Internet Explorer. Google complained about the monopolistic practices to ensure Microsoft was fined. And we’ve went from that to a web where Google syndicates native ads that blend into page content while directly funding robot journalism. And then Google is ranking the robot-generated crap too. Speaking of robot journalists, check out the top 3 results for this query. All 3 are auto-written by automated insights (AI software). Yikes pic.twitter.com/ltFGFXHNiF— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 8, 2017 But to keep the ecosystem clean & spam free, Google is also planning to leverage their web browser to further dictate the terms of online publishing. Chrome will block autoplay audio & will automatically reroute .dev domains to https. Cutting edge developers suggest using a web browser other than Google Chrome to prevent proprietary lock in across the web. Is this a test, @Google? pic.twitter.com/V9FZ2hL2cA— TNW (@TheNextWeb) September 5, 2017 While Google distributes their Chrome browser as unwanted bundleware, other web browsers must display uninstall links front & center when trying to gain awareness of their product using Google AdWords. Microsoft Edge is coming to Android, but without a BrowserChoice.eu screen it is unlikely most users will change their web browser as most are unaware of what a web browser even is, let alone the limitations of any of them or the tracking embedded in them. If you go back several years, there was celebration of the fact that the cost of doing a startup was so low. You didn’t have to pay Oracle a million dollars for a server license any more. You didn’t even have to rack your own hardware. Now you can just dial it up on Amazon. But there are now these gatekeepers and toll-takers. Back in 2004, you had the wide-open internet. – Jeremy Stoppelman The Mobile Revolution If you are an anti-social work at home webmaster who has dual monitors it is easy to dismiss cell phones as inefficient and chalk most mobile usage up to the following. Russian man visited Chinese click farm.They make fake ratings for mobile apps and things like this.He said they have 10,000 more phones pic.twitter.com/qE96vgCCsi— English Russia (@EnglishRussia1) May 11, 2017 The reality is cell phones are more powerful than they seem if you are strictly consuming rather than working. Deflationary impact of technology: everything in this Radio Shack flyer from 1991 adds up to $3,285.12 and can be done today on a smartphone pic.twitter.com/ONh3waWVgq— Jeffrey Kleintop (@JeffreyKleintop) June 23, 2017 And that is how the unstoppable quickly becomes the extinct! 10 years ago. pic.twitter.com/ZCWfHfpedi— Harry Tucker (@harrytuckerr) September 11, 2017 Many people the world over are addicted to their cell phones to where viral game makers are self-regulating before regulators step in: “From Tuesday, users below 12 years of age will be limited to one hour of play time each day, while those aged between 12 years and 18 years will be limited to two hours a day, Tencent said.” While China is using their various tools to clamp down on Honour of Kings, Tencent is bringing the game to the west, which makes blocking VPN services (with Apple’s help – they must play along or have the phones reduced to bricks) & requiring local data storage & technology transfer more important. Anything stored locally can be easily disappeared: “China’s already formidable internet censors have demonstrated a new strength-the ability to delete images in one-on-one chats as they are being transmitted, making them disappear before receivers see them.” China has banned live streaming, threatened their largest domestic social networks, shut down chat bots, require extensive multimedia review: “an industry association circulated new regulations that at least two “auditors” will, with immediate effect, be required to check all audiovisual content posted online” AND they force users to install spyware on their devices. In spite of all those restrictions, last year “Chinese consumers spent $5.5 trillion through mobile payment platforms, about 50 times more than their American counterparts.” In the last quarter Baidu had Â¥20.87 billion in revenues, with 72% of their revenues driven by mobile. People can not miss that which they’ve never seen, thus platform socialism works. Those who doubt it will be tracked & scored accordingly. History, as well, can be scrubbed. And insurance companies watch everything in real-time – careful what you post. The watchful eye of the Chinese pre-crime team is also looking over every move. Last quarter Facebook had revenues of $9.164 billion, with 87% coming from mobile devices. pic.twitter.com/JlPBSlmKlw— banksy (@thereaIbanksy) September 16, 2017 Simulacrum has ALMOST been perfected: “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.” … “Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.” … “Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.” pic.twitter.com/QBLBXIDDLK— banksy (@thereaIbanksy) August 24, 2017 The web is becoming easier to get addicted to due to personalization algorithms that reinforce our worldviews even as they make us feel more isolated and left out. And the barrier to entry for consumers into one of the few central gatekeeper ecosystems is dropping like a rock due to the falling cost of mobile devices, coupled with with images & video displacing text making literacy optional. As we become more “connected” we feel more isolated: “Social isolation, loneliness or living alone was each a significant factor contributing to premature death. And each one of these factors was a more significant risk factor for dying than obesity. … No one knows precisely why loneliness is surging, threatening the lives of many millions of people, but it does seem that the burgeoning use of technology may have something to do with it. Personally, I would contend that technology may be the chief factor fueling it.” The primary role of the big data mining companies is leveraging surveillance for social engineering Unsettling that according to Mark Zuckerberg purpose of Facebook is forced social engineering. From “World Without Mind” by Franklin Foer: pic.twitter.com/CHRnefg9m2— Murtaza Hussain (@MazMHussain) October 8, 2017 App Annie expects the global app economy to be worth $6.3 trillion by 2021. The reason those numbers can easily sound fake & mobile can seem overblown is how highly concentrated usage has become: “over 80 percent of consumer time on mobile devices is now spent on the apps, websites and properties” of just five companies: Facebook, Google, Apple, Yelp and Bing. Maslow 2.0 pic.twitter.com/X1OguQG8Gq— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) October 7, 2017 eMarketer stated Google will have more mobile ad revenue than desktop ad revenue in the US this year. They also predicted Google & Facebook will consume over 2/3 of US online ad spend within 2 years. The central network operators not only maintain an outsized share of revenues, but also maintain an outsized share of profits. When the home team gets a 30% rake of any sale it is hard for anyone else to compete. Even after buying and gutting Motorola Google bought part of HTC for $1.1 billion. The game plan has never changed: commoditize the compliment to ensure user data & most of the profits flow to Google. Put up arbitrary roadblocks for competing services while launching free parallel offerings to drive lock-in. For the last YEAR I’ve been battling App Store rejections – we made an app called Animoji with animated emojis…now I know why. https://t.co/jKJXfLMGj2— Ryan Jones (@rjonesy) September 9, 2017 Central data aggregators can keep collecting more user data & offer more granular ad distribution features. They can tell you that this micro moment RIGHT NOW is make or break: it’s intended to create a bizarre sense of panic among marketers – “OMG, we have to be present at every possible instant someone might be looking at their phone!” – which doesn’t help them think strategically or make the best use of their marketing or ad spend. The reality is that if you don’t have a relationship with a person on their desktop computer they probably don’t want your mobile app either. If you have the relationship then mobile only increases profits. Is iOS 11 specifically designed to make your older iPhones unusable and drain your battery so you have to upgrade to the newest phones?— Eric Jackson (@ericjackson) October 7, 2017 Many people attempting to build “the next mobile” will go bust, but wherever the attention flows the ads will follow. Those with a broad & dominant tech platform can copy features from single-category devices and keep integrating them into their core products to increase user lock-in. And they can build accessories for those core devices while prohibiting the flow of data to third party devices to keep users locked into their ecosystem. Smaller Screens, Shallower Attention People often multi-task while using mobile devices. Powerful stuff …An very fucking true pic.twitter.com/enP98Z6B7r— Nev (@LFCNev) July 13, 2017 When multi-tasking it is easier to accidentally click an ad. This happens 10s of billions of times a year: This year, in-app mobile ad spend will reach $45.3 billion, up $11 billion from last year, according to eMarketer. And apps are where the money is at for mobile advertising, comprising 80 percent of all U.S. media dollars spent on mobile. But multi-tasking means doing almost everything else worse. The “always on” mode not only increases isolation, but also lowers our ability to focus: “while our phones offer convenience and diversion, they also breed anxiety. Their extraordinary usefulness gives them an unprecedented hold on our attention and vast influence over our thinking and behavior. … Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren’t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens. … when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline. … As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased. … Anticipating that information would be readily available in digital form seemed to reduce the mental effort that people made to remember it. … people are all too quick to credit lies and half-truths spread through social media by Russian agents and other bad actors. If your phone has sapped your powers of discernment, you’ll believe anything it tells you.” Further, the shallow attention stream makes it easy to displace content with ads: 4 Ads 3 map carrousel results 5 organic results 4 Ads Then “see more results” 4 more Ads 5 organic results 4 more Ads On desktop devices people don’t accidentally misclick on ads at anywhere near the rate they fat thumb ads on mobile devices. Desktop ad clicks convert to purchases. Mobile ad clicks convert to ad budget burned: “marketers are still seeing few shoppers purchasing on mobile. The 52% of share in traffic only has 26% share of revenue.” For traditional publishers mobile users drastically under-monetize desktop users due to drastically lower conversion rates (true for almost everyone in ecommerce outside of Amazon perhaps) limited cross-device tracking (how do you track people who don’t even hit your site but hit a cached page hosted via Google AMP or Facebook Instant Articles?) lower ad load allowed on publisher sites due to limited screen size aggressive filtering of fat thumb ad clicks on partner sites from central ad networks For the central network operators almost all the above are precisely the exact opposite. higher ad CTR by making entire interface ads (& perhaps even disappearing the concept of non-ads in the result set) great cross-device user tracking higher ad load allowed by the small screen size pushing content below the fold more lenient filtering of fat thumb accidental ad clicks If you look at raw stats without understanding the underlying impact, it is easy to believe the ecosystem is healthy. Assumption: Google’s ads are more prominent, so organic must be dying.Reality: As of Oct. 2016, 20X more organic clicks than paid ones. pic.twitter.com/FaEBpBZWSw— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) July 1, 2017 However the huge number of “no click” results are demonetizing easy publisher revenues, which have traditionally helped to fund more in-depth investigative reporting. Further, much of the direct navigation which happened in the past is now being passed through brand-related search result pages. You can argue that is an increase in search traffic, or you can argue it is shifting the roll of the address bar from navigation to search. The first page is nothing but ads Yep, and here they are in Philly. Home service ads, then AdWords traditional ads, then the local pack (way down below). pic.twitter.com/VOVZPWWHsg— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 17, 2017 On mobile so is the second, and most of the third Hey, only 2.5 screens before you get to the 10 blue links. A full 4 screens if you cannot crack the top 2 organics. pic.twitter.com/bbm1pz8hyF— Jeremy Bochenek (@J_Bochenek) July 17, 2017 If a search query has lots of easy to structure crap around it, a user might need 6 or 7 scrolls to get to an organic result Very interesting Google SERP for GoT. One barely visible organic result after >70% scroll depth. Oh my… #seo #GameOfThones pic.twitter.com/Z6j7VvJMI4— Bastian Grimm (@basgr) August 24, 2017 Then if third parties go “well Google does this, so I should too” they are considered a low quality user experience and get a penalty. Emailed a client one month ago when I picked up ultra-aggressive ads (especially on mobile). They just received an ad experiences warning. pic.twitter.com/QLLZci1xKW— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 25, 2017 31% ad coverage on mobile website is excessive / spam / low quality user experience for a publisher, while 301% coverage is reasonable for the central network operators. Google not only displaces the result set, but also leverages their search suggestion features & algorithmic influence to alter how people search & what they search for. Ads are getting integrated into mobile keyboards. The standard keyboard on the HTC 10 has begun showing ads [X-Post from r/mildlyinfuriating] https://t.co/FuXDJzilZ6 #blog pic.twitter.com/VriK54dBHb— Android Facts (@manatweets) July 16, 2017 And when a user finally reaches the publisher’s website (provided they scroll past the ads, the AMP listings, and all the other scrape-n-displace trash) then when they finally land on a publication Google will overlay other recommended articles from other sites. Whoa -> While you’re reading a page on the Google app for iOS, you’ll now see suggestions for related content https://t.co/n6FjkNqx82 pic.twitter.com/DZYTt8T7fI— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 19, 2017 That feature will eventually end up including ads in it, where publishers will get 0.00% of the revenue generated. Remember how Google suggested publishers should make their websites faster, remove ads, remove clutter, etc. What was the point of all that? To create free real estate for Google to insert a spam unit into your website? Continuing coverage of Google’s new content recos. I’m sure Best Buy is thrilled to see Amazon show up while someone is on their page. Ouch. pic.twitter.com/qpDyGKPyYh— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 24, 2017 This wouldn’t be bad if mobile were a small, fringe slice of traffic, but it is becoming the majority of traffic. And as mobile increases desktop traffic is shrinking. Even politically biased outlets that appear to be nearly perfectly optimized for a filter bubble that promotes identity politics struggle to make the numbers work: “As a result of continued decline in direct advertising, [Salon’s] total revenue in the fiscal year 2017 decreased by 34% to $4.6 million. Following the market trend, 84% of our advertising revenue in fiscal year 2017 was generated by programmatic selling. … [Monthly unique visitors to our website saw] a decrease of 23%. We attribute the decline primarily to the changes in the algorithms used by Facebook.” I knew the last year was bad for online publishing, but the Salon 10K shows *just how bad* pic.twitter.com/oyH7pdCDNI— josh laurito (@joshlaurito) June 26, 2017 The above sorts of numbers are the logical outcome to this: we’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content”above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward. Especially when combined with this: As you scroll through it, you are then given travel ads for flight options through Google Flight search, hotels through Google Hotel search and restaurants through Google Local results. Then towards the bottom of the knowledge graph card, all the way at the end in a small grayish font, you have a link to “see web results.” Bad news for TripAdvisor. Google has squeezed out SEO for travel. PCLN/EXPE SEM $ spend and higher conversion is a massive competitive advantage. Bad news for TRIP. pic.twitter.com/39QkxuN780— modest proposal (@modestproposal1) April 17, 2017 And amongst the good news for Expedia, there’s also a bit of bad news for Expedia. The hotels are fighting Airbnb & OTAs. In travel Google is twice as big as the biggest OTA players. They keep eating more SERP real estate and adding more content behind tabs. On mobile they’ll even disappear the concept of organic results. Room previews in the search results not only means that second tier players are worth a song, but even the new growth players propped up by aggressive ad buying eventually hit a wall and see their stock crash. As the entire ecosystem gets squeezed by middlemen and the market gets obfuscated with an incomplete selection it is ultimately consumers who lose: “Reservations made through Internet discount sites are almost always slated for our worst rooms.” The New York Times pitched Yelp as a pesky player holding a grudge: “For six years, his company has been locked in a campaign on three continents to get antitrust regulators to punish Google, Yelp’s larger, richer and more politically connected competitor. … Yelp concluded that there was no better way to get Google’s attention than to raise the specter of regulation. … something [Mark Mahaney] calls the Death of Free Google. As the internet has migrated to mobile phones, Google has compensated for the smaller screen space by filling it with so many ads that users can have a hard time finding a result that hasn’t been paid for.” In spite of how quick The New York Times was to dismiss Yelp, the monopoly platforms are stiffing competition & creativity while bundling fake reviews & junk features into their core platforms. People can literally switch their name to “Loop dee Loop” and leave you terrible, fake reviews. Google’s lack of effort & investment to clean up trash in their local services department highlights that they don’t feel they need to compete on quality. Pay for core search distribution, throw an inferior service front & center, and win by default placement. As AI advancements make fake reviews look more legit Google’s lack of investment in creating a quality ecosystem will increasingly harm both consumers and businesses. Many low margin businesses will go under simply because their Google reviews are full of inaccurate trash or a competitor decided to hijack their business listing or list their business as closed. To this day Google is still egregiously stealing content from Yelp: Yelp said it investigated and found that over one hour, Google pulled images from Yelp’s servers nearly 386,000 times for business listings in Google Maps, which Google exempted from its promise to not scrape content. Yelp then searched Google for 150 of the businesses from those map listings and found that for 110 of them, Google used a Yelp photo as the lead image in the businesses’ listings in search results. Stealing content & wrapping it in fake reviews is NOT putting the user first. Facebook has their own matching parallel shifts. The aggregate quality of mobile ad clicks is quite low. So as mobile becomes a much higher percent of total ad clicks, those who don’t have scale and narrative control are reduced to taking whatever they can get. And mainstream media outlets are reduced to writing puff pieces so the brands they cover will pay to promote the stories on the main channels. As programmatic advertising, ad blockers, unpatched Android-powered botnets & malware spread each day gets a little uglier for everyone but the central market operators. It is so bad that some of the central market operators offer surveillance apps which claim to protect user privacy! Other app makers not connected to monopoly profit streams monetize any way they can. The narrative of growth can be sold (we are launching a new food channel, we are investing in our internal video team, we have exclusive real estate listings, and, um, we acquired a food channel) but the competition is a zero sum game with Google & Facebook eating off the publisher’s plates. That’s why Time is trying to shave $400 million off their expenses & wants to sell their magazine division. Newspaper companies are selling for $1. It is also why Business Insider is no longer chasing growth & the New York Times is setting up a charitable trust. The rise of ad blocking only accelerates the underlying desperation. I have some thoughts about why news orgs are finding that people won’t read long articles: pic.twitter.com/G8Zh6GTA6w— Ben Chase (@bbchase) July 4, 2017 I feel terrible for journalists who invest time and effort into doing a hard job well only to have it presented like this. pic.twitter.com/jIZxuJqVAq— Jeff Long (@banterability) October 5, 2017 As long as news websites make their own customer experience worse than what can be found as a cached copy on the monopoly platforms there is no reason to visit the end publisher website. That is why the proprietary formats promoted by the monopoly platforms are so dangerous. They force lighter monetization & offset the lack of revenue by given preferential placement: click through rate from Google search went from 5.9% (Regular) to 10.3% (AMP), and average search position went from 5.9 (Regular) to 1.7 (AMP). Since then, we have deployed AMP across fifteen of our brands and we have been very pleased with the results. Today, AMP accounts for 79% of our mobile search traffic and 36% of our total mobile visits. As long as almost nobody is using the new proprietary, ghetto lock-in format the math may work out there, but once many people adopt it then it becomes another recurring sunk cost with no actual benefit: the only voices promoting AMP’s performance benefits are coming from inside Google. … given how AMP pages are privileged in Google’s search results, the net effect of the team’s hard, earnest work comes across as a corporate-backed attempt to rewrite HTML in Google’s image. Even if you get a slight uptick in traffic from AMP, it will lead to lower quality user engagement as users are browsing across websites rather than within websites. Getting a bit more traffic but 59% fewer leads is a fail. No amount of collaborative publisher partnerships, begging for anti-trust exemptions, or whining about Google is going to fix the problem. “The only way publishers can address this inexorable threat is by banding together. If they open a unified front to negotiate with Google and Facebook-pushing for stronger intellectual-property protections, better support for subscription models and a fair share of revenue and data-they could build a more sustainable future for the news business. But antitrust laws make such coordination perilous. These laws, intended to prevent monopolies, are having the unintended effect of preserving and protecting Google and Facebook’s dominant position.” Wait a minute. Wasn’t it the New York Times which claimed Yelp was holding an arbitrary grudge against Google? The following sounds a lot more desperate: newspapers that once delivered their journalism with their own trucks increasingly have to rely on these big online platforms to get their articles in front of people, fighting for attention alongside fake news, websites that lift their content, and cat videos. Well maybe that is just smaller publications & not the gray lady herself “the temperature is rising in terms of concern, and in some cases anger, about what seems like a very asymmetric, disadvantageous relationship between the publishers and the very big digital platforms.” – NYT CEO Mark Thompson In unrelated news, there’s another round of layoffs coming at the New York Times. And the New York Times is also setting up a nonprofit division to expand journalism while their core company focuses on something else. Apparently Yelp does not qualify as a publisher in this instance. Or does it? The Times is backing the move for what is called an anticompetitive safe haven, in part, Mr. Thompson said, “because we care about the whole of journalism as well as about The New York Times.” Ah, whole of journalism, which, apparently, no longer includes local business coverage. You know the slogan: “news isn’t news, unless it isn’t local.” The struggles are all across the media landscape. The new Boston Globe CEO lasted a half-year. The San Diego Union-Tribune resorted to using GoFundMe. The Chicago Sun-Times sold for $1. Moody’s issued a negative outlook for the US newspaper sector. As the industry declines the biggest players view consolidation as the only solution. These struggles existed even before the largest brand advertisers like P&G cut back on low & no value ad venues like YouTube: In the fourth quarter, the reduction in marketing that occurred was almost all in the digital space. And what it reflected was a choice to cut spending from a digital standpoint where it was ineffective: where either we were serving bots as opposed to human beings, or where the placement of ads was not facilitating the equity of our brands. Google & Facebook are extending their grip on the industry with Google launching topical feeds & Facebook wanting to control subscription management. Best of luck to journalists on the employment front: The initiative, dubbed Reporters and Data and Robots (RADAR), will see a team of five journalists work with Natural Language Generation software to produce over 30,000 pieces of content for local media each month. Hopefully editors catch the subtle errors the bots make, because most of them will not be this obvious & stupid. The Guardian does not seem to know what a 40 is https://t.co/m7Gm1YrbXC pic.twitter.com/Y0sK9r0ltJ— Shuja Haider (@shujaxhaider) July 26, 2017 The cost of parasitic content recycling is coming down quickly: In a show of strength last year, Microsoft used thousands of these chips at once to translate all of English Wikipedia into Spanish-3 billion words across five million articles-in less than a tenth of a second. Next Microsoft will let its cloud customers use these chips to speed up their own AI tasks. Voice search makes it even easier to extract the rewards without paying publishers. Throwing pennies at journalists does nothing to change this. If Google is subsidizing robotic journalism they are thus legitimizing robotic journalism. As big publishers employ the tactic, Google ranks it. Checking some Heliograf articles (AI-written) reveals once again they do rank well. Google is in a tough position here. It’s inevitable… pic.twitter.com/g0Etcx3rFj— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 16, 2017 It is almost impossible to compete economically with an entity that rewrites your work & has zero marginal cost of production. YouTube has perhaps the worst comments on the web. Some mainstream news sites got rid of comments because they couldn’t justify the cost of policing them. That in turn shifts the audience & attention stream to sites like Facebook & Twitter. Some news sites which are still leaving comments enabled rely on a Google filter, a technology Google can use on YouTube as they see fit. Any plugins publishers use to lower their costs can later disappear. It looked like FindTheBest was doing well financially, but when it was acquired many news sites quickly found out the cost of free as they now have thousands of broken articles in their archives: “Last month, Graphiq announced that features for news publishers would no longer be available after Friday.” Driving costs toward zero by piling on external dependencies is no way to build a sustainable business. Especially when the central network operators are eating the playing field: “Between fast-loading AMP articles from major news brands hosted in its domain, full pages of information scraped from outside sites that don’t require you to visit them, basic shopping functions built into ads, YouTube, and a host of other features, the Google-verse is more of a digital walled garden than ever. … If Google continues to choke these sites out, what incentive will there be for new ones to come along?” Unprofitable partners which were buying growth with artificially cheap pricing eventually find out investors want profits more than growth & either reprice or go away. The longer you use something & the more locked in you are to it the more aggressively it can afford to reprice. Symbiotic relationships devolve into abusive ones: “for every pound an advertiser spends programmatically on the Guardian only 30 pence actually goes to the publisher.” – Mediatel “Google wants to cut out the middlemen, which it turns out, are URLs.” – MobileMoxie “[AMP is] a way for Google to obfuscate your website, usurp your content & remove any personal credibility from the web” – TheRegister “Though the stated initiative of ads.txt is to stop inventory resale, it achieves this by establishing ‘preferred’ channels, which naturally favors the industry’s most influential companies” – Ad Exchanger That Apple does extra work to undo AMP says a lot. Those who think the central network operators are naive to the power structure being promoted by the faux solutions are either chasing short-term goals or are incredibly masochistic. Arbitraging brand is the core business model of the attention merchant monopoly. we’ve found out that 98% of our business was coming from 22 words. So, wait, we’re buying 3,200 words and 98% of the business is coming from 22 words. What are the 22 words? And they said, well, it’s the word Restoration Hardware and the 21 ways to spell it wrong, okay? Publishers buying the “speed” narrative are failing themselves. The Guardian has 11 people working on AMP integration. And what is Google doing about speed? Google shut down Google Instant search results, often displays a screen or two full of ads which mobile users have to scroll past to find the organic search results AND is testing auto-playing videos in the search results. Facebook is also promoting fast loading & mobile-friendly pages. To keep bleeding clicks out of the “organic” ecosystem they don’t even need to have explicit malicious intent. They can run a thousand different tests every month (new vertical sitelink formats, swipable sitelinks, showing 8 sitelinks on tiny mobile devices, MOAR sitelinks, message extensions, extensions on call-only ads, price discount labels, frame 3rd party content inline, dramatically ramp up featured snippets +QnA listings, more related searches, more features in ad units, larger ad units, ad units that replace websites & charge advertisers for sending clicks from Google to Google, launch a meta-search service where they over-promote select listings, test dropping URLs from listings, put ads in the local pack, change color of source links or other elements, pop ups of search results inside search results, etc.) & keep moving toward whatever layout drives more ad clicks, keeps users on Google longer & forces businesses to buy ads for exposure, claiming they are optimizing the user experience the whole time. They can hard-code any data type or feature, price it at free to de-fund adjacent businesses, consolidate market power, then increase rents after they have a monopoly position in the adjacent market. And they can fund research on how to remove watermarks from images. Why not make hosting free, get people to publish into a proprietary format & try to shift news reading onto the Google app. With enough attention & market coverage they can further extort publishers into accepting perpetually worse deals. And free analytics & business plugins which are widely adopted can have key features get pushed into the paid version. Just look at Google Analytics – its free or $150,000+/yr. The above sorts of moves can be done in isolation, or in a combinatorial approach. Publishers aloof of the ecosystem shifts may use microformats to structure their content. They’ll then find it is integrated in Google’s new image search layout, where Google copies the content wholesale & shows it near other third party images framed by Google. How about some visually striking, yet irrelevant listings for competing brands on branded searches to force the brand ad buy. And, of course rounded card corners to eat a few more pixels, along with faint ad labeling on ads coupled with vibrant colored dots on the organic results to confuse end users into thinking the organic results are the ads. While Google turns their search results into an adspam farm, they invite you to test showing fewer ads on your site to improve user experience. Google knows best – let them automate your ad load & ad placement. What is the real risk of AI? Bias. “It’s important that we be transparent about the training data that we are using, and are looking for hidden biases in it, otherwise we are building biased systems,” Giannandrea added. “If someone is trying to sell you a black box system for medical decision support, and you don’t know how it works or what data was used to train it, then I wouldn’t trust it.” And how does Google justify their AI investments? Through driving incremental ad clicks: “The DeepMind founders understand that their power within [Alphabet], and their ability to get their way with [Alphabet CEO] Larry Page, depends on how many eyeballs and clicks and ad dollars they can claim to be driving” No bias at all there! Truth: Google killed publishing in 2015. What you’re reading now is detritus + new junk posted by crazies walking around empty offices— 11 (@searchsleuth998) August 1, 2017 SEOs who were overly reliant on the search channel were the first to notice all the above sorts of change, as it is their job to be hyper-aware of ecosystem shifts. But publishers far removed from SEO who never focused on SEO are now writing about the trends SEOs were writing about nearly a decade ago. Josh Marshall recently covered Google’s awesome monopoly powers. few publishers really want to talk about the depths or mechanics of Google’s role in news publishing. Some of this is secrecy about proprietary information; most of it is that Google could destroy or profoundly damage most publications if it wanted to. So why rock the boat? … Google’s monopoly control is almost comically great. It’s a monopoly at every conceivable turn and consistently uses that market power to deepen its hold and increase its profits. Just the interplay between DoubleClick and Adexchange is textbook anti-competitive practices. … Is your favorite website laying off staff or ‘pivoting to video’. In most cases, the root cause is not entirely but to a significant degree driven by the platform monopolies His article details how Google owns many points of the supply chain So let’s go down the list: 1) The system for running ads, 2) the top purchaser of ads, 3) the most pervasive audience data service, 4) all search, 5) our email. … But wait, there’s more! Google also owns Chrome, the most used browser for visiting TPM. He also covers the price dumping technique that is used to maintain control In many cases, alternatives don’t exist because no business can get a footing with a product Google lets people use for free. And he shared an example of Google algorithms gone astray crippling his business, even though it was not related to search & unintentional: Because we were forwarding to ourselves spam that other people sent to us, Google decided that the owner of the TPM url was a major spammer and blocked emails from TPM from being sent to anyone. If the above comes across as depressing, don’t worry. The search results now contain a depression diagnostic testing tool. Categories: internet from SEO Book http://www.seobook.com/virtual-real-estate via IFTTT from Local SEO Guru http://localseoguru.tumblr.com/post/166227650323 via IFTTT from Tumblr http://tomeucapella.tumblr.com/post/166231157730/virtual-real-estate via IFTTT

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[andrew-forbes]

Virtual Real Estate

Wrastlin With The News

The current presidential cabinet includes a WWE co-founder & this passes for modern political discourse:

#FraudNewsCNN #FNN http://pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017

CNN promised vengeance.

Something To Believe In

The pretense of objectivity has been dropped:

These reporters aren't ideologues. They're just right-thinking people who lean left. Somewhere along the line, they stopped pretending to be objective about Trump. ... People don't just disagree with each other. They can't imagine how a decent caring human being could disagree with their own view of race or the minimum wage or immigration or Trump. Being a member of the virtuous tribe means not only carrying the correct card in your wallet to reassure yourself. You have to also believe that the people carrying any other card are irrational, or worse, evil. They're not people to engage in conversation with. They are barriers to be ignored or pushed aside on the virtuous path to paradise. This intolerance and inability to imagine the virtue of the other side is the road to tyranny and chaos. It dehumanizes a good chunk of humanity and that in turn justifies the worst atrocities human beings are capable of.

The WSJ, typically a right-leaning publication, is differentiating their coverage of the president from most other outlets by attempting to be somewhat neutral.

The news is fake. Even historically left-leaning people are disgusted with outlets like CNN.

"I think the president is probably right to say, like, look you are witch-hunting me. You have no smoking gun, you have no real proof." - CNN supervising producer John Bonifield

"When you do shitty reporting like CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times & Rachel Maddow especially. When you do that & it is revealed to be bullshit, what you're doing is building up Trump. There's no greater way to build up Trump than to falsely report on him. There's no better way to build up Trump than to make him the victim." - Jimmy Dore

"Rachel Maddow was given the facts, she ignored them, & she kept right on going. That's MSNBC, that's CNN, that's the New York Times, the Washington Post - they're all horrible. That's why we had the Iraq war. That's why we have the Syria war. That's why we are still in Afghanistan. That's why we had Libya. That's why we have the biggest income disparity since the gilded age. Meanwhile we are spending more on the military than the rest of the world." - Jimmy Dore

And, since people need something to believe in, there are new American Gods:

"A half hour of cable news delivers enough psychic trauma for a whole year. The newspapers are talking of nothing but treason, espionage, investigations, protests." ... "Stocks are rallying because of how little faith we have in the government. The Mega Blue Chip Corporation is the new Sovereign."

Current Headwinds for Online Publishing

I struggle to keep up with the accelerating rate of change. A number of common themes in the current ecosystem are:

We are moving toward a world where more things are becoming fake (only accelerated by the demonetization of neutrality & the algorithmic boost associated with reliably delivering confirmation bias in an algorithmic or manual fashion)

risk keeps being radiated outward to the individual while monopoly platforms capture the spoils (forced-place health insurance purchases where the insurance company arbitrarily drops the sick member on the policy even though that is supposed to be illegal, more temp jobs where people don't get enough hours to get health insurance through their employer, under-funded pensions, outsourcing of core business functions to sweatshops where part-time workers don't get paid for dozens to hundreds of hours of required training & get to watch beheading videos all day)

the barrier to entry keeps increasing (increased marketing cost due to brand bias, heavy ad loads on dominant platforms, & central platforms making partners do "bet the farm" moves in how they adjust distribution to drive adoption of proprietary formats & temporarily over-promote select content formats)

the increasing chunk size of competition is making it much harder for individuals to build sustainable businesses. (Yes the tools of the trade are improving quickly, BUT the central platforms are demonetizing the adjacent fields faster than publishing tools & business options improve.)

In Europe publishers are aggressively leaning on regulators to try to rebalance power.

Some of this stuff is cyclical. About a decade ago the European Commission went after Microsoft for bundling Internet Explorer. Google complained about the monopolistic practices to ensure Microsoft was fined. And we've went from that to a web where Google syndicates native ads that blend into page content while directly funding robot journalism. And then Google is ranking the robot-generated crap too.

Speaking of robot journalists, check out the top 3 results for this query. All 3 are auto-written by automated insights (AI software). Yikes http://pic.twitter.com/ltFGFXHNiF— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 8, 2017

But to keep the ecosystem clean & spam free, Google is also planning to leverage their web browser to further dictate the terms of online publishing. Chrome will block autoplay audio & will automatically reroute .dev domains to https. Cutting edge developers suggest using a web browser other than Google Chrome to prevent proprietary lock in across the web.

Is this a test, @Google? http://pic.twitter.com/V9FZ2hL2cA— TNW (@TheNextWeb) September 5, 2017

While Google distributes their Chrome browser as unwanted bundleware, other web browsers must display uninstall links front & center when trying to gain awareness of their product using Google AdWords. Microsoft Edge is coming to Android, but without a BrowserChoice.eu screen it is unlikely most users will change their web browser as most are unaware of what a web browser even is, let alone the limitations of any of them or the tracking embedded in them.

If you go back several years, there was celebration of the fact that the cost of doing a startup was so low. You didn't have to pay Oracle a million dollars for a server license any more. You didn't even have to rack your own hardware. Now you can just dial it up on Amazon. But there are now these gatekeepers and toll-takers. Back in 2004, you had the wide-open internet. - Jeremy Stoppelman

The Mobile Revolution

If you are an anti-social work at home webmaster who has dual monitors it is easy to dismiss cell phones as inefficient and chalk most mobile usage up to the following.

Russian man visited Chinese click farm.They make fake ratings for mobile apps and things like this.He said they have 10,000 more phones http://pic.twitter.com/qE96vgCCsi— English Russia (@EnglishRussia1) May 11, 2017

The reality is cell phones are more powerful than they seem if you are strictly consuming rather than working.

Deflationary impact of technology: everything in this Radio Shack flyer from 1991 adds up to $3,285.12 and can be done today on a smartphone http://pic.twitter.com/ONh3waWVgq— Jeffrey Kleintop (@JeffreyKleintop) June 23, 2017

And that is how the unstoppable quickly becomes the extinct!

10 years ago. http://pic.twitter.com/ZCWfHfpedi— Harry Tucker (@harrytuckerr) September 11, 2017

Many people the world over are addicted to their cell phones to where viral game makers are self-regulating before regulators step in: "From Tuesday, users below 12 years of age will be limited to one hour of play time each day, while those aged between 12 years and 18 years will be limited to two hours a day, Tencent said."

While China is using their various tools to clamp down on Honour of Kings, Tencent is bringing the game to the west, which makes blocking VPN services (with Apple's help - they must play along or have the phones reduced to bricks) & requiring local data storage & technology transfer more important. Anything stored locally can be easily disappeared: "China's already formidable internet censors have demonstrated a new strength-the ability to delete images in one-on-one chats as they are being transmitted, making them disappear before receivers see them."

China has banned live streaming, threatened their largest domestic social networks, shut down chat bots, require extensive multimedia review: "an industry association circulated new regulations that at least two "auditors" will, with immediate effect, be required to check all audiovisual content posted online" AND they force users to install spyware on their devices.

In spite of all those restrictions, last year "Chinese consumers spent $5.5 trillion through mobile payment platforms, about 50 times more than their American counterparts." In the last quarter Baidu had ¥20.87 billion in revenues, with 72% of their revenues driven by mobile.

People can not miss that which they've never seen, thus platform socialism works. Those who doubt it will be tracked & scored accordingly.

History, as well, can be scrubbed. And insurance companies watch everything in real-time - careful what you post. The watchful eye of the Chinese pre-crime team is also looking over every move.

Last quarter Facebook had revenues of $9.164 billion, with 87% coming from mobile devices.

http://pic.twitter.com/JlPBSlmKlw— banksy (@thereaIbanksy) September 16, 2017

Simulacrum has ALMOST been perfected:

"We didn't have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people." ... "Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It's not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones." ... "Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy."

http://pic.twitter.com/QBLBXIDDLK— banksy (@thereaIbanksy) August 24, 2017

The web is becoming easier to get addicted to due to personalization algorithms that reinforce our worldviews even as they make us feel more isolated and left out. And the barrier to entry for consumers into one of the few central gatekeeper ecosystems is dropping like a rock due to the falling cost of mobile devices, coupled with with images & video displacing text making literacy optional. As we become more "connected" we feel more isolated:

"Social isolation, loneliness or living alone was each a significant factor contributing to premature death. And each one of these factors was a more significant risk factor for dying than obesity. ... No one knows precisely why loneliness is surging, threatening the lives of many millions of people, but it does seem that the burgeoning use of technology may have something to do with it. Personally, I would contend that technology may be the chief factor fueling it."

The primary role of the big data mining companies is leveraging surveillance for social engineering

Unsettling that according to Mark Zuckerberg purpose of Facebook is forced social engineering. From "World Without Mind" by Franklin Foer: http://pic.twitter.com/CHRnefg9m2— Murtaza Hussain (@MazMHussain) October 8, 2017

App Annie expects the global app economy to be worth $6.3 trillion by 2021.

The reason those numbers can easily sound fake & mobile can seem overblown is how highly concentrated usage has become: "over 80 percent of consumer time on mobile devices is now spent on the apps, websites and properties" of just five companies: Facebook, Google, Apple, Yelp and Bing.

Maslow 2.0 http://pic.twitter.com/X1OguQG8Gq— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) October 7, 2017

eMarketer stated Google will have more mobile ad revenue than desktop ad revenue in the US this year. They also predicted Google & Facebook will consume over 2/3 of US online ad spend within 2 years.

The central network operators not only maintain an outsized share of revenues, but also maintain an outsized share of profits. When the home team gets a 30% rake of any sale it is hard for anyone else to compete. Even after buying and gutting Motorola Google bought part of HTC for $1.1 billion. The game plan has never changed: commoditize the compliment to ensure user data & most of the profits flow to Google. Put up arbitrary roadblocks for competing services while launching free parallel offerings to drive lock-in.

For the last YEAR I've been battling App Store rejections - we made an app called Animoji with animated emojis...now I know why. https://t.co/jKJXfLMGj2— Ryan Jones (@rjonesy) September 9, 2017

Central data aggregators can keep collecting more user data & offer more granular ad distribution features. They can tell you that this micro moment RIGHT NOW is make or break:

it's intended to create a bizarre sense of panic among marketers - "OMG, we have to be present at every possible instant someone might be looking at their phone!" - which doesn't help them think strategically or make the best use of their marketing or ad spend.

The reality is that if you don't have a relationship with a person on their desktop computer they probably don't want your mobile app either.

If you have the relationship then mobile only increases profits.

Is iOS 11 specifically designed to make your older iPhones unusable and drain your battery so you have to upgrade to the newest phones?— Eric Jackson (@ericjackson) October 7, 2017

Many people attempting to build "the next mobile" will go bust, but wherever the attention flows the ads will follow.

Those with a broad & dominant tech platform can copy features from single-category devices and keep integrating them into their core products to increase user lock-in. And they can build accessories for those core devices while prohibiting the flow of data to third party devices to keep users locked into their ecosystem.

Smaller Screens, Shallower Attention

People often multi-task while using mobile devices.

Powerful stuff ...An very fucking true http://pic.twitter.com/enP98Z6B7r— Nev (@LFCNev) July 13, 2017

When multi-tasking it is easier to accidentally click an ad. This happens 10s of billions of times a year:

This year, in-app mobile ad spend will reach $45.3 billion, up $11 billion from last year, according to eMarketer. And apps are where the money is at for mobile advertising, comprising 80 percent of all U.S. media dollars spent on mobile.

But multi-tasking means doing almost everything else worse. The "always on" mode not only increases isolation, but also lowers our ability to focus:

"while our phones offer convenience and diversion, they also breed anxiety. Their extraordinary usefulness gives them an unprecedented hold on our attention and vast influence over our thinking and behavior. ... Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren't using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens. ... when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline. ... As the phone's proximity increased, brainpower decreased. ... Anticipating that information would be readily available in digital form seemed to reduce the mental effort that people made to remember it. ... people are all too quick to credit lies and half-truths spread through social media by Russian agents and other bad actors. If your phone has sapped your powers of discernment, you'll believe anything it tells you."

Further, the shallow attention stream makes it easy to displace content with ads:

4 Ads 3 map carrousel results 5 organic results 4 Ads

Then "see more results"

4 more Ads 5 organic results 4 more Ads

On desktop devices people don't accidentally misclick on ads at anywhere near the rate they fat thumb ads on mobile devices.

Desktop ad clicks convert to purchases. Mobile ad clicks convert to ad budget burned: "marketers are still seeing few shoppers purchasing on mobile. The 52% of share in traffic only has 26% share of revenue."

For traditional publishers mobile users drastically under-monetize desktop users due to

drastically lower conversion rates (true for almost everyone in ecommerce outside of Amazon perhaps)

limited cross-device tracking (how do you track people who don't even hit your site but hit a cached page hosted via Google AMP or Facebook Instant Articles?)

lower ad load allowed on publisher sites due to limited screen size

aggressive filtering of fat thumb ad clicks on partner sites from central ad networks

For the central network operators almost all the above are precisely the exact opposite.

higher ad CTR by making entire interface ads (& perhaps even disappearing the concept of non-ads in the result set)

great cross-device user tracking

higher ad load allowed by the small screen size pushing content below the fold

more lenient filtering of fat thumb accidental ad clicks

If you look at raw stats without understanding the underlying impact, it is easy to believe the ecosystem is healthy.

Assumption: Google's ads are more prominent, so organic must be dying.Reality: As of Oct. 2016, 20X more organic clicks than paid ones. http://pic.twitter.com/FaEBpBZWSw— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) July 1, 2017

However the huge number of "no click" results are demonetizing easy publisher revenues, which have traditionally helped to fund more in-depth investigative reporting. Further, much of the direct navigation which happened in the past is now being passed through brand-related search result pages. You can argue that is an increase in search traffic, or you can argue it is shifting the roll of the address bar from navigation to search.

The first page is nothing but ads

Yep, and here they are in Philly. Home service ads, then AdWords traditional ads, then the local pack (way down below). :) http://pic.twitter.com/VOVZPWWHsg— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 17, 2017

On mobile so is the second, and most of the third

Hey, only 2.5 screens before you get to the 10 blue links. A full 4 screens if you cannot crack the top 2 organics. http://pic.twitter.com/bbm1pz8hyF— Jeremy Bochenek (@J_Bochenek) July 17, 2017

If a search query has lots of easy to structure crap around it, a user might need 6 or 7 scrolls to get to an organic result

Very interesting Google SERP for GoT. One barely visible organic result after >70% scroll depth. Oh my... #seo #GameOfThones http://pic.twitter.com/Z6j7VvJMI4— Bastian Grimm (@basgr) August 24, 2017

Then if third parties go "well Google does this, so I should too" they are considered a low quality user experience and get a penalty.

Emailed a client one month ago when I picked up ultra-aggressive ads (especially on mobile). They just received an ad experiences warning. http://pic.twitter.com/QLLZci1xKW— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 25, 2017

31% ad coverage on mobile website is excessive / spam / low quality user experience for a publisher, while 301% coverage is reasonable for the central network operators.

Google not only displaces the result set, but also leverages their search suggestion features & algorithmic influence to alter how people search & what they search for.

Ads are getting integrated into mobile keyboards.

The standard keyboard on the HTC 10 has begun showing ads [X-Post from r/mildlyinfuriating] https://t.co/FuXDJzilZ6 #blog http://pic.twitter.com/VriK54dBHb— Android Facts (@manatweets) July 16, 2017

And when a user finally reaches the publisher's website (provided they scroll past the ads, the AMP listings, and all the other scrape-n-displace trash) then when they finally land on a publication Google will overlay other recommended articles from other sites.

Whoa -> While you're reading a page on the Google app for iOS, you'll now see suggestions for related content https://t.co/n6FjkNqx82 http://pic.twitter.com/DZYTt8T7fI— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 19, 2017

That feature will eventually end up including ads in it, where publishers will get 0.00% of the revenue generated.

Remember how Google suggested publishers should make their websites faster, remove ads, remove clutter, etc. What was the point of all that? To create free real estate for Google to insert a spam unit into your website?

Continuing coverage of Google's new content recos. I'm sure Best Buy is thrilled to see Amazon show up while someone is on their page. Ouch. http://pic.twitter.com/qpDyGKPyYh— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 24, 2017

This wouldn't be bad if mobile were a small, fringe slice of traffic, but it is becoming the majority of traffic. And as mobile increases desktop traffic is shrinking.

Even politically biased outlets that appear to be nearly perfectly optimized for a filter bubble that promotes identity politics struggle to make the numbers work: "As a result of continued decline in direct advertising, [Salon's] total revenue in the fiscal year 2017 decreased by 34% to $4.6 million. Following the market trend, 84% of our advertising revenue in fiscal year 2017 was generated by programmatic selling. ... [Monthly unique visitors to our website saw] a decrease of 23%. We attribute the decline primarily to the changes in the algorithms used by Facebook."

I knew the last year was bad for online publishing, but the Salon 10K shows *just how bad* http://pic.twitter.com/oyH7pdCDNI— josh laurito (@joshlaurito) June 26, 2017

The above sorts of numbers are the logical outcome to this:

we've heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it's difficult to find the actual content, they aren't happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don't have much content"above-the-fold" can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn't have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site's initial screen real estate to ads, that's not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.

Especially when combined with this:

As you scroll through it, you are then given travel ads for flight options through Google Flight search, hotels through Google Hotel search and restaurants through Google Local results. Then towards the bottom of the knowledge graph card, all the way at the end in a small grayish font, you have a link to "see web results."

Bad news for TripAdvisor.

Google has squeezed out SEO for travel. PCLN/EXPE SEM $ spend and higher conversion is a massive competitive advantage. Bad news for TRIP. http://pic.twitter.com/39QkxuN780— modest proposal (@modestproposal1) April 17, 2017

And amongst the good news for Expedia, there's also a bit of bad news for Expedia. The hotels are fighting Airbnb & OTAs. In travel Google is twice as big as the biggest OTA players. They keep eating more SERP real estate and adding more content behind tabs. On mobile they'll even disappear the concept of organic results.

Room previews in the search results not only means that second tier players are worth a song, but even the new growth players propped up by aggressive ad buying eventually hit a wall and see their stock crash.

As the entire ecosystem gets squeezed by middlemen and the market gets obfuscated with an incomplete selection it is ultimately consumers who lose: "Reservations made through Internet discount sites are almost always slated for our worst rooms."

The New York Times pitched Yelp as a pesky player holding a grudge:

"For six years, his company has been locked in a campaign on three continents to get antitrust regulators to punish Google, Yelp's larger, richer and more politically connected competitor. ... Yelp concluded that there was no better way to get Google's attention than to raise the specter of regulation. ... something [Mark Mahaney] calls the Death of Free Google. As the internet has migrated to mobile phones, Google has compensated for the smaller screen space by filling it with so many ads that users can have a hard time finding a result that hasn't been paid for."

In spite of how quick The New York Times was to dismiss Yelp, the monopoly platforms are stiffing competition & creativity while bundling fake reviews & junk features into their core platforms.

People can literally switch their name to "Loop dee Loop" and leave you terrible, fake reviews. Google's lack of effort & investment to clean up trash in their local services department highlights that they don't feel they need to compete on quality. Pay for core search distribution, throw an inferior service front & center, and win by default placement.

As AI advancements make fake reviews look more legit Google's lack of investment in creating a quality ecosystem will increasingly harm both consumers and businesses. Many low margin businesses will go under simply because their Google reviews are full of inaccurate trash or a competitor decided to hijack their business listing or list their business as closed.

To this day Google is still egregiously stealing content from Yelp:

Yelp said it investigated and found that over one hour, Google pulled images from Yelp's servers nearly 386,000 times for business listings in Google Maps, which Google exempted from its promise to not scrape content. Yelp then searched Google for 150 of the businesses from those map listings and found that for 110 of them, Google used a Yelp photo as the lead image in the businesses' listings in search results.

Stealing content & wrapping it in fake reviews is NOT putting the user first.

Facebook has their own matching parallel shifts.

The aggregate quality of mobile ad clicks is quite low. So as mobile becomes a much higher percent of total ad clicks, those who don't have scale and narrative control are reduced to taking whatever they can get. And mainstream media outlets are reduced to writing puff pieces so the brands they cover will pay to promote the stories on the main channels.

As programmatic advertising, ad blockers, unpatched Android-powered botnets & malware spread each day gets a little uglier for everyone but the central market operators. It is so bad that some of the central market operators offer surveillance apps which claim to protect user privacy! Other app makers not connected to monopoly profit streams monetize any way they can.

The narrative of growth can be sold (we are launching a new food channel, we are investing in our internal video team, we have exclusive real estate listings, and, um, we acquired a food channel) but the competition is a zero sum game with Google & Facebook eating off the publisher's plates.

That's why Time is trying to shave $400 million off their expenses & wants to sell their magazine division. Newspaper companies are selling for $1. It is also why Business Insider is no longer chasing growth & the New York Times is setting up a charitable trust.

The rise of ad blocking only accelerates the underlying desperation.

I have some thoughts about why news orgs are finding that people won't read long articles: http://pic.twitter.com/G8Zh6GTA6w— Ben Chase (@bbchase) July 4, 2017

I feel terrible for journalists who invest time and effort into doing a hard job well only to have it presented like this. http://pic.twitter.com/jIZxuJqVAq— Jeff Long (@banterability) October 5, 2017

As long as news websites make their own customer experience worse than what can be found as a cached copy on the monopoly platforms there is no reason to visit the end publisher website. That is why the proprietary formats promoted by the monopoly platforms are so dangerous. They force lighter monetization & offset the lack of revenue by given preferential placement:

click through rate from Google search went from 5.9% (Regular) to 10.3% (AMP), and average search position went from 5.9 (Regular) to 1.7 (AMP). Since then, we have deployed AMP across fifteen of our brands and we have been very pleased with the results. Today, AMP accounts for 79% of our mobile search traffic and 36% of our total mobile visits.

As long as almost nobody is using the new proprietary, ghetto lock-in format the math may work out there, but once many people adopt it then it becomes another recurring sunk cost with no actual benefit:

the only voices promoting AMP's performance benefits are coming from inside Google. ... given how AMP pages are privileged in Google's search results, the net effect of the team's hard, earnest work comes across as a corporate-backed attempt to rewrite HTML in Google's image.

Even if you get a slight uptick in traffic from AMP, it will lead to lower quality user engagement as users are browsing across websites rather than within websites. Getting a bit more traffic but 59% fewer leads is a fail.

No amount of collaborative publisher partnerships, begging for anti-trust exemptions, or whining about Google is going to fix the problem.

"The only way publishers can address this inexorable threat is by banding together. If they open a unified front to negotiate with Google and Facebook-pushing for stronger intellectual-property protections, better support for subscription models and a fair share of revenue and data-they could build a more sustainable future for the news business. But antitrust laws make such coordination perilous. These laws, intended to prevent monopolies, are having the unintended effect of preserving and protecting Google and Facebook's dominant position."

Wait a minute.

Wasn't it the New York Times which claimed Yelp was holding an arbitrary grudge against Google?

The following sounds a lot more desperate:

newspapers that once delivered their journalism with their own trucks increasingly have to rely on these big online platforms to get their articles in front of people, fighting for attention alongside fake news, websites that lift their content, and cat videos.

Well maybe that is just smaller publications & not the gray lady herself

"the temperature is rising in terms of concern, and in some cases anger, about what seems like a very asymmetric, disadvantageous relationship between the publishers and the very big digital platforms." - NYT CEO Mark Thompson

In unrelated news, there's another round of layoffs coming at the New York Times.

And the New York Times is also setting up a nonprofit division to expand journalism while their core company focuses on something else.

Apparently Yelp does not qualify as a publisher in this instance.

Or does it?

The Times is backing the move for what is called an anticompetitive safe haven, in part, Mr. Thompson said, "because we care about the whole of journalism as well as about The New York Times."

Ah, whole of journalism, which, apparently, no longer includes local business coverage.

You know the slogan: "news isn't news, unless it isn't local."

The struggles are all across the media landscape. The new Boston Globe CEO lasted a half-year. The San Diego Union-Tribune resorted to using GoFundMe. The Chicago Sun-Times sold for $1. Moody's issued a negative outlook for the US newspaper sector. As the industry declines the biggest players view consolidation as the only solution.

These struggles existed even before the largest brand advertisers like P&G cut back on low & no value ad venues like YouTube:

In the fourth quarter, the reduction in marketing that occurred was almost all in the digital space. And what it reflected was a choice to cut spending from a digital standpoint where it was ineffective: where either we were serving bots as opposed to human beings, or where the placement of ads was not facilitating the equity of our brands.

Google & Facebook are extending their grip on the industry with Google launching topical feeds & Facebook wanting to control subscription management.

Best of luck to journalists on the employment front:

The initiative, dubbed Reporters and Data and Robots (RADAR), will see a team of five journalists work with Natural Language Generation software to produce over 30,000 pieces of content for local media each month.

Hopefully editors catch the subtle errors the bots make, because most of them will not be this obvious & stupid.

The Guardian does not seem to know what a 40 is https://t.co/m7Gm1YrbXC http://pic.twitter.com/Y0sK9r0ltJ— Shuja Haider (@shujaxhaider) July 26, 2017

The cost of parasitic content recycling is coming down quickly:

In a show of strength last year, Microsoft used thousands of these chips at once to translate all of English Wikipedia into Spanish-3 billion words across five million articles-in less than a tenth of a second. Next Microsoft will let its cloud customers use these chips to speed up their own AI tasks.

Voice search makes it even easier to extract the rewards without paying publishers. Throwing pennies at journalists does nothing to change this.

If Google is subsidizing robotic journalism they are thus legitimizing robotic journalism. As big publishers employ the tactic, Google ranks it.

Checking some Heliograf articles (AI-written) reveals once again they do rank well. Google is in a tough position here. It's inevitable... http://pic.twitter.com/g0Etcx3rFj— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 16, 2017

It is almost impossible to compete economically with an entity that rewrites your work & has zero marginal cost of production.

YouTube has perhaps the worst comments on the web. Some mainstream news sites got rid of comments because they couldn't justify the cost of policing them. That in turn shifts the audience & attention stream to sites like Facebook & Twitter. Some news sites which are still leaving comments enabled rely on a Google filter, a technology Google can use on YouTube as they see fit.

Any plugins publishers use to lower their costs can later disappear. It looked like FindTheBest was doing well financially, but when it was acquired many news sites quickly found out the cost of free as they now have thousands of broken articles in their archives: "Last month, Graphiq announced that features for news publishers would no longer be available after Friday."

Driving costs toward zero by piling on external dependencies is no way to build a sustainable business. Especially when the central network operators are eating the playing field:

"Between fast-loading AMP articles from major news brands hosted in its domain, full pages of information scraped from outside sites that don't require you to visit them, basic shopping functions built into ads, YouTube, and a host of other features, the Google-verse is more of a digital walled garden than ever. ... If Google continues to choke these sites out, what incentive will there be for new ones to come along?"

Unprofitable partners which were buying growth with artificially cheap pricing eventually find out investors want profits more than growth & either reprice or go away. The longer you use something & the more locked in you are to it the more aggressively it can afford to reprice. Symbiotic relationships devolve into abusive ones:

"for every pound an advertiser spends programmatically on the Guardian only 30 pence actually goes to the publisher." - Mediatel

"Google wants to cut out the middlemen, which it turns out, are URLs." - MobileMoxie

"[AMP is] a way for Google to obfuscate your website, usurp your content & remove any personal credibility from the web" - TheRegister

"Though the stated initiative of ads.txt is to stop inventory resale, it achieves this by establishing 'preferred' channels, which naturally favors the industry's most influential companies" - Ad Exchanger

That Apple does extra work to undo AMP says a lot.

Those who think the central network operators are naive to the power structure being promoted by the faux solutions are either chasing short-term goals or are incredibly masochistic.

Arbitraging brand is the core business model of the attention merchant monopoly.

we've found out that 98% of our business was coming from 22 words. So, wait, we're buying 3,200 words and 98% of the business is coming from 22 words. What are the 22 words? And they said, well, it's the word Restoration Hardware and the 21 ways to spell it wrong, okay?

Publishers buying the "speed" narrative are failing themselves. The Guardian has 11 people working on AMP integration. And what is Google doing about speed? Google shut down Google Instant search results, often displays a screen or two full of ads which mobile users have to scroll past to find the organic search results AND is testing auto-playing videos in the search results.

Facebook is also promoting fast loading & mobile-friendly pages.

To keep bleeding clicks out of the "organic" ecosystem they don't even need to have explicit malicious intent. They can run a thousand different tests every month (new vertical sitelink formats, swipable sitelinks, showing 8 sitelinks on tiny mobile devices, MOAR sitelinks, message extensions, extensions on call-only ads, price discount labels, frame 3rd party content inline, dramatically ramp up featured snippets +QnA listings, more related searches, more features in ad units, larger ad units, ad units that replace websites & charge advertisers for sending clicks from Google to Google, launch a meta-search service where they over-promote select listings, test dropping URLs from listings, put ads in the local pack, change color of source links or other elements, pop ups of search results inside search results, etc.) & keep moving toward whatever layout drives more ad clicks, keeps users on Google longer & forces businesses to buy ads for exposure, claiming they are optimizing the user experience the whole time.

They can hard-code any data type or feature, price it at free to de-fund adjacent businesses, consolidate market power, then increase rents after they have a monopoly position in the adjacent market.

And they can fund research on how to remove watermarks from images.

Why not make hosting free, get people to publish into a proprietary format & try to shift news reading onto the Google app. With enough attention & market coverage they can further extort publishers into accepting perpetually worse deals. And free analytics & business plugins which are widely adopted can have key features get pushed into the paid version. Just look at Google Analytics - its free or $150,000+/yr.

The above sorts of moves can be done in isolation, or in a combinatorial approach. Publishers aloof of the ecosystem shifts may use microformats to structure their content. They'll then find it is integrated in Google's new image search layout, where Google copies the content wholesale & shows it near other third party images framed by Google.

How about some visually striking, yet irrelevant listings for competing brands on branded searches to force the brand ad buy. And, of course rounded card corners to eat a few more pixels, along with faint ad labeling on ads coupled with vibrant colored dots on the organic results to confuse end users into thinking the organic results are the ads.

While Google turns their search results into an adspam farm, they invite you to test showing fewer ads on your site to improve user experience. Google knows best - let them automate your ad load & ad placement.

What is the real risk of AI? Bias.

"It's important that we be transparent about the training data that we are using, and are looking for hidden biases in it, otherwise we are building biased systems," Giannandrea added. "If someone is trying to sell you a black box system for medical decision support, and you don't know how it works or what data was used to train it, then I wouldn't trust it."

And how does Google justify their AI investments? Through driving incremental ad clicks: "The DeepMind founders understand that their power within [Alphabet], and their ability to get their way with [Alphabet CEO] Larry Page, depends on how many eyeballs and clicks and ad dollars they can claim to be driving"

No bias at all there!

Truth: Google killed publishing in 2015. What you're reading now is detritus + new junk posted by crazies walking around empty offices— 11 (@searchsleuth998) August 1, 2017

And if publishing was killed in 2015, things have only got worse since then:

Looking at 2015 vs 2017 data for all keywords ranking organically on the first page, we’ve seen a dramatic change in CTR. Below we’ve normalized our actual CTR on a 1–10 scale, representing a total drop of 25% of click share on desktop and 55% on mobile.

SEOs who were overly reliant on the search channel were the first to notice all the above sorts of change, as it is their job to be hyper-aware of ecosystem shifts. But publishers far removed from SEO who never focused on SEO are now writing about the trends SEOs were writing about nearly a decade ago. Josh Marshall recently covered Google's awesome monopoly powers.

few publishers really want to talk about the depths or mechanics of Google's role in news publishing. Some of this is secrecy about proprietary information; most of it is that Google could destroy or profoundly damage most publications if it wanted to. So why rock the boat? ... Google's monopoly control is almost comically great. It's a monopoly at every conceivable turn and consistently uses that market power to deepen its hold and increase its profits. Just the interplay between DoubleClick and Adexchange is textbook anti-competitive practices. ... Is your favorite website laying off staff or 'pivoting to video'. In most cases, the root cause is not entirely but to a significant degree driven by the platform monopolies

His article details how Google owns many points of the supply chain

So let's go down the list: 1) The system for running ads, 2) the top purchaser of ads, 3) the most pervasive audience data service, 4) all search, 5) our email. ... But wait, there's more! Google also owns Chrome, the most used browser for visiting TPM.

He also covers the price dumping technique that is used to maintain control

In many cases, alternatives don't exist because no business can get a footing with a product Google lets people use for free.

And he shared an example of Google algorithms gone astray crippling his business, even though it was not related to search & unintentional:

Because we were forwarding to ourselves spam that other people sent to us, Google decided that the owner of the TPM url was a major spammer and blocked emails from TPM from being sent to anyone.

If the above comes across as depressing, don't worry. The search results now contain a depression diagnostic testing tool.

Categories: 

internet

from SEO book AnthyHayesYT http://ift.tt/2yT7sCR via Going Here

[emmagarciarest]

Virtual Real Estate

Wrastlin With The News The current presidential cabinet includes a WWE co-founder & this passes for modern political discourse: #FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017 CNN promised vengeance. Something To Believe In The pretense of objectivity has been dropped: These reporters aren’t ideologues. They’re just right-thinking people who lean left. Somewhere along the line, they stopped pretending to be objective about Trump. … People don’t just disagree with each other. They can’t imagine how a decent caring human being could disagree with their own view of race or the minimum wage or immigration or Trump. Being a member of the virtuous tribe means not only carrying the correct card in your wallet to reassure yourself. You have to also believe that the people carrying any other card are irrational, or worse, evil. They’re not people to engage in conversation with. They are barriers to be ignored or pushed aside on the virtuous path to paradise. This intolerance and inability to imagine the virtue of the other side is the road to tyranny and chaos. It dehumanizes a good chunk of humanity and that in turn justifies the worst atrocities human beings are capable of. The WSJ, typically a right-leaning publication, is differentiating their coverage of the president from most other outlets by attempting to be somewhat neutral. The news is fake. Even historically left-leaning people are disgusted with outlets like CNN. “I think the president is probably right to say, like, look you are witch-hunting me. You have no smoking gun, you have no real proof.” - CNN supervising producer John Bonifield “When you do shitty reporting like CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times & Rachel Maddow especially. When you do that & it is revealed to be bullshit, what you’re doing is building up Trump. There’s no greater way to build up Trump than to falsely report on him. There’s no better way to build up Trump than to make him the victim.” - Jimmy Dore “Rachel Maddow was given the facts, she ignored them, & she kept right on going. That’s MSNBC, that’s CNN, that’s the New York Times, the Washington Post - they’re all horrible. That’s why we had the Iraq war. That’s why we have the Syria war. That’s why we are still in Afghanistan. That’s why we had Libya. That’s why we have the biggest income disparity since the gilded age. Meanwhile we are spending more on the military than the rest of the world.” - Jimmy Dore And, since people need something to believe in, there are new American Gods: “A half hour of cable news delivers enough psychic trauma for a whole year. The newspapers are talking of nothing but treason, espionage, investigations, protests.” … “Stocks are rallying because of how little faith we have in the government. The Mega Blue Chip Corporation is the new Sovereign.” Current Headwinds for Online Publishing I struggle to keep up with the accelerating rate of change. A number of common themes in the current ecosystem are: We are moving toward a world where more things are becoming fake (only accelerated by the demonetization of neutrality & the algorithmic boost associated with reliably delivering confirmation bias in an algorithmic or manual fashion) risk keeps being radiated outward to the individual while monopoly platforms capture the spoils (forced-place health insurance purchases where the insurance company arbitrarily drops the sick member on the policy even though that is supposed to be illegal, more temp jobs where people don’t get enough hours to get health insurance through their employer, under-funded pensions, outsourcing of core business functions to sweatshops where part-time workers don’t get paid for dozens to hundreds of hours of required training & get to watch beheading videos all day) the barrier to entry keeps increasing (increased marketing cost due to brand bias, heavy ad loads on dominant platforms, & central platforms making partners do “bet the farm” moves in how they adjust distribution to drive adoption of proprietary formats & temporarily over-promote select content formats) the increasing chunk size of competition is making it much harder for individuals to build sustainable businesses. (Yes the tools of the trade are improving quickly, BUT the central platforms are demonetizing the adjacent fields faster than publishing tools & business options improve.) In Europe publishers are aggressively leaning on regulators to try to rebalance power. Some of this stuff is cyclical. About a decade ago the European Commission went after Microsoft for bundling Internet Explorer. Google complained about the monopolistic practices to ensure Microsoft was fined. And we’ve went from that to a web where Google syndicates native ads that blend into page content while directly funding robot journalism. And then Google is ranking the robot-generated crap too. Speaking of robot journalists, check out the top 3 results for this query. All 3 are auto-written by automated insights (AI software). Yikes pic.twitter.com/ltFGFXHNiF— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 8, 2017 But to keep the ecosystem clean & spam free, Google is also planning to leverage their web browser to further dictate the terms of online publishing. Chrome will block autoplay audio & will automatically reroute .dev domains to https. Cutting edge developers suggest using a web browser other than Google Chrome to prevent proprietary lock in across the web. Is this a test, @Google? pic.twitter.com/V9FZ2hL2cA— TNW (@TheNextWeb) September 5, 2017 While Google distributes their Chrome browser as unwanted bundleware, other web browsers must display uninstall links front & center when trying to gain awareness of their product using Google AdWords. Microsoft Edge is coming to Android, but without a BrowserChoice.eu screen it is unlikely most users will change their web browser as most are unaware of what a web browser even is, let alone the limitations of any of them or the tracking embedded in them. If you go back several years, there was celebration of the fact that the cost of doing a startup was so low. You didn’t have to pay Oracle a million dollars for a server license any more. You didn’t even have to rack your own hardware. Now you can just dial it up on Amazon. But there are now these gatekeepers and toll-takers. Back in 2004, you had the wide-open internet. - Jeremy Stoppelman The Mobile Revolution If you are an anti-social work at home webmaster who has dual monitors it is easy to dismiss cell phones as inefficient and chalk most mobile usage up to the following. Russian man visited Chinese click farm.They make fake ratings for mobile apps and things like this.He said they have 10,000 more phones pic.twitter.com/qE96vgCCsi— English Russia (@EnglishRussia1) May 11, 2017 The reality is cell phones are more powerful than they seem if you are strictly consuming rather than working. Deflationary impact of technology: everything in this Radio Shack flyer from 1991 adds up to $3,285.12 and can be done today on a smartphone pic.twitter.com/ONh3waWVgq— Jeffrey Kleintop (@JeffreyKleintop) June 23, 2017 And that is how the unstoppable quickly becomes the extinct! 10 years ago. pic.twitter.com/ZCWfHfpedi— Harry Tucker (@harrytuckerr) September 11, 2017 Many people the world over are addicted to their cell phones to where viral game makers are self-regulating before regulators step in: “From Tuesday, users below 12 years of age will be limited to one hour of play time each day, while those aged between 12 years and 18 years will be limited to two hours a day, Tencent said.” While China is using their various tools to clamp down on Honour of Kings, Tencent is bringing the game to the west, which makes blocking VPN services (with Apple’s help - they must play along or have the phones reduced to bricks) & requiring local data storage & technology transfer more important. Anything stored locally can be easily disappeared: “China’s already formidable internet censors have demonstrated a new strength-the ability to delete images in one-on-one chats as they are being transmitted, making them disappear before receivers see them.” China has banned live streaming, threatened their largest domestic social networks, shut down chat bots, require extensive multimedia review: “an industry association circulated new regulations that at least two "auditors” will, with immediate effect, be required to check all audiovisual content posted online" AND they force users to install spyware on their devices. In spite of all those restrictions, last year “Chinese consumers spent $5.5 trillion through mobile payment platforms, about 50 times more than their American counterparts.” In the last quarter Baidu had Â¥20.87 billion in revenues, with 72% of their revenues driven by mobile. People can not miss that which they’ve never seen, thus platform socialism works. Those who doubt it will be tracked & scored accordingly. History, as well, can be scrubbed. And insurance companies watch everything in real-time - careful what you post. The watchful eye of the Chinese pre-crime team is also looking over every move. Last quarter Facebook had revenues of $9.164 billion, with 87% coming from mobile devices. pic.twitter.com/JlPBSlmKlw— banksy (@thereaIbanksy) September 16, 2017 Simulacrum has ALMOST been perfected: “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.” … “Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.” … “Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.” pic.twitter.com/QBLBXIDDLK— banksy (@thereaIbanksy) August 24, 2017 The web is becoming easier to get addicted to due to personalization algorithms that reinforce our worldviews even as they make us feel more isolated and left out. And the barrier to entry for consumers into one of the few central gatekeeper ecosystems is dropping like a rock due to the falling cost of mobile devices, coupled with with images & video displacing text making literacy optional. As we become more “connected” we feel more isolated: “Social isolation, loneliness or living alone was each a significant factor contributing to premature death. And each one of these factors was a more significant risk factor for dying than obesity. … No one knows precisely why loneliness is surging, threatening the lives of many millions of people, but it does seem that the burgeoning use of technology may have something to do with it. Personally, I would contend that technology may be the chief factor fueling it.” The primary role of the big data mining companies is leveraging surveillance for social engineering Unsettling that according to Mark Zuckerberg purpose of Facebook is forced social engineering. From “World Without Mind” by Franklin Foer: pic.twitter.com/CHRnefg9m2— Murtaza Hussain (@MazMHussain) October 8, 2017 App Annie expects the global app economy to be worth $6.3 trillion by 2021. The reason those numbers can easily sound fake & mobile can seem overblown is how highly concentrated usage has become: “over 80 percent of consumer time on mobile devices is now spent on the apps, websites and properties” of just five companies: Facebook, Google, Apple, Yelp and Bing. Maslow 2.0 pic.twitter.com/X1OguQG8Gq— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) October 7, 2017 eMarketer stated Google will have more mobile ad revenue than desktop ad revenue in the US this year. They also predicted Google & Facebook will consume over 2/3 of US online ad spend within 2 years. The central network operators not only maintain an outsized share of revenues, but also maintain an outsized share of profits. When the home team gets a 30% rake of any sale it is hard for anyone else to compete. Even after buying and gutting Motorola Google bought part of HTC for $1.1 billion. The game plan has never changed: commoditize the compliment to ensure user data & most of the profits flow to Google. Put up arbitrary roadblocks for competing services while launching free parallel offerings to drive lock-in. For the last YEAR I’ve been battling App Store rejections - we made an app called Animoji with animated emojis…now I know why. https://t.co/jKJXfLMGj2— Ryan Jones (@rjonesy) September 9, 2017 Central data aggregators can keep collecting more user data & offer more granular ad distribution features. They can tell you that this micro moment RIGHT NOW is make or break: it’s intended to create a bizarre sense of panic among marketers - “OMG, we have to be present at every possible instant someone might be looking at their phone!” - which doesn’t help them think strategically or make the best use of their marketing or ad spend. The reality is that if you don’t have a relationship with a person on their desktop computer they probably don’t want your mobile app either. If you have the relationship then mobile only increases profits. Is iOS 11 specifically designed to make your older iPhones unusable and drain your battery so you have to upgrade to the newest phones?— Eric Jackson (@ericjackson) October 7, 2017 Many people attempting to build “the next mobile” will go bust, but wherever the attention flows the ads will follow. Those with a broad & dominant tech platform can copy features from single-category devices and keep integrating them into their core products to increase user lock-in. And they can build accessories for those core devices while prohibiting the flow of data to third party devices to keep users locked into their ecosystem. Smaller Screens, Shallower Attention People often multi-task while using mobile devices. Powerful stuff …An very fucking true pic.twitter.com/enP98Z6B7r— Nev (@LFCNev) July 13, 2017 When multi-tasking it is easier to accidentally click an ad. This happens 10s of billions of times a year: This year, in-app mobile ad spend will reach $45.3 billion, up $11 billion from last year, according to eMarketer. And apps are where the money is at for mobile advertising, comprising 80 percent of all U.S. media dollars spent on mobile. But multi-tasking means doing almost everything else worse. The “always on” mode not only increases isolation, but also lowers our ability to focus: “while our phones offer convenience and diversion, they also breed anxiety. Their extraordinary usefulness gives them an unprecedented hold on our attention and vast influence over our thinking and behavior. … Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren’t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens. … when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline. … As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased. … Anticipating that information would be readily available in digital form seemed to reduce the mental effort that people made to remember it. … people are all too quick to credit lies and half-truths spread through social media by Russian agents and other bad actors. If your phone has sapped your powers of discernment, you’ll believe anything it tells you.” Further, the shallow attention stream makes it easy to displace content with ads: 4 Ads 3 map carrousel results 5 organic results 4 Ads Then “see more results” 4 more Ads 5 organic results 4 more Ads On desktop devices people don’t accidentally misclick on ads at anywhere near the rate they fat thumb ads on mobile devices. Desktop ad clicks convert to purchases. Mobile ad clicks convert to ad budget burned: “marketers are still seeing few shoppers purchasing on mobile. The 52% of share in traffic only has 26% share of revenue.” For traditional publishers mobile users drastically under-monetize desktop users due to drastically lower conversion rates (true for almost everyone in ecommerce outside of Amazon perhaps) limited cross-device tracking (how do you track people who don’t even hit your site but hit a cached page hosted via Google AMP or Facebook Instant Articles?) lower ad load allowed on publisher sites due to limited screen size aggressive filtering of fat thumb ad clicks on partner sites from central ad networks For the central network operators almost all the above are precisely the exact opposite. higher ad CTR by making entire interface ads (& perhaps even disappearing the concept of non-ads in the result set) great cross-device user tracking higher ad load allowed by the small screen size pushing content below the fold more lenient filtering of fat thumb accidental ad clicks If you look at raw stats without understanding the underlying impact, it is easy to believe the ecosystem is healthy. Assumption: Google’s ads are more prominent, so organic must be dying.Reality: As of Oct. 2016, 20X more organic clicks than paid ones. pic.twitter.com/FaEBpBZWSw— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) July 1, 2017 However the huge number of “no click” results are demonetizing easy publisher revenues, which have traditionally helped to fund more in-depth investigative reporting. Further, much of the direct navigation which happened in the past is now being passed through brand-related search result pages. You can argue that is an increase in search traffic, or you can argue it is shifting the roll of the address bar from navigation to search. The first page is nothing but ads Yep, and here they are in Philly. Home service ads, then AdWords traditional ads, then the local pack (way down below). :) pic.twitter.com/VOVZPWWHsg— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 17, 2017 On mobile so is the second, and most of the third Hey, only 2.5 screens before you get to the 10 blue links. A full 4 screens if you cannot crack the top 2 organics. pic.twitter.com/bbm1pz8hyF— Jeremy Bochenek (@J_Bochenek) July 17, 2017 If a search query has lots of easy to structure crap around it, a user might need 6 or 7 scrolls to get to an organic result Very interesting Google SERP for GoT. One barely visible organic result after >70% scroll depth. Oh my… #seo #GameOfThones pic.twitter.com/Z6j7VvJMI4— Bastian Grimm (@basgr) August 24, 2017 Then if third parties go “well Google does this, so I should too” they are considered a low quality user experience and get a penalty. Emailed a client one month ago when I picked up ultra-aggressive ads (especially on mobile). They just received an ad experiences warning. pic.twitter.com/QLLZci1xKW— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 25, 2017 31% ad coverage on mobile website is excessive / spam / low quality user experience for a publisher, while 301% coverage is reasonable for the central network operators. Google not only displaces the result set, but also leverages their search suggestion features & algorithmic influence to alter how people search & what they search for. Ads are getting integrated into mobile keyboards. The standard keyboard on the HTC 10 has begun showing ads [X-Post from r/mildlyinfuriating] https://t.co/FuXDJzilZ6 #blog pic.twitter.com/VriK54dBHb— Android Facts (@manatweets) July 16, 2017 And when a user finally reaches the publisher’s website (provided they scroll past the ads, the AMP listings, and all the other scrape-n-displace trash) then when they finally land on a publication Google will overlay other recommended articles from other sites. Whoa -> While you’re reading a page on the Google app for iOS, you’ll now see suggestions for related content https://t.co/n6FjkNqx82 pic.twitter.com/DZYTt8T7fI— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 19, 2017 That feature will eventually end up including ads in it, where publishers will get 0.00% of the revenue generated. Remember how Google suggested publishers should make their websites faster, remove ads, remove clutter, etc. What was the point of all that? To create free real estate for Google to insert a spam unit into your website? Continuing coverage of Google’s new content recos. I’m sure Best Buy is thrilled to see Amazon show up while someone is on their page. Ouch. pic.twitter.com/qpDyGKPyYh— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 24, 2017 This wouldn’t be bad if mobile were a small, fringe slice of traffic, but it is becoming the majority of traffic. And as mobile increases desktop traffic is shrinking. Even politically biased outlets that appear to be nearly perfectly optimized for a filter bubble that promotes identity politics struggle to make the numbers work: “As a result of continued decline in direct advertising, [Salon’s] total revenue in the fiscal year 2017 decreased by 34% to $4.6 million. Following the market trend, 84% of our advertising revenue in fiscal year 2017 was generated by programmatic selling. … [Monthly unique visitors to our website saw] a decrease of 23%. We attribute the decline primarily to the changes in the algorithms used by Facebook.” I knew the last year was bad for online publishing, but the Salon 10K shows *just how bad* pic.twitter.com/oyH7pdCDNI— josh laurito (@joshlaurito) June 26, 2017 The above sorts of numbers are the logical outcome to this: we’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content"above-the-fold" can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward. Especially when combined with this: As you scroll through it, you are then given travel ads for flight options through Google Flight search, hotels through Google Hotel search and restaurants through Google Local results. Then towards the bottom of the knowledge graph card, all the way at the end in a small grayish font, you have a link to “see web results.” Bad news for TripAdvisor. Google has squeezed out SEO for travel. PCLN/EXPE SEM $ spend and higher conversion is a massive competitive advantage. Bad news for TRIP. pic.twitter.com/39QkxuN780— modest proposal (@modestproposal1) April 17, 2017 And amongst the good news for Expedia, there’s also a bit of bad news for Expedia. The hotels are fighting Airbnb & OTAs. In travel Google is twice as big as the biggest OTA players. They keep eating more SERP real estate and adding more content behind tabs. On mobile they’ll even disappear the concept of organic results. Room previews in the search results not only means that second tier players are worth a song, but even the new growth players propped up by aggressive ad buying eventually hit a wall and see their stock crash. As the entire ecosystem gets squeezed by middlemen and the market gets obfuscated with an incomplete selection it is ultimately consumers who lose: “Reservations made through Internet discount sites are almost always slated for our worst rooms.” The New York Times pitched Yelp as a pesky player holding a grudge: “For six years, his company has been locked in a campaign on three continents to get antitrust regulators to punish Google, Yelp’s larger, richer and more politically connected competitor. … Yelp concluded that there was no better way to get Google’s attention than to raise the specter of regulation. … something [Mark Mahaney] calls the Death of Free Google. As the internet has migrated to mobile phones, Google has compensated for the smaller screen space by filling it with so many ads that users can have a hard time finding a result that hasn’t been paid for.” In spite of how quick The New York Times was to dismiss Yelp, the monopoly platforms are stiffing competition & creativity while bundling fake reviews & junk features into their core platforms. People can literally switch their name to “Loop dee Loop” and leave you terrible, fake reviews. Google’s lack of effort & investment to clean up trash in their local services department highlights that they don’t feel they need to compete on quality. Pay for core search distribution, throw an inferior service front & center, and win by default placement. As AI advancements make fake reviews look more legit Google’s lack of investment in creating a quality ecosystem will increasingly harm both consumers and businesses. Many low margin businesses will go under simply because their Google reviews are full of inaccurate trash or a competitor decided to hijack their business listing or list their business as closed. To this day Google is still egregiously stealing content from Yelp: Yelp said it investigated and found that over one hour, Google pulled images from Yelp’s servers nearly 386,000 times for business listings in Google Maps, which Google exempted from its promise to not scrape content. Yelp then searched Google for 150 of the businesses from those map listings and found that for 110 of them, Google used a Yelp photo as the lead image in the businesses’ listings in search results. Stealing content & wrapping it in fake reviews is NOT putting the user first. Facebook has their own matching parallel shifts. The aggregate quality of mobile ad clicks is quite low. So as mobile becomes a much higher percent of total ad clicks, those who don’t have scale and narrative control are reduced to taking whatever they can get. And mainstream media outlets are reduced to writing puff pieces so the brands they cover will pay to promote the stories on the main channels. As programmatic advertising, ad blockers, unpatched Android-powered botnets & malware spread each day gets a little uglier for everyone but the central market operators. It is so bad that some of the central market operators offer surveillance apps which claim to protect user privacy! Other app makers not connected to monopoly profit streams monetize any way they can. The narrative of growth can be sold (we are launching a new food channel, we are investing in our internal video team, we have exclusive real estate listings, and, um, we acquired a food channel) but the competition is a zero sum game with Google & Facebook eating off the publisher’s plates. That’s why Time is trying to shave $400 million off their expenses & wants to sell their magazine division. Newspaper companies are selling for $1. It is also why Business Insider is no longer chasing growth & the New York Times is setting up a charitable trust. The rise of ad blocking only accelerates the underlying desperation. I have some thoughts about why news orgs are finding that people won’t read long articles: pic.twitter.com/G8Zh6GTA6w— Ben Chase (@bbchase) July 4, 2017 I feel terrible for journalists who invest time and effort into doing a hard job well only to have it presented like this. pic.twitter.com/jIZxuJqVAq— Jeff Long (@banterability) October 5, 2017 As long as news websites make their own customer experience worse than what can be found as a cached copy on the monopoly platforms there is no reason to visit the end publisher website. That is why the proprietary formats promoted by the monopoly platforms are so dangerous. They force lighter monetization & offset the lack of revenue by given preferential placement: click through rate from Google search went from 5.9% (Regular) to 10.3% (AMP), and average search position went from 5.9 (Regular) to 1.7 (AMP). Since then, we have deployed AMP across fifteen of our brands and we have been very pleased with the results. Today, AMP accounts for 79% of our mobile search traffic and 36% of our total mobile visits. As long as almost nobody is using the new proprietary, ghetto lock-in format the math may work out there, but once many people adopt it then it becomes another recurring sunk cost with no actual benefit: the only voices promoting AMP’s performance benefits are coming from inside Google. … given how AMP pages are privileged in Google’s search results, the net effect of the team’s hard, earnest work comes across as a corporate-backed attempt to rewrite HTML in Google’s image. Even if you get a slight uptick in traffic from AMP, it will lead to lower quality user engagement as users are browsing across websites rather than within websites. Getting a bit more traffic but 59% fewer leads is a fail. No amount of collaborative publisher partnerships, begging for anti-trust exemptions, or whining about Google is going to fix the problem. “The only way publishers can address this inexorable threat is by banding together. If they open a unified front to negotiate with Google and Facebook-pushing for stronger intellectual-property protections, better support for subscription models and a fair share of revenue and data-they could build a more sustainable future for the news business. But antitrust laws make such coordination perilous. These laws, intended to prevent monopolies, are having the unintended effect of preserving and protecting Google and Facebook’s dominant position.” Wait a minute. Wasn’t it the New York Times which claimed Yelp was holding an arbitrary grudge against Google? The following sounds a lot more desperate: newspapers that once delivered their journalism with their own trucks increasingly have to rely on these big online platforms to get their articles in front of people, fighting for attention alongside fake news, websites that lift their content, and cat videos. Well maybe that is just smaller publications & not the gray lady herself “the temperature is rising in terms of concern, and in some cases anger, about what seems like a very asymmetric, disadvantageous relationship between the publishers and the very big digital platforms.” - NYT CEO Mark Thompson In unrelated news, there’s another round of layoffs coming at the New York Times. And the New York Times is also setting up a nonprofit division to expand journalism while their core company focuses on something else. Apparently Yelp does not qualify as a publisher in this instance. Or does it? The Times is backing the move for what is called an anticompetitive safe haven, in part, Mr. Thompson said, “because we care about the whole of journalism as well as about The New York Times.” Ah, whole of journalism, which, apparently, no longer includes local business coverage. You know the slogan: “news isn’t news, unless it isn’t local.” The struggles are all across the media landscape. The new Boston Globe CEO lasted a half-year. The San Diego Union-Tribune resorted to using GoFundMe. The Chicago Sun-Times sold for $1. Moody’s issued a negative outlook for the US newspaper sector. As the industry declines the biggest players view consolidation as the only solution. These struggles existed even before the largest brand advertisers like P&G cut back on low & no value ad venues like YouTube: In the fourth quarter, the reduction in marketing that occurred was almost all in the digital space. And what it reflected was a choice to cut spending from a digital standpoint where it was ineffective: where either we were serving bots as opposed to human beings, or where the placement of ads was not facilitating the equity of our brands. Google & Facebook are extending their grip on the industry with Google launching topical feeds & Facebook wanting to control subscription management. Best of luck to journalists on the employment front: The initiative, dubbed Reporters and Data and Robots (RADAR), will see a team of five journalists work with Natural Language Generation software to produce over 30,000 pieces of content for local media each month. Hopefully editors catch the subtle errors the bots make, because most of them will not be this obvious & stupid. The Guardian does not seem to know what a 40 is https://t.co/m7Gm1YrbXC pic.twitter.com/Y0sK9r0ltJ— Shuja Haider (@shujaxhaider) July 26, 2017 The cost of parasitic content recycling is coming down quickly: In a show of strength last year, Microsoft used thousands of these chips at once to translate all of English Wikipedia into Spanish-3 billion words across five million articles-in less than a tenth of a second. Next Microsoft will let its cloud customers use these chips to speed up their own AI tasks. Voice search makes it even easier to extract the rewards without paying publishers. Throwing pennies at journalists does nothing to change this. If Google is subsidizing robotic journalism they are thus legitimizing robotic journalism. As big publishers employ the tactic, Google ranks it. Checking some Heliograf articles (AI-written) reveals once again they do rank well. Google is in a tough position here. It’s inevitable… pic.twitter.com/g0Etcx3rFj— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 16, 2017 It is almost impossible to compete economically with an entity that rewrites your work & has zero marginal cost of production. YouTube has perhaps the worst comments on the web. Some mainstream news sites got rid of comments because they couldn’t justify the cost of policing them. That in turn shifts the audience & attention stream to sites like Facebook & Twitter. Some news sites which are still leaving comments enabled rely on a Google filter, a technology Google can use on YouTube as they see fit. Any plugins publishers use to lower their costs can later disappear. It looked like FindTheBest was doing well financially, but when it was acquired many news sites quickly found out the cost of free as they now have thousands of broken articles in their archives: “Last month, Graphiq announced that features for news publishers would no longer be available after Friday.” Driving costs toward zero by piling on external dependencies is no way to build a sustainable business. Especially when the central network operators are eating the playing field: “Between fast-loading AMP articles from major news brands hosted in its domain, full pages of information scraped from outside sites that don’t require you to visit them, basic shopping functions built into ads, YouTube, and a host of other features, the Google-verse is more of a digital walled garden than ever. … If Google continues to choke these sites out, what incentive will there be for new ones to come along?” Unprofitable partners which were buying growth with artificially cheap pricing eventually find out investors want profits more than growth & either reprice or go away. The longer you use something & the more locked in you are to it the more aggressively it can afford to reprice. Symbiotic relationships devolve into abusive ones: “for every pound an advertiser spends programmatically on the Guardian only 30 pence actually goes to the publisher.” - Mediatel “Google wants to cut out the middlemen, which it turns out, are URLs.” - MobileMoxie “[AMP is] a way for Google to obfuscate your website, usurp your content & remove any personal credibility from the web” - TheRegister “Though the stated initiative of ads.txt is to stop inventory resale, it achieves this by establishing ‘preferred’ channels, which naturally favors the industry’s most influential companies” - Ad Exchanger That Apple does extra work to undo AMP says a lot. Those who think the central network operators are naive to the power structure being promoted by the faux solutions are either chasing short-term goals or are incredibly masochistic. Arbitraging brand is the core business model of the attention merchant monopoly. we’ve found out that 98% of our business was coming from 22 words. So, wait, we’re buying 3,200 words and 98% of the business is coming from 22 words. What are the 22 words? And they said, well, it’s the word Restoration Hardware and the 21 ways to spell it wrong, okay? Publishers buying the “speed” narrative are failing themselves. The Guardian has 11 people working on AMP integration. And what is Google doing about speed? Google shut down Google Instant search results, often displays a screen or two full of ads which mobile users have to scroll past to find the organic search results AND is testing auto-playing videos in the search results. Facebook is also promoting fast loading & mobile-friendly pages. To keep bleeding clicks out of the “organic” ecosystem they don’t even need to have explicit malicious intent. They can run a thousand different tests every month (new vertical sitelink formats, swipable sitelinks, showing 8 sitelinks on tiny mobile devices, MOAR sitelinks, message extensions, extensions on call-only ads, price discount labels, frame 3rd party content inline, dramatically ramp up featured snippets +QnA listings, more related searches, more features in ad units, larger ad units, ad units that replace websites & charge advertisers for sending clicks from Google to Google, launch a meta-search service where they over-promote select listings, test dropping URLs from listings, put ads in the local pack, change color of source links or other elements, pop ups of search results inside search results, etc.) & keep moving toward whatever layout drives more ad clicks, keeps users on Google longer & forces businesses to buy ads for exposure, claiming they are optimizing the user experience the whole time. They can hard-code any data type or feature, price it at free to de-fund adjacent businesses, consolidate market power, then increase rents after they have a monopoly position in the adjacent market. And they can fund research on how to remove watermarks from images. Why not make hosting free, get people to publish into a proprietary format & try to shift news reading onto the Google app. With enough attention & market coverage they can further extort publishers into accepting perpetually worse deals. And free analytics & business plugins which are widely adopted can have key features get pushed into the paid version. Just look at Google Analytics - its free or $150,000+/yr. The above sorts of moves can be done in isolation, or in a combinatorial approach. Publishers aloof of the ecosystem shifts may use microformats to structure their content. They’ll then find it is integrated in Google’s new image search layout, where Google copies the content wholesale & shows it near other third party images framed by Google. How about some visually striking, yet irrelevant listings for competing brands on branded searches to force the brand ad buy. And, of course rounded card corners to eat a few more pixels, along with faint ad labeling on ads coupled with vibrant colored dots on the organic results to confuse end users into thinking the organic results are the ads. While Google turns their search results into an adspam farm, they invite you to test showing fewer ads on your site to improve user experience. Google knows best - let them automate your ad load & ad placement. What is the real risk of AI? Bias. “It’s important that we be transparent about the training data that we are using, and are looking for hidden biases in it, otherwise we are building biased systems,” Giannandrea added. “If someone is trying to sell you a black box system for medical decision support, and you don’t know how it works or what data was used to train it, then I wouldn’t trust it.” And how does Google justify their AI investments? Through driving incremental ad clicks: “The DeepMind founders understand that their power within [Alphabet], and their ability to get their way with [Alphabet CEO] Larry Page, depends on how many eyeballs and clicks and ad dollars they can claim to be driving” No bias at all there! Truth: Google killed publishing in 2015. What you’re reading now is detritus + new junk posted by crazies walking around empty offices— 11 (@searchsleuth998) August 1, 2017 SEOs who were overly reliant on the search channel were the first to notice all the above sorts of change, as it is their job to be hyper-aware of ecosystem shifts. But publishers far removed from SEO who never focused on SEO are now writing about the trends SEOs were writing about nearly a decade ago. Josh Marshall recently covered Google’s awesome monopoly powers. few publishers really want to talk about the depths or mechanics of Google’s role in news publishing. Some of this is secrecy about proprietary information; most of it is that Google could destroy or profoundly damage most publications if it wanted to. So why rock the boat? … Google’s monopoly control is almost comically great. It’s a monopoly at every conceivable turn and consistently uses that market power to deepen its hold and increase its profits. Just the interplay between DoubleClick and Adexchange is textbook anti-competitive practices. … Is your favorite website laying off staff or 'pivoting to video’. In most cases, the root cause is not entirely but to a significant degree driven by the platform monopolies His article details how Google owns many points of the supply chain So let’s go down the list: 1) The system for running ads, 2) the top purchaser of ads, 3) the most pervasive audience data service, 4) all search, 5) our email. … But wait, there’s more! Google also owns Chrome, the most used browser for visiting TPM. He also covers the price dumping technique that is used to maintain control In many cases, alternatives don’t exist because no business can get a footing with a product Google lets people use for free. And he shared an example of Google algorithms gone astray crippling his business, even though it was not related to search & unintentional: Because we were forwarding to ourselves spam that other people sent to us, Google decided that the owner of the TPM url was a major spammer and blocked emails from TPM from being sent to anyone. If the above comes across as depressing, don’t worry. The search results now contain a depression diagnostic testing tool. Categories: internet from SEO Book http://www.seobook.com/virtual-real-estate via IFTTT from Tumblr http://localseoguru.tumblr.com/post/166227650323/virtual-real-estate via IFTTT from Local SEO Guru http://thelocalseoguru.blogspot.com/2017/10/virtual-real-estate.html via IFTTT from Blogger http://buyvipbids.blogspot.com/2017/10/virtual-real-estate.html via IFTTT

[evasalinasrest]

Virtual Real Estate

Wrastlin With The News The current presidential cabinet includes a WWE co-founder & this passes for modern political discourse:

#FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017

CNN promised vengeance.

Something To Believe In The pretense of objectivity has been dropped:

These reporters aren’t ideologues. They’re just right-thinking people who lean left. Somewhere along the line, they stopped pretending to be objective about Trump. … People don’t just disagree with each other. They can’t imagine how a decent caring human being could disagree with their own view of race or the minimum wage or immigration or Trump. Being a member of the virtuous tribe means not only carrying the correct card in your wallet to reassure yourself. You have to also believe that the people carrying any other card are irrational, or worse, evil. They’re not people to engage in conversation with. They are barriers to be ignored or pushed aside on the virtuous path to paradise. This intolerance and inability to imagine the virtue of the other side is the road to tyranny and chaos. It dehumanizes a good chunk of humanity and that in turn justifies the worst atrocities human beings are capable of.

The WSJ, typically a right-leaning publication, is differentiating their coverage of the president from most other outlets by attempting to be somewhat neutral.

The news is fake. Even historically left-leaning people are disgusted with outlets like CNN.

“I think the president is probably right to say, like, look you are witch-hunting me. You have no smoking gun, you have no real proof.” – CNN supervising producer John Bonifield “When you do shitty reporting like CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times & Rachel Maddow especially. When you do that & it is revealed to be bullshit, what you’re doing is building up Trump. There’s no greater way to build up Trump than to falsely report on him. There’s no better way to build up Trump than to make him the victim.” – Jimmy Dore “Rachel Maddow was given the facts, she ignored them, & she kept right on going. That’s MSNBC, that’s CNN, that’s the New York Times, the Washington Post – they’re all horrible. That’s why we had the Iraq war. That’s why we have the Syria war. That’s why we are still in Afghanistan. That’s why we had Libya. That’s why we have the biggest income disparity since the gilded age. Meanwhile we are spending more on the military than the rest of the world.” – Jimmy Dore And, since people need something to believe in, there are new American Gods:

“A half hour of cable news delivers enough psychic trauma for a whole year. The newspapers are talking of nothing but treason, espionage, investigations, protests.” … “Stocks are rallying because of how little faith we have in the government. The Mega Blue Chip Corporation is the new Sovereign.”

Current Headwinds for Online Publishing I struggle to keep up with the accelerating rate of change. A number of common themes in the current ecosystem are:

We are moving toward a world where more things are becoming fake (only accelerated by the demonetization of neutrality & the algorithmic boost associated with reliably delivering confirmation bias in an algorithmic or manual fashion) risk keeps being radiated outward to the individual while monopoly platforms capture the spoils (forced-place health insurance purchases where the insurance company arbitrarily drops the sick member on the policy even though that is supposed to be illegal, more temp jobs where people don’t get enough hours to get health insurance through their employer, under-funded pensions, outsourcing of core business functions to sweatshops where part-time workers don’t get paid for dozens to hundreds of hours of required training & get to watch beheading videos all day) the barrier to entry keeps increasing (increased marketing cost due to brand bias, heavy ad loads on dominant platforms, & central platforms making partners do “bet the farm” moves in how they adjust distribution to drive adoption of proprietary formats & temporarily over-promote select content formats) the increasing chunk size of competition is making it much harder for individuals to build sustainable businesses. (Yes the tools of the trade are improving quickly, BUT the central platforms are demonetizing the adjacent fields faster than publishing tools & business options improve.) In Europe publishers are aggressively leaning on regulators to try to rebalance power. Some of this stuff is cyclical. About a decade ago the European Commission went after Microsoft for bundling Internet Explorer. Google complained about the monopolistic practices to ensure Microsoft was fined. And we’ve went from that to a web where Google syndicates native ads that blend into page content while directly funding robot journalism. And then Google is ranking the robot-generated crap too.

Speaking of robot journalists, check out the top 3 results for this query. All 3 are auto-written by automated insights (AI software). Yikes pic.twitter.com/ltFGFXHNiF— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 8, 2017

But to keep the ecosystem clean & spam free, Google is also planning to leverage their web browser to further dictate the terms of online publishing. Chrome will block autoplay audio & will automatically reroute .dev domains to https. Cutting edge developers suggest using a web browser other than Google Chrome to prevent proprietary lock in across the web.

Is this a test, @Google? pic.twitter.com/V9FZ2hL2cA— TNW (@TheNextWeb) September 5, 2017

While Google distributes their Chrome browser as unwanted bundleware, other web browsers must display uninstall links front & center when trying to gain awareness of their product using Google AdWords. Microsoft Edge is coming to Android, but without a BrowserChoice.eu screen it is unlikely most users will change their web browser as most are unaware of what a web browser even is, let alone the limitations of any of them or the tracking embedded in them.

If you go back several years, there was celebration of the fact that the cost of doing a startup was so low. You didn’t have to pay Oracle a million dollars for a server license any more. You didn’t even have to rack your own hardware. Now you can just dial it up on Amazon. But there are now these gatekeepers and toll-takers. Back in 2004, you had the wide-open internet. – Jeremy Stoppelman

The Mobile Revolution If you are an anti-social work at home webmaster who has dual monitors it is easy to dismiss cell phones as inefficient and chalk most mobile usage up to the following.

Russian man visited Chinese click farm.They make fake ratings for mobile apps and things like this.He said they have 10,000 more phones pic.twitter.com/qE96vgCCsi— English Russia (@EnglishRussia1) May 11, 2017

The reality is cell phones are more powerful than they seem if you are strictly consuming rather than working.

Deflationary impact of technology: everything in this Radio Shack flyer from 1991 adds up to $3,285.12 and can be done today on a smartphone pic.twitter.com/ONh3waWVgq— Jeffrey Kleintop (@JeffreyKleintop) June 23, 2017

And that is how the unstoppable quickly becomes the extinct!

10 years ago. pic.twitter.com/ZCWfHfpedi— Harry Tucker (@harrytuckerr) September 11, 2017

Many people the world over are addicted to their cell phones to where viral game makers are self-regulating before regulators step in: “From Tuesday, users below 12 years of age will be limited to one hour of play time each day, while those aged between 12 years and 18 years will be limited to two hours a day, Tencent said.”

While China is using their various tools to clamp down on Honour of Kings, Tencent is bringing the game to the west, which makes blocking VPN services (with Apple’s help – they must play along or have the phones reduced to bricks) & requiring local data storage & technology transfer more important. Anything stored locally can be easily disappeared: “China’s already formidable internet censors have demonstrated a new strength-the ability to delete images in one-on-one chats as they are being transmitted, making them disappear before receivers see them.”

China has banned live streaming, threatened their largest domestic social networks, shut down chat bots, require extensive multimedia review: “an industry association circulated new regulations that at least two “auditors” will, with immediate effect, be required to check all audiovisual content posted online” AND they force users to install spyware on their devices.

In spite of all those restrictions, last year “Chinese consumers spent $5.5 trillion through mobile payment platforms, about 50 times more than their American counterparts.” In the last quarter Baidu had Â¥20.87 billion in revenues, with 72% of their revenues driven by mobile.

People can not miss that which they’ve never seen, thus platform socialism works. Those who doubt it will be tracked & scored accordingly.

History, as well, can be scrubbed. And insurance companies watch everything in real-time – careful what you post. The watchful eye of the Chinese pre-crime team is also looking over every move.

Last quarter Facebook had revenues of $9.164 billion, with 87% coming from mobile devices.

pic.twitter.com/JlPBSlmKlw— banksy (@thereaIbanksy) September 16, 2017

Simulacrum has ALMOST been perfected:

“We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.” … “Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.” … “Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.”

pic.twitter.com/QBLBXIDDLK— banksy (@thereaIbanksy) August 24, 2017

The web is becoming easier to get addicted to due to personalization algorithms that reinforce our worldviews even as they make us feel more isolated and left out. And the barrier to entry for consumers into one of the few central gatekeeper ecosystems is dropping like a rock due to the falling cost of mobile devices, coupled with with images & video displacing text making literacy optional. As we become more “connected” we feel more isolated:

“Social isolation, loneliness or living alone was each a significant factor contributing to premature death. And each one of these factors was a more significant risk factor for dying than obesity. … No one knows precisely why loneliness is surging, threatening the lives of many millions of people, but it does seem that the burgeoning use of technology may have something to do with it. Personally, I would contend that technology may be the chief factor fueling it.”

The primary role of the big data mining companies is leveraging surveillance for social engineering

Unsettling that according to Mark Zuckerberg purpose of Facebook is forced social engineering. From “World Without Mind” by Franklin Foer: pic.twitter.com/CHRnefg9m2— Murtaza Hussain (@MazMHussain) October 8, 2017

App Annie expects the global app economy to be worth $6.3 trillion by 2021.

The reason those numbers can easily sound fake & mobile can seem overblown is how highly concentrated usage has become: “over 80 percent of consumer time on mobile devices is now spent on the apps, websites and properties” of just five companies: Facebook, Google, Apple, Yelp and Bing.

Maslow 2.0 pic.twitter.com/X1OguQG8Gq— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) October 7, 2017

eMarketer stated Google will have more mobile ad revenue than desktop ad revenue in the US this year. They also predicted Google & Facebook will consume over 2/3 of US online ad spend within 2 years.

The central network operators not only maintain an outsized share of revenues, but also maintain an outsized share of profits. When the home team gets a 30% rake of any sale it is hard for anyone else to compete. Even after buying and gutting Motorola Google bought part of HTC for $1.1 billion. The game plan has never changed: commoditize the compliment to ensure user data & most of the profits flow to Google. Put up arbitrary roadblocks for competing services while launching free parallel offerings to drive lock-in.

For the last YEAR I’ve been battling App Store rejections – we made an app called Animoji with animated emojis…now I know why. https://t.co/jKJXfLMGj2— Ryan Jones (@rjonesy) September 9, 2017

Central data aggregators can keep collecting more user data & offer more granular ad distribution features. They can tell you that this micro moment RIGHT NOW is make or break:

it’s intended to create a bizarre sense of panic among marketers – “OMG, we have to be present at every possible instant someone might be looking at their phone!” – which doesn’t help them think strategically or make the best use of their marketing or ad spend.

The reality is that if you don’t have a relationship with a person on their desktop computer they probably don’t want your mobile app either.

If you have the relationship then mobile only increases profits.

Is iOS 11 specifically designed to make your older iPhones unusable and drain your battery so you have to upgrade to the newest phones?— Eric Jackson (@ericjackson) October 7, 2017

Many people attempting to build “the next mobile” will go bust, but wherever the attention flows the ads will follow.

Those with a broad & dominant tech platform can copy features from single-category devices and keep integrating them into their core products to increase user lock-in. And they can build accessories for those core devices while prohibiting the flow of data to third party devices to keep users locked into their ecosystem.

Smaller Screens, Shallower Attention People often multi-task while using mobile devices.

Powerful stuff …An very fucking true pic.twitter.com/enP98Z6B7r— Nev (@LFCNev) July 13, 2017

When multi-tasking it is easier to accidentally click an ad. This happens 10s of billions of times a year:

This year, in-app mobile ad spend will reach $45.3 billion, up $11 billion from last year, according to eMarketer. And apps are where the money is at for mobile advertising, comprising 80 percent of all U.S. media dollars spent on mobile.

But multi-tasking means doing almost everything else worse. The “always on” mode not only increases isolation, but also lowers our ability to focus:

“while our phones offer convenience and diversion, they also breed anxiety. Their extraordinary usefulness gives them an unprecedented hold on our attention and vast influence over our thinking and behavior. … Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren’t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens. … when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline. … As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased. … Anticipating that information would be readily available in digital form seemed to reduce the mental effort that people made to remember it. … people are all too quick to credit lies and half-truths spread through social media by Russian agents and other bad actors. If your phone has sapped your powers of discernment, you’ll believe anything it tells you.”

Further, the shallow attention stream makes it easy to displace content with ads:

4 Ads

3 map carrousel results

5 organic results

4 Ads

Then “see more results”

4 more Ads

5 organic results

4 more Ads

On desktop devices people don’t accidentally misclick on ads at anywhere near the rate they fat thumb ads on mobile devices.

Desktop ad clicks convert to purchases. Mobile ad clicks convert to ad budget burned: “marketers are still seeing few shoppers purchasing on mobile. The 52% of share in traffic only has 26% share of revenue.”

For traditional publishers mobile users drastically under-monetize desktop users due to

drastically lower conversion rates (true for almost everyone in ecommerce outside of Amazon perhaps) limited cross-device tracking (how do you track people who don’t even hit your site but hit a cached page hosted via Google AMP or Facebook Instant Articles?) lower ad load allowed on publisher sites due to limited screen size aggressive filtering of fat thumb ad clicks on partner sites from central ad networks For the central network operators almost all the above are precisely the exact opposite.

higher ad CTR by making entire interface ads (& perhaps even disappearing the concept of non-ads in the result set) great cross-device user tracking higher ad load allowed by the small screen size pushing content below the fold more lenient filtering of fat thumb accidental ad clicks If you look at raw stats without understanding the underlying impact, it is easy to believe the ecosystem is healthy.

Assumption: Google’s ads are more prominent, so organic must be dying.Reality: As of Oct. 2016, 20X more organic clicks than paid ones. pic.twitter.com/FaEBpBZWSw— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) July 1, 2017

However the huge number of “no click” results are demonetizing easy publisher revenues, which have traditionally helped to fund more in-depth investigative reporting. Further, much of the direct navigation which happened in the past is now being passed through brand-related search result pages. You can argue that is an increase in search traffic, or you can argue it is shifting the roll of the address bar from navigation to search.

The first page is nothing but ads

Yep, and here they are in Philly. Home service ads, then AdWords traditional ads, then the local pack (way down below). pic.twitter.com/VOVZPWWHsg— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 17, 2017

On mobile so is the second, and most of the third

Hey, only 2.5 screens before you get to the 10 blue links. A full 4 screens if you cannot crack the top 2 organics. pic.twitter.com/bbm1pz8hyF— Jeremy Bochenek (@J_Bochenek) July 17, 2017

If a search query has lots of easy to structure crap around it, a user might need 6 or 7 scrolls to get to an organic result

Very interesting Google SERP for GoT. One barely visible organic result after >70% scroll depth. Oh my… #seo #GameOfThones pic.twitter.com/Z6j7VvJMI4— Bastian Grimm (@basgr) August 24, 2017

Then if third parties go “well Google does this, so I should too” they are considered a low quality user experience and get a penalty.

Emailed a client one month ago when I picked up ultra-aggressive ads (especially on mobile). They just received an ad experiences warning. pic.twitter.com/QLLZci1xKW— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 25, 2017

31% ad coverage on mobile website is excessive / spam / low quality user experience for a publisher, while 301% coverage is reasonable for the central network operators.

Google not only displaces the result set, but also leverages their search suggestion features & algorithmic influence to alter how people search & what they search for.

Ads are getting integrated into mobile keyboards.

The standard keyboard on the HTC 10 has begun showing ads [X-Post from r/mildlyinfuriating] https://t.co/FuXDJzilZ6 #blog pic.twitter.com/VriK54dBHb— Android Facts (@manatweets) July 16, 2017

And when a user finally reaches the publisher’s website (provided they scroll past the ads, the AMP listings, and all the other scrape-n-displace trash) then when they finally land on a publication Google will overlay other recommended articles from other sites.

Whoa -> While you’re reading a page on the Google app for iOS, you’ll now see suggestions for related content https://t.co/n6FjkNqx82 pic.twitter.com/DZYTt8T7fI— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 19, 2017

That feature will eventually end up including ads in it, where publishers will get 0.00% of the revenue generated.

Remember how Google suggested publishers should make their websites faster, remove ads, remove clutter, etc. What was the point of all that? To create free real estate for Google to insert a spam unit into your website?

Continuing coverage of Google’s new content recos. I’m sure Best Buy is thrilled to see Amazon show up while someone is on their page. Ouch. pic.twitter.com/qpDyGKPyYh— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 24, 2017

This wouldn’t be bad if mobile were a small, fringe slice of traffic, but it is becoming the majority of traffic. And as mobile increases desktop traffic is shrinking.

Even politically biased outlets that appear to be nearly perfectly optimized for a filter bubble that promotes identity politics struggle to make the numbers work: “As a result of continued decline in direct advertising, [Salon’s] total revenue in the fiscal year 2017 decreased by 34% to $4.6 million. Following the market trend, 84% of our advertising revenue in fiscal year 2017 was generated by programmatic selling. … [Monthly unique visitors to our website saw] a decrease of 23%. We attribute the decline primarily to the changes in the algorithms used by Facebook.”

I knew the last year was bad for online publishing, but the Salon 10K shows *just how bad* pic.twitter.com/oyH7pdCDNI— josh laurito (@joshlaurito) June 26, 2017

The above sorts of numbers are the logical outcome to this:

we’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content”above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.

Especially when combined with this:

As you scroll through it, you are then given travel ads for flight options through Google Flight search, hotels through Google Hotel search and restaurants through Google Local results. Then towards the bottom of the knowledge graph card, all the way at the end in a small grayish font, you have a link to “see web results.”

Bad news for TripAdvisor.

Google has squeezed out SEO for travel. PCLN/EXPE SEM $ spend and higher conversion is a massive competitive advantage. Bad news for TRIP. pic.twitter.com/39QkxuN780— modest proposal (@modestproposal1) April 17, 2017

And amongst the good news for Expedia, there’s also a bit of bad news for Expedia. The hotels are fighting Airbnb & OTAs. In travel Google is twice as big as the biggest OTA players. They keep eating more SERP real estate and adding more content behind tabs. On mobile they’ll even disappear the concept of organic results.

Room previews in the search results not only means that second tier players are worth a song, but even the new growth players propped up by aggressive ad buying eventually hit a wall and see their stock crash.

As the entire ecosystem gets squeezed by middlemen and the market gets obfuscated with an incomplete selection it is ultimately consumers who lose: “Reservations made through Internet discount sites are almost always slated for our worst rooms.”

The New York Times pitched Yelp as a pesky player holding a grudge:

“For six years, his company has been locked in a campaign on three continents to get antitrust regulators to punish Google, Yelp’s larger, richer and more politically connected competitor. … Yelp concluded that there was no better way to get Google’s attention than to raise the specter of regulation. … something [Mark Mahaney] calls the Death of Free Google. As the internet has migrated to mobile phones, Google has compensated for the smaller screen space by filling it with so many ads that users can have a hard time finding a result that hasn’t been paid for.”

In spite of how quick The New York Times was to dismiss Yelp, the monopoly platforms are stiffing competition & creativity while bundling fake reviews & junk features into their core platforms.

People can literally switch their name to “Loop dee Loop”

and leave you terrible, fake reviews.

Google’s lack of effort & investment to clean up trash in their local services department highlights that they don’t feel they need to compete on quality. Pay for core search distribution, throw an inferior service front & center, and win by default placement.

As AI advancements make fake reviews look more legit Google’s lack of investment in creating a quality ecosystem will increasingly harm both consumers and businesses. Many low margin businesses will go under simply because their Google reviews are full of inaccurate trash or a competitor decided to hijack their business listing or list their business as closed.

To this day Google is still egregiously stealing content from Yelp:

Yelp said it investigated and found that over one hour, Google pulled images from Yelp’s servers nearly 386,000 times for business listings in Google Maps, which Google exempted from its promise to not scrape content. Yelp then searched Google for 150 of the businesses from those map listings and found that for 110 of them, Google used a Yelp photo as the lead image in the businesses’ listings in search results.

Stealing content & wrapping it in fake reviews is NOT putting the user first.

Facebook has their own matching parallel shifts.

The aggregate quality of mobile ad clicks is quite low. So as mobile becomes a much higher percent of total ad clicks, those who don’t have scale and narrative control are reduced to taking whatever they can get. And mainstream media outlets are reduced to writing puff pieces so the brands they cover will pay to promote the stories on the main channels.

As programmatic advertising, ad blockers, unpatched Android-powered botnets & malware spread each day gets a little uglier for everyone but the central market operators. It is so bad that some of the central market operators offer surveillance apps which claim to protect user privacy! Other app makers not connected to monopoly profit streams monetize any way they can.

The narrative of growth can be sold (we are launching a new food channel, we are investing in our internal video team, we have exclusive real estate listings, and, um, we acquired a food channel) but the competition is a zero sum game with Google & Facebook eating off the publisher’s plates.

That’s why Time is trying to shave $400 million off their expenses & wants to sell their magazine division. Newspaper companies are selling for $1. It is also why Business Insider is no longer chasing growth & the New York Times is setting up a charitable trust.

The rise of ad blocking only accelerates the underlying desperation.

I have some thoughts about why news orgs are finding that people won’t read long articles: pic.twitter.com/G8Zh6GTA6w— Ben Chase (@bbchase) July 4, 2017

I feel terrible for journalists who invest time and effort into doing a hard job well only to have it presented like this. pic.twitter.com/jIZxuJqVAq— Jeff Long (@banterability) October 5, 2017

As long as news websites make their own customer experience worse than what can be found as a cached copy on the monopoly platforms there is no reason to visit the end publisher website. That is why the proprietary formats promoted by the monopoly platforms are so dangerous. They force lighter monetization & offset the lack of revenue by given preferential placement:

click through rate from Google search went from 5.9% (Regular) to 10.3% (AMP), and average search position went from 5.9 (Regular) to 1.7 (AMP). Since then, we have deployed AMP across fifteen of our brands and we have been very pleased with the results. Today, AMP accounts for 79% of our mobile search traffic and 36% of our total mobile visits.

As long as almost nobody is using the new proprietary, ghetto lock-in format the math may work out there, but once many people adopt it then it becomes another recurring sunk cost with no actual benefit:

the only voices promoting AMP’s performance benefits are coming from inside Google. … given how AMP pages are privileged in Google’s search results, the net effect of the team’s hard, earnest work comes across as a corporate-backed attempt to rewrite HTML in Google’s image.

Even if you get a slight uptick in traffic from AMP, it will lead to lower quality user engagement as users are browsing across websites rather than within websites. Getting a bit more traffic but 59% fewer leads is a fail.

No amount of collaborative publisher partnerships, begging for anti-trust exemptions, or whining about Google is going to fix the problem.

“The only way publishers can address this inexorable threat is by banding together. If they open a unified front to negotiate with Google and Facebook-pushing for stronger intellectual-property protections, better support for subscription models and a fair share of revenue and data-they could build a more sustainable future for the news business. But antitrust laws make such coordination perilous. These laws, intended to prevent monopolies, are having the unintended effect of preserving and protecting Google and Facebook’s dominant position.”

Wait a minute.

Wasn’t it the New York Times which claimed Yelp was holding an arbitrary grudge against Google?

The following sounds a lot more desperate:

newspapers that once delivered their journalism with their own trucks increasingly have to rely on these big online platforms to get their articles in front of people, fighting for attention alongside fake news, websites that lift their content, and cat videos.

Well maybe that is just smaller publications & not the gray lady herself

“the temperature is rising in terms of concern, and in some cases anger, about what seems like a very asymmetric, disadvantageous relationship between the publishers and the very big digital platforms.” – NYT CEO Mark Thompson

In unrelated news, there’s another round of layoffs coming at the New York Times.

And the New York Times is also setting up a nonprofit division to expand journalism while their core company focuses on something else.

Apparently Yelp does not qualify as a publisher in this instance.

Or does it?

The Times is backing the move for what is called an anticompetitive safe haven, in part, Mr. Thompson said, “because we care about the whole of journalism as well as about The New York Times.”

Ah, whole of journalism, which, apparently, no longer includes local business coverage.

You know the slogan: “news isn’t news, unless it isn’t local.”

The struggles are all across the media landscape. The new Boston Globe CEO lasted a half-year. The San Diego Union-Tribune resorted to using GoFundMe. The Chicago Sun-Times sold for $1. Moody’s issued a negative outlook for the US newspaper sector. As the industry declines the biggest players view consolidation as the only solution.

These struggles existed even before the largest brand advertisers like P&G cut back on low & no value ad venues like YouTube:

In the fourth quarter, the reduction in marketing that occurred was almost all in the digital space. And what it reflected was a choice to cut spending from a digital standpoint where it was ineffective: where either we were serving bots as opposed to human beings, or where the placement of ads was not facilitating the equity of our brands.

Google & Facebook are extending their grip on the industry with Google launching topical feeds & Facebook wanting to control subscription management.

Best of luck to journalists on the employment front:

The initiative, dubbed Reporters and Data and Robots (RADAR), will see a team of five journalists work with Natural Language Generation software to produce over 30,000 pieces of content for local media each month.

Hopefully editors catch the subtle errors the bots make, because most of them will not be this obvious & stupid.

The Guardian does not seem to know what a 40 is https://t.co/m7Gm1YrbXC pic.twitter.com/Y0sK9r0ltJ— Shuja Haider (@shujaxhaider) July 26, 2017

The cost of parasitic content recycling is coming down quickly:

In a show of strength last year, Microsoft used thousands of these chips at once to translate all of English Wikipedia into Spanish-3 billion words across five million articles-in less than a tenth of a second. Next Microsoft will let its cloud customers use these chips to speed up their own AI tasks.

Voice search makes it even easier to extract the rewards without paying publishers. Throwing pennies at journalists does nothing to change this.

If Google is subsidizing robotic journalism they are thus legitimizing robotic journalism. As big publishers employ the tactic, Google ranks it.

Checking some Heliograf articles (AI-written) reveals once again they do rank well. Google is in a tough position here. It’s inevitable… pic.twitter.com/g0Etcx3rFj— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 16, 2017

It is almost impossible to compete economically with an entity that rewrites your work & has zero marginal cost of production.

YouTube has perhaps the worst comments on the web. Some mainstream news sites got rid of comments because they couldn’t justify the cost of policing them. That in turn shifts the audience & attention stream to sites like Facebook & Twitter. Some news sites which are still leaving comments enabled rely on a Google filter, a technology Google can use on YouTube as they see fit.

Any plugins publishers use to lower their costs can later disappear. It looked like FindTheBest was doing well financially, but when it was acquired many news sites quickly found out the cost of free as they now have thousands of broken articles in their archives: “Last month, Graphiq announced that features for news publishers would no longer be available after Friday.”

Driving costs toward zero by piling on external dependencies is no way to build a sustainable business. Especially when the central network operators are eating the playing field:

“Between fast-loading AMP articles from major news brands hosted in its domain, full pages of information scraped from outside sites that don’t require you to visit them, basic shopping functions built into ads, YouTube, and a host of other features, the Google-verse is more of a digital walled garden than ever. … If Google continues to choke these sites out, what incentive will there be for new ones to come along?”

Unprofitable partners which were buying growth with artificially cheap pricing eventually find out investors want profits more than growth & either reprice or go away. The longer you use something & the more locked in you are to it the more aggressively it can afford to reprice. Symbiotic relationships devolve into abusive ones:

“for every pound an advertiser spends programmatically on the Guardian only 30 pence actually goes to the publisher.” – Mediatel “Google wants to cut out the middlemen, which it turns out, are URLs.” – MobileMoxie “[AMP is] a way for Google to obfuscate your website, usurp your content & remove any personal credibility from the web” – TheRegister “Though the stated initiative of ads.txt is to stop inventory resale, it achieves this by establishing ‘preferred’ channels, which naturally favors the industry’s most influential companies” – Ad Exchanger That Apple does extra work to undo AMP says a lot.

Those who think the central network operators are naive to the power structure being promoted by the faux solutions are either chasing short-term goals or are incredibly masochistic.

Arbitraging brand is the core business model of the attention merchant monopoly.

we’ve found out that 98% of our business was coming from 22 words. So, wait, we’re buying 3,200 words and 98% of the business is coming from 22 words. What are the 22 words? And they said, well, it’s the word Restoration Hardware and the 21 ways to spell it wrong, okay?

Publishers buying the “speed” narrative are failing themselves. The Guardian has 11 people working on AMP integration. And what is Google doing about speed? Google shut down Google Instant search results, often displays a screen or two full of ads which mobile users have to scroll past to find the organic search results AND is testing auto-playing videos in the search results.

Facebook is also promoting fast loading & mobile-friendly pages.

To keep bleeding clicks out of the “organic” ecosystem they don’t even need to have explicit malicious intent. They can run a thousand different tests every month (new vertical sitelink formats, swipable sitelinks, showing 8 sitelinks on tiny mobile devices, MOAR sitelinks, message extensions, extensions on call-only ads, price discount labels, frame 3rd party content inline, dramatically ramp up featured snippets +QnA listings, more related searches, more features in ad units, larger ad units, ad units that replace websites & charge advertisers for sending clicks from Google to Google, launch a meta-search service where they over-promote select listings, test dropping URLs from listings, put ads in the local pack, change color of source links or other elements, pop ups of search results inside search results, etc.) & keep moving toward whatever layout drives more ad clicks, keeps users on Google longer & forces businesses to buy ads for exposure, claiming they are optimizing the user experience the whole time.

They can hard-code any data type or feature, price it at free to de-fund adjacent businesses, consolidate market power, then increase rents after they have a monopoly position in the adjacent market.

And they can fund research on how to remove watermarks from images.

Why not make hosting free, get people to publish into a proprietary format & try to shift news reading onto the Google app. With enough attention & market coverage they can further extort publishers into accepting perpetually worse deals. And free analytics & business plugins which are widely adopted can have key features get pushed into the paid version. Just look at Google Analytics – its free or $150,000+/yr.

The above sorts of moves can be done in isolation, or in a combinatorial approach. Publishers aloof of the ecosystem shifts may use microformats to structure their content. They’ll then find it is integrated in Google’s new image search layout, where Google copies the content wholesale & shows it near other third party images framed by Google.

How about some visually striking, yet irrelevant listings for competing brands on branded searches to force the brand ad buy. And, of course rounded card corners to eat a few more pixels, along with faint ad labeling on ads coupled with vibrant colored dots on the organic results to confuse end users into thinking the organic results are the ads.

While Google turns their search results into an adspam farm, they invite you to test showing fewer ads on your site to improve user experience. Google knows best – let them automate your ad load & ad placement.

What is the real risk of AI? Bias.

“It’s important that we be transparent about the training data that we are using, and are looking for hidden biases in it, otherwise we are building biased systems,” Giannandrea added. “If someone is trying to sell you a black box system for medical decision support, and you don’t know how it works or what data was used to train it, then I wouldn’t trust it.”

And how does Google justify their AI investments? Through driving incremental ad clicks: “The DeepMind founders understand that their power within [Alphabet], and their ability to get their way with [Alphabet CEO] Larry Page, depends on how many eyeballs and clicks and ad dollars they can claim to be driving”

No bias at all there!

Truth: Google killed publishing in 2015. What you’re reading now is detritus + new junk posted by crazies walking around empty offices— 11 (@searchsleuth998) August 1, 2017

SEOs who were overly reliant on the search channel were the first to notice all the above sorts of change, as it is their job to be hyper-aware of ecosystem shifts. But publishers far removed from SEO who never focused on SEO are now writing about the trends SEOs were writing about nearly a decade ago. Josh Marshall recently covered Google’s awesome monopoly powers.

few publishers really want to talk about the depths or mechanics of Google’s role in news publishing. Some of this is secrecy about proprietary information; most of it is that Google could destroy or profoundly damage most publications if it wanted to. So why rock the boat? … Google’s monopoly control is almost comically great. It’s a monopoly at every conceivable turn and consistently uses that market power to deepen its hold and increase its profits. Just the interplay between DoubleClick and Adexchange is textbook anti-competitive practices. … Is your favorite website laying off staff or ‘pivoting to video’. In most cases, the root cause is not entirely but to a significant degree driven by the platform monopolies

His article details how Google owns many points of the supply chain

So let’s go down the list: 1) The system for running ads, 2) the top purchaser of ads, 3) the most pervasive audience data service, 4) all search, 5) our email. … But wait, there’s more! Google also owns Chrome, the most used browser for visiting TPM.

He also covers the price dumping technique that is used to maintain control

In many cases, alternatives don’t exist because no business can get a footing with a product Google lets people use for free.

And he shared an example of Google algorithms gone astray crippling his business, even though it was not related to search & unintentional:

Because we were forwarding to ourselves spam that other people sent to us, Google decided that the owner of the TPM url was a major spammer and blocked emails from TPM from being sent to anyone.

If the above comes across as depressing, don’t worry. The search results now contain a depression diagnostic testing tool.

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Virtual Real Estate

Wrastlin With The News

The current presidential cabinet includes a WWE co-founder & this passes for modern political discourse:

#FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017

CNN promised vengeance.

Something To Believe In

The pretense of objectivity has been dropped:

These reporters aren’t ideologues. They’re just right-thinking people who lean left. Somewhere along the line, they stopped pretending to be objective about Trump. … People don’t just disagree with each other. They can’t imagine how a decent caring human being could disagree with their own view of race or the minimum wage or immigration or Trump. Being a member of the virtuous tribe means not only carrying the correct card in your wallet to reassure yourself. You have to also believe that the people carrying any other card are irrational, or worse, evil. They’re not people to engage in conversation with. They are barriers to be ignored or pushed aside on the virtuous path to paradise. This intolerance and inability to imagine the virtue of the other side is the road to tyranny and chaos. It dehumanizes a good chunk of humanity and that in turn justifies the worst atrocities human beings are capable of.

The WSJ, typically a right-leaning publication, is differentiating their coverage of the president from most other outlets by attempting to be somewhat neutral.

The news is fake. Even historically left-leaning people are disgusted with outlets like CNN.

“I think the president is probably right to say, like, look you are witch-hunting me. You have no smoking gun, you have no real proof.” - CNN supervising producer John Bonifield

“When you do shitty reporting like CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times & Rachel Maddow especially. When you do that & it is revealed to be bullshit, what you’re doing is building up Trump. There’s no greater way to build up Trump than to falsely report on him. There’s no better way to build up Trump than to make him the victim.” - Jimmy Dore

“Rachel Maddow was given the facts, she ignored them, & she kept right on going. That’s MSNBC, that’s CNN, that’s the New York Times, the Washington Post - they’re all horrible. That’s why we had the Iraq war. That’s why we have the Syria war. That’s why we are still in Afghanistan. That’s why we had Libya. That’s why we have the biggest income disparity since the gilded age. Meanwhile we are spending more on the military than the rest of the world.” - Jimmy Dore

And, since people need something to believe in, there are new American Gods:

“A half hour of cable news delivers enough psychic trauma for a whole year. The newspapers are talking of nothing but treason, espionage, investigations, protests.” … “Stocks are rallying because of how little faith we have in the government. The Mega Blue Chip Corporation is the new Sovereign.”

Current Headwinds for Online Publishing

I struggle to keep up with the accelerating rate of change. A number of common themes in the current ecosystem are:

We are moving toward a world where more things are becoming fake (only accelerated by the demonetization of neutrality & the algorithmic boost associated with reliably delivering confirmation bias in an algorithmic or manual fashion)

risk keeps being radiated outward to the individual while monopoly platforms capture the spoils (forced-place health insurance purchases where the insurance company arbitrarily drops the sick member on the policy even though that is supposed to be illegal, more temp jobs where people don’t get enough hours to get health insurance through their employer, under-funded pensions, outsourcing of core business functions to sweatshops where part-time workers don’t get paid for dozens to hundreds of hours of required training & get to watch beheading videos all day)

the barrier to entry keeps increasing (increased marketing cost due to brand bias, heavy ad loads on dominant platforms, & central platforms making partners do “bet the farm” moves in how they adjust distribution to drive adoption of proprietary formats & temporarily over-promote select content formats)

the increasing chunk size of competition is making it much harder for individuals to build sustainable businesses. (Yes the tools of the trade are improving quickly, BUT the central platforms are demonetizing the adjacent fields faster than publishing tools & business options improve.)

In Europe publishers are aggressively leaning on regulators to try to rebalance power.

Some of this stuff is cyclical. About a decade ago the European Commission went after Microsoft for bundling Internet Explorer. Google complained about the monopolistic practices to ensure Microsoft was fined. And we’ve went from that to a web where Google syndicates native ads that blend into page content while directly funding robot journalism. And then Google is ranking the robot-generated crap too.

Speaking of robot journalists, check out the top 3 results for this query. All 3 are auto-written by automated insights (AI software). Yikes pic.twitter.com/ltFGFXHNiF— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 8, 2017

But to keep the ecosystem clean & spam free, Google is also planning to leverage their web browser to further dictate the terms of online publishing. Chrome will block autoplay audio & will automatically reroute .dev domains to https. Cutting edge developers suggest using a web browser other than Google Chrome to prevent proprietary lock in across the web.

Is this a test, @Google? pic.twitter.com/V9FZ2hL2cA— TNW (@TheNextWeb) September 5, 2017

While Google distributes their Chrome browser as unwanted bundleware, other web browsers must display uninstall links front & center when trying to gain awareness of their product using Google AdWords. Microsoft Edge is coming to Android, but without a BrowserChoice.eu screen it is unlikely most users will change their web browser as most are unaware of what a web browser even is, let alone the limitations of any of them or the tracking embedded in them.

If you go back several years, there was celebration of the fact that the cost of doing a startup was so low. You didn’t have to pay Oracle a million dollars for a server license any more. You didn’t even have to rack your own hardware. Now you can just dial it up on Amazon. But there are now these gatekeepers and toll-takers. Back in 2004, you had the wide-open internet. - Jeremy Stoppelman

The Mobile Revolution

If you are an anti-social work at home webmaster who has dual monitors it is easy to dismiss cell phones as inefficient and chalk most mobile usage up to the following.

Russian man visited Chinese click farm.They make fake ratings for mobile apps and things like this.He said they have 10,000 more phones pic.twitter.com/qE96vgCCsi— English Russia (@EnglishRussia1) May 11, 2017

The reality is cell phones are more powerful than they seem if you are strictly consuming rather than working.

Deflationary impact of technology: everything in this Radio Shack flyer from 1991 adds up to $3,285.12 and can be done today on a smartphone pic.twitter.com/ONh3waWVgq— Jeffrey Kleintop (@JeffreyKleintop) June 23, 2017

And that is how the unstoppable quickly becomes the extinct!

10 years ago. pic.twitter.com/ZCWfHfpedi— Harry Tucker (@harrytuckerr) September 11, 2017

Many people the world over are addicted to their cell phones to where viral game makers are self-regulating before regulators step in: “From Tuesday, users below 12 years of age will be limited to one hour of play time each day, while those aged between 12 years and 18 years will be limited to two hours a day, Tencent said.”

While China is using their various tools to clamp down on Honour of Kings, Tencent is bringing the game to the west, which makes blocking VPN services (with Apple’s help - they must play along or have the phones reduced to bricks) & requiring local data storage & technology transfer more important. Anything stored locally can be easily disappeared: “China’s already formidable internet censors have demonstrated a new strength-the ability to delete images in one-on-one chats as they are being transmitted, making them disappear before receivers see them.”

China has banned live streaming, threatened their largest domestic social networks, shut down chat bots, require extensive multimedia review: “an industry association circulated new regulations that at least two "auditors” will, with immediate effect, be required to check all audiovisual content posted online" AND they force users to install spyware on their devices.

In spite of all those restrictions, last year “Chinese consumers spent $5.5 trillion through mobile payment platforms, about 50 times more than their American counterparts.” In the last quarter Baidu had Â¥20.87 billion in revenues, with 72% of their revenues driven by mobile.

People can not miss that which they’ve never seen, thus platform socialism works. Those who doubt it will be tracked & scored accordingly.

History, as well, can be scrubbed. And insurance companies watch everything in real-time - careful what you post. The watchful eye of the Chinese pre-crime team is also looking over every move.

Last quarter Facebook had revenues of $9.164 billion, with 87% coming from mobile devices.

pic.twitter.com/JlPBSlmKlw— banksy (@thereaIbanksy) September 16, 2017

Simulacrum has ALMOST been perfected:

“We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.” … “Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.” … “Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.”

pic.twitter.com/QBLBXIDDLK— banksy (@thereaIbanksy) August 24, 2017

The web is becoming easier to get addicted to due to personalization algorithms that reinforce our worldviews even as they make us feel more isolated and left out. And the barrier to entry for consumers into one of the few central gatekeeper ecosystems is dropping like a rock due to the falling cost of mobile devices, coupled with with images & video displacing text making literacy optional. As we become more “connected” we feel more isolated:

“Social isolation, loneliness or living alone was each a significant factor contributing to premature death. And each one of these factors was a more significant risk factor for dying than obesity. … No one knows precisely why loneliness is surging, threatening the lives of many millions of people, but it does seem that the burgeoning use of technology may have something to do with it. Personally, I would contend that technology may be the chief factor fueling it.”

The primary role of the big data mining companies is leveraging surveillance for social engineering

Unsettling that according to Mark Zuckerberg purpose of Facebook is forced social engineering. From “World Without Mind” by Franklin Foer: pic.twitter.com/CHRnefg9m2— Murtaza Hussain (@MazMHussain) October 8, 2017

App Annie expects the global app economy to be worth $6.3 trillion by 2021.

The reason those numbers can easily sound fake & mobile can seem overblown is how highly concentrated usage has become: “over 80 percent of consumer time on mobile devices is now spent on the apps, websites and properties” of just five companies: Facebook, Google, Apple, Yelp and Bing.

Maslow 2.0 pic.twitter.com/X1OguQG8Gq— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) October 7, 2017

eMarketer stated Google will have more mobile ad revenue than desktop ad revenue in the US this year. They also predicted Google & Facebook will consume over 2/3 of US online ad spend within 2 years.

The central network operators not only maintain an outsized share of revenues, but also maintain an outsized share of profits. When the home team gets a 30% rake of any sale it is hard for anyone else to compete. Even after buying and gutting Motorola Google bought part of HTC for $1.1 billion. The game plan has never changed: commoditize the compliment to ensure user data & most of the profits flow to Google. Put up arbitrary roadblocks for competing services while launching free parallel offerings to drive lock-in.

For the last YEAR I’ve been battling App Store rejections - we made an app called Animoji with animated emojis…now I know why. https://t.co/jKJXfLMGj2— Ryan Jones (@rjonesy) September 9, 2017

Central data aggregators can keep collecting more user data & offer more granular ad distribution features. They can tell you that this micro moment RIGHT NOW is make or break:

it’s intended to create a bizarre sense of panic among marketers - “OMG, we have to be present at every possible instant someone might be looking at their phone!” - which doesn’t help them think strategically or make the best use of their marketing or ad spend.

The reality is that if you don’t have a relationship with a person on their desktop computer they probably don’t want your mobile app either.

If you have the relationship then mobile only increases profits.

Is iOS 11 specifically designed to make your older iPhones unusable and drain your battery so you have to upgrade to the newest phones?— Eric Jackson (@ericjackson) October 7, 2017

Many people attempting to build “the next mobile” will go bust, but wherever the attention flows the ads will follow.

Those with a broad & dominant tech platform can copy features from single-category devices and keep integrating them into their core products to increase user lock-in. And they can build accessories for those core devices while prohibiting the flow of data to third party devices to keep users locked into their ecosystem.

Smaller Screens, Shallower Attention

People often multi-task while using mobile devices.

Powerful stuff …An very fucking true pic.twitter.com/enP98Z6B7r— Nev (@LFCNev) July 13, 2017

When multi-tasking it is easier to accidentally click an ad. This happens 10s of billions of times a year:

This year, in-app mobile ad spend will reach $45.3 billion, up $11 billion from last year, according to eMarketer. And apps are where the money is at for mobile advertising, comprising 80 percent of all U.S. media dollars spent on mobile.

But multi-tasking means doing almost everything else worse. The “always on” mode not only increases isolation, but also lowers our ability to focus:

“while our phones offer convenience and diversion, they also breed anxiety. Their extraordinary usefulness gives them an unprecedented hold on our attention and vast influence over our thinking and behavior. … Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren’t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens. … when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline. … As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased. … Anticipating that information would be readily available in digital form seemed to reduce the mental effort that people made to remember it. … people are all too quick to credit lies and half-truths spread through social media by Russian agents and other bad actors. If your phone has sapped your powers of discernment, you’ll believe anything it tells you.”

Further, the shallow attention stream makes it easy to displace content with ads:

4 Ads 3 map carrousel results 5 organic results 4 Ads

Then “see more results”

4 more Ads 5 organic results 4 more Ads

On desktop devices people don’t accidentally misclick on ads at anywhere near the rate they fat thumb ads on mobile devices.

Desktop ad clicks convert to purchases. Mobile ad clicks convert to ad budget burned: “marketers are still seeing few shoppers purchasing on mobile. The 52% of share in traffic only has 26% share of revenue.”

For traditional publishers mobile users drastically under-monetize desktop users due to

drastically lower conversion rates (true for almost everyone in ecommerce outside of Amazon perhaps)

limited cross-device tracking (how do you track people who don’t even hit your site but hit a cached page hosted via Google AMP or Facebook Instant Articles?)

lower ad load allowed on publisher sites due to limited screen size

aggressive filtering of fat thumb ad clicks on partner sites from central ad networks

For the central network operators almost all the above are precisely the exact opposite.

higher ad CTR by making entire interface ads (& perhaps even disappearing the concept of non-ads in the result set)

great cross-device user tracking

higher ad load allowed by the small screen size pushing content below the fold

more lenient filtering of fat thumb accidental ad clicks

If you look at raw stats without understanding the underlying impact, it is easy to believe the ecosystem is healthy.

Assumption: Google’s ads are more prominent, so organic must be dying.Reality: As of Oct. 2016, 20X more organic clicks than paid ones. pic.twitter.com/FaEBpBZWSw— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) July 1, 2017

However the huge number of “no click” results are demonetizing easy publisher revenues, which have traditionally helped to fund more in-depth investigative reporting. Further, much of the direct navigation which happened in the past is now being passed through brand-related search result pages. You can argue that is an increase in search traffic, or you can argue it is shifting the roll of the address bar from navigation to search.

The first page is nothing but ads

Yep, and here they are in Philly. Home service ads, then AdWords traditional ads, then the local pack (way down below). :) pic.twitter.com/VOVZPWWHsg— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 17, 2017

On mobile so is the second, and most of the third

Hey, only 2.5 screens before you get to the 10 blue links. A full 4 screens if you cannot crack the top 2 organics. pic.twitter.com/bbm1pz8hyF— Jeremy Bochenek (@J_Bochenek) July 17, 2017

If a search query has lots of easy to structure crap around it, a user might need 6 or 7 scrolls to get to an organic result

Very interesting Google SERP for GoT. One barely visible organic result after >70% scroll depth. Oh my… #seo #GameOfThones pic.twitter.com/Z6j7VvJMI4— Bastian Grimm (@basgr) August 24, 2017

Then if third parties go “well Google does this, so I should too” they are considered a low quality user experience and get a penalty.

Emailed a client one month ago when I picked up ultra-aggressive ads (especially on mobile). They just received an ad experiences warning. pic.twitter.com/QLLZci1xKW— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 25, 2017

31% ad coverage on mobile website is excessive / spam / low quality user experience for a publisher, while 301% coverage is reasonable for the central network operators.

Google not only displaces the result set, but also leverages their search suggestion features & algorithmic influence to alter how people search & what they search for.

Ads are getting integrated into mobile keyboards.

The standard keyboard on the HTC 10 has begun showing ads [X-Post from r/mildlyinfuriating] https://t.co/FuXDJzilZ6 #blog pic.twitter.com/VriK54dBHb— Android Facts (@manatweets) July 16, 2017

And when a user finally reaches the publisher’s website (provided they scroll past the ads, the AMP listings, and all the other scrape-n-displace trash) then when they finally land on a publication Google will overlay other recommended articles from other sites.

Whoa -> While you’re reading a page on the Google app for iOS, you’ll now see suggestions for related content https://t.co/n6FjkNqx82 pic.twitter.com/DZYTt8T7fI— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 19, 2017

That feature will eventually end up including ads in it, where publishers will get 0.00% of the revenue generated.

Remember how Google suggested publishers should make their websites faster, remove ads, remove clutter, etc. What was the point of all that? To create free real estate for Google to insert a spam unit into your website?

Continuing coverage of Google’s new content recos. I’m sure Best Buy is thrilled to see Amazon show up while someone is on their page. Ouch. pic.twitter.com/qpDyGKPyYh— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 24, 2017

This wouldn’t be bad if mobile were a small, fringe slice of traffic, but it is becoming the majority of traffic. And as mobile increases desktop traffic is shrinking.

Even politically biased outlets that appear to be nearly perfectly optimized for a filter bubble that promotes identity politics struggle to make the numbers work: “As a result of continued decline in direct advertising, [Salon’s] total revenue in the fiscal year 2017 decreased by 34% to $4.6 million. Following the market trend, 84% of our advertising revenue in fiscal year 2017 was generated by programmatic selling. … [Monthly unique visitors to our website saw] a decrease of 23%. We attribute the decline primarily to the changes in the algorithms used by Facebook.”

I knew the last year was bad for online publishing, but the Salon 10K shows *just how bad* pic.twitter.com/oyH7pdCDNI— josh laurito (@joshlaurito) June 26, 2017

The above sorts of numbers are the logical outcome to this:

we’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content"above-the-fold" can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.

Especially when combined with this:

As you scroll through it, you are then given travel ads for flight options through Google Flight search, hotels through Google Hotel search and restaurants through Google Local results. Then towards the bottom of the knowledge graph card, all the way at the end in a small grayish font, you have a link to “see web results.”

Bad news for TripAdvisor.

Google has squeezed out SEO for travel. PCLN/EXPE SEM $ spend and higher conversion is a massive competitive advantage. Bad news for TRIP. pic.twitter.com/39QkxuN780— modest proposal (@modestproposal1) April 17, 2017

And amongst the good news for Expedia, there’s also a bit of bad news for Expedia. The hotels are fighting Airbnb & OTAs. In travel Google is twice as big as the biggest OTA players. They keep eating more SERP real estate and adding more content behind tabs. On mobile they’ll even disappear the concept of organic results.

Room previews in the search results not only means that second tier players are worth a song, but even the new growth players propped up by aggressive ad buying eventually hit a wall and see their stock crash.

As the entire ecosystem gets squeezed by middlemen and the market gets obfuscated with an incomplete selection it is ultimately consumers who lose: “Reservations made through Internet discount sites are almost always slated for our worst rooms.”

The New York Times pitched Yelp as a pesky player holding a grudge:

“For six years, his company has been locked in a campaign on three continents to get antitrust regulators to punish Google, Yelp’s larger, richer and more politically connected competitor. … Yelp concluded that there was no better way to get Google’s attention than to raise the specter of regulation. … something [Mark Mahaney] calls the Death of Free Google. As the internet has migrated to mobile phones, Google has compensated for the smaller screen space by filling it with so many ads that users can have a hard time finding a result that hasn’t been paid for.”

In spite of how quick The New York Times was to dismiss Yelp, the monopoly platforms are stiffing competition & creativity while bundling fake reviews & junk features into their core platforms.

People can literally switch their name to “Loop dee Loop” and leave you terrible, fake reviews. Google’s lack of effort & investment to clean up trash in their local services department highlights that they don’t feel they need to compete on quality. Pay for core search distribution, throw an inferior service front & center, and win by default placement.

As AI advancements make fake reviews look more legit Google’s lack of investment in creating a quality ecosystem will increasingly harm both consumers and businesses. Many low margin businesses will go under simply because their Google reviews are full of inaccurate trash or a competitor decided to hijack their business listing or list their business as closed.

To this day Google is still egregiously stealing content from Yelp:

Yelp said it investigated and found that over one hour, Google pulled images from Yelp’s servers nearly 386,000 times for business listings in Google Maps, which Google exempted from its promise to not scrape content. Yelp then searched Google for 150 of the businesses from those map listings and found that for 110 of them, Google used a Yelp photo as the lead image in the businesses’ listings in search results.

Stealing content & wrapping it in fake reviews is NOT putting the user first.

Facebook has their own matching parallel shifts.

The aggregate quality of mobile ad clicks is quite low. So as mobile becomes a much higher percent of total ad clicks, those who don’t have scale and narrative control are reduced to taking whatever they can get. And mainstream media outlets are reduced to writing puff pieces so the brands they cover will pay to promote the stories on the main channels.

As programmatic advertising, ad blockers, unpatched Android-powered botnets & malware spread each day gets a little uglier for everyone but the central market operators. It is so bad that some of the central market operators offer surveillance apps which claim to protect user privacy! Other app makers not connected to monopoly profit streams monetize any way they can.

The narrative of growth can be sold (we are launching a new food channel, we are investing in our internal video team, we have exclusive real estate listings, and, um, we acquired a food channel) but the competition is a zero sum game with Google & Facebook eating off the publisher’s plates.

That’s why Time is trying to shave $400 million off their expenses & wants to sell their magazine division. Newspaper companies are selling for $1. It is also why Business Insider is no longer chasing growth & the New York Times is setting up a charitable trust.

The rise of ad blocking only accelerates the underlying desperation.

I have some thoughts about why news orgs are finding that people won’t read long articles: pic.twitter.com/G8Zh6GTA6w— Ben Chase (@bbchase) July 4, 2017

I feel terrible for journalists who invest time and effort into doing a hard job well only to have it presented like this. pic.twitter.com/jIZxuJqVAq— Jeff Long (@banterability) October 5, 2017

As long as news websites make their own customer experience worse than what can be found as a cached copy on the monopoly platforms there is no reason to visit the end publisher website. That is why the proprietary formats promoted by the monopoly platforms are so dangerous. They force lighter monetization & offset the lack of revenue by given preferential placement:

click through rate from Google search went from 5.9% (Regular) to 10.3% (AMP), and average search position went from 5.9 (Regular) to 1.7 (AMP). Since then, we have deployed AMP across fifteen of our brands and we have been very pleased with the results. Today, AMP accounts for 79% of our mobile search traffic and 36% of our total mobile visits.

As long as almost nobody is using the new proprietary, ghetto lock-in format the math may work out there, but once many people adopt it then it becomes another recurring sunk cost with no actual benefit:

the only voices promoting AMP’s performance benefits are coming from inside Google. … given how AMP pages are privileged in Google’s search results, the net effect of the team’s hard, earnest work comes across as a corporate-backed attempt to rewrite HTML in Google’s image.

Even if you get a slight uptick in traffic from AMP, it will lead to lower quality user engagement as users are browsing across websites rather than within websites. Getting a bit more traffic but 59% fewer leads is a fail.

No amount of collaborative publisher partnerships, begging for anti-trust exemptions, or whining about Google is going to fix the problem.

“The only way publishers can address this inexorable threat is by banding together. If they open a unified front to negotiate with Google and Facebook-pushing for stronger intellectual-property protections, better support for subscription models and a fair share of revenue and data-they could build a more sustainable future for the news business. But antitrust laws make such coordination perilous. These laws, intended to prevent monopolies, are having the unintended effect of preserving and protecting Google and Facebook’s dominant position.”

Wait a minute.

Wasn’t it the New York Times which claimed Yelp was holding an arbitrary grudge against Google?

The following sounds a lot more desperate:

newspapers that once delivered their journalism with their own trucks increasingly have to rely on these big online platforms to get their articles in front of people, fighting for attention alongside fake news, websites that lift their content, and cat videos.

Well maybe that is just smaller publications & not the gray lady herself

“the temperature is rising in terms of concern, and in some cases anger, about what seems like a very asymmetric, disadvantageous relationship between the publishers and the very big digital platforms.” - NYT CEO Mark Thompson

In unrelated news, there’s another round of layoffs coming at the New York Times.

And the New York Times is also setting up a nonprofit division to expand journalism while their core company focuses on something else.

Apparently Yelp does not qualify as a publisher in this instance.

Or does it?

The Times is backing the move for what is called an anticompetitive safe haven, in part, Mr. Thompson said, “because we care about the whole of journalism as well as about The New York Times.”

Ah, whole of journalism, which, apparently, no longer includes local business coverage.

You know the slogan: “news isn’t news, unless it isn’t local.”

The struggles are all across the media landscape. The new Boston Globe CEO lasted a half-year. The San Diego Union-Tribune resorted to using GoFundMe. The Chicago Sun-Times sold for $1. Moody’s issued a negative outlook for the US newspaper sector. As the industry declines the biggest players view consolidation as the only solution.

These struggles existed even before the largest brand advertisers like P&G cut back on low & no value ad venues like YouTube:

In the fourth quarter, the reduction in marketing that occurred was almost all in the digital space. And what it reflected was a choice to cut spending from a digital standpoint where it was ineffective: where either we were serving bots as opposed to human beings, or where the placement of ads was not facilitating the equity of our brands.

Google & Facebook are extending their grip on the industry with Google launching topical feeds & Facebook wanting to control subscription management.

Best of luck to journalists on the employment front:

The initiative, dubbed Reporters and Data and Robots (RADAR), will see a team of five journalists work with Natural Language Generation software to produce over 30,000 pieces of content for local media each month.

Hopefully editors catch the subtle errors the bots make, because most of them will not be this obvious & stupid.

The Guardian does not seem to know what a 40 is https://t.co/m7Gm1YrbXC pic.twitter.com/Y0sK9r0ltJ— Shuja Haider (@shujaxhaider) July 26, 2017

The cost of parasitic content recycling is coming down quickly:

In a show of strength last year, Microsoft used thousands of these chips at once to translate all of English Wikipedia into Spanish-3 billion words across five million articles-in less than a tenth of a second. Next Microsoft will let its cloud customers use these chips to speed up their own AI tasks.

Voice search makes it even easier to extract the rewards without paying publishers. Throwing pennies at journalists does nothing to change this.

If Google is subsidizing robotic journalism they are thus legitimizing robotic journalism. As big publishers employ the tactic, Google ranks it.

Checking some Heliograf articles (AI-written) reveals once again they do rank well. Google is in a tough position here. It’s inevitable… pic.twitter.com/g0Etcx3rFj— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 16, 2017

It is almost impossible to compete economically with an entity that rewrites your work & has zero marginal cost of production.

YouTube has perhaps the worst comments on the web. Some mainstream news sites got rid of comments because they couldn’t justify the cost of policing them. That in turn shifts the audience & attention stream to sites like Facebook & Twitter. Some news sites which are still leaving comments enabled rely on a Google filter, a technology Google can use on YouTube as they see fit.

Any plugins publishers use to lower their costs can later disappear. It looked like FindTheBest was doing well financially, but when it was acquired many news sites quickly found out the cost of free as they now have thousands of broken articles in their archives: “Last month, Graphiq announced that features for news publishers would no longer be available after Friday.”

Driving costs toward zero by piling on external dependencies is no way to build a sustainable business. Especially when the central network operators are eating the playing field:

“Between fast-loading AMP articles from major news brands hosted in its domain, full pages of information scraped from outside sites that don’t require you to visit them, basic shopping functions built into ads, YouTube, and a host of other features, the Google-verse is more of a digital walled garden than ever. … If Google continues to choke these sites out, what incentive will there be for new ones to come along?”

Unprofitable partners which were buying growth with artificially cheap pricing eventually find out investors want profits more than growth & either reprice or go away. The longer you use something & the more locked in you are to it the more aggressively it can afford to reprice. Symbiotic relationships devolve into abusive ones:

“for every pound an advertiser spends programmatically on the Guardian only 30 pence actually goes to the publisher.” - Mediatel

“Google wants to cut out the middlemen, which it turns out, are URLs.” - MobileMoxie

“[AMP is] a way for Google to obfuscate your website, usurp your content & remove any personal credibility from the web” - TheRegister

“Though the stated initiative of ads.txt is to stop inventory resale, it achieves this by establishing ‘preferred’ channels, which naturally favors the industry’s most influential companies” - Ad Exchanger

That Apple does extra work to undo AMP says a lot.

Those who think the central network operators are naive to the power structure being promoted by the faux solutions are either chasing short-term goals or are incredibly masochistic.

Arbitraging brand is the core business model of the attention merchant monopoly.

we’ve found out that 98% of our business was coming from 22 words. So, wait, we’re buying 3,200 words and 98% of the business is coming from 22 words. What are the 22 words? And they said, well, it’s the word Restoration Hardware and the 21 ways to spell it wrong, okay?

Publishers buying the “speed” narrative are failing themselves. The Guardian has 11 people working on AMP integration. And what is Google doing about speed? Google shut down Google Instant search results, often displays a screen or two full of ads which mobile users have to scroll past to find the organic search results AND is testing auto-playing videos in the search results.

Facebook is also promoting fast loading & mobile-friendly pages.

To keep bleeding clicks out of the “organic” ecosystem they don’t even need to have explicit malicious intent. They can run a thousand different tests every month (new vertical sitelink formats, swipable sitelinks, showing 8 sitelinks on tiny mobile devices, MOAR sitelinks, message extensions, extensions on call-only ads, price discount labels, frame 3rd party content inline, dramatically ramp up featured snippets +QnA listings, more related searches, more features in ad units, larger ad units, ad units that replace websites & charge advertisers for sending clicks from Google to Google, launch a meta-search service where they over-promote select listings, test dropping URLs from listings, put ads in the local pack, change color of source links or other elements, pop ups of search results inside search results, etc.) & keep moving toward whatever layout drives more ad clicks, keeps users on Google longer & forces businesses to buy ads for exposure, claiming they are optimizing the user experience the whole time.

They can hard-code any data type or feature, price it at free to de-fund adjacent businesses, consolidate market power, then increase rents after they have a monopoly position in the adjacent market.

And they can fund research on how to remove watermarks from images.

Why not make hosting free, get people to publish into a proprietary format & try to shift news reading onto the Google app. With enough attention & market coverage they can further extort publishers into accepting perpetually worse deals. And free analytics & business plugins which are widely adopted can have key features get pushed into the paid version. Just look at Google Analytics - its free or $150,000+/yr.

The above sorts of moves can be done in isolation, or in a combinatorial approach. Publishers aloof of the ecosystem shifts may use microformats to structure their content. They’ll then find it is integrated in Google’s new image search layout, where Google copies the content wholesale & shows it near other third party images framed by Google.

How about some visually striking, yet irrelevant listings for competing brands on branded searches to force the brand ad buy. And, of course rounded card corners to eat a few more pixels, along with faint ad labeling on ads coupled with vibrant colored dots on the organic results to confuse end users into thinking the organic results are the ads.

While Google turns their search results into an adspam farm, they invite you to test showing fewer ads on your site to improve user experience. Google knows best - let them automate your ad load & ad placement.

What is the real risk of AI? Bias.

“It’s important that we be transparent about the training data that we are using, and are looking for hidden biases in it, otherwise we are building biased systems,” Giannandrea added. “If someone is trying to sell you a black box system for medical decision support, and you don’t know how it works or what data was used to train it, then I wouldn’t trust it.”

And how does Google justify their AI investments? Through driving incremental ad clicks: “The DeepMind founders understand that their power within [Alphabet], and their ability to get their way with [Alphabet CEO] Larry Page, depends on how many eyeballs and clicks and ad dollars they can claim to be driving”

No bias at all there!

Truth: Google killed publishing in 2015. What you’re reading now is detritus + new junk posted by crazies walking around empty offices— 11 (@searchsleuth998) August 1, 2017

SEOs who were overly reliant on the search channel were the first to notice all the above sorts of change, as it is their job to be hyper-aware of ecosystem shifts. But publishers far removed from SEO who never focused on SEO are now writing about the trends SEOs were writing about nearly a decade ago. Josh Marshall recently covered Google’s awesome monopoly powers.

few publishers really want to talk about the depths or mechanics of Google’s role in news publishing. Some of this is secrecy about proprietary information; most of it is that Google could destroy or profoundly damage most publications if it wanted to. So why rock the boat? … Google’s monopoly control is almost comically great. It’s a monopoly at every conceivable turn and consistently uses that market power to deepen its hold and increase its profits. Just the interplay between DoubleClick and Adexchange is textbook anti-competitive practices. … Is your favorite website laying off staff or 'pivoting to video’. In most cases, the root cause is not entirely but to a significant degree driven by the platform monopolies

His article details how Google owns many points of the supply chain

So let’s go down the list: 1) The system for running ads, 2) the top purchaser of ads, 3) the most pervasive audience data service, 4) all search, 5) our email. … But wait, there’s more! Google also owns Chrome, the most used browser for visiting TPM.

He also covers the price dumping technique that is used to maintain control

In many cases, alternatives don’t exist because no business can get a footing with a product Google lets people use for free.

And he shared an example of Google algorithms gone astray crippling his business, even though it was not related to search & unintentional:

Because we were forwarding to ourselves spam that other people sent to us, Google decided that the owner of the TPM url was a major spammer and blocked emails from TPM from being sent to anyone.

If the above comes across as depressing, don’t worry. The search results now contain a depression diagnostic testing tool.

Categories: internet from IM Tips And Tricks http://www.seobook.com/virtual-real-estate from Rising Phoenix SEO https://risingphxseo.tumblr.com/post/166228574275

[kellykperez]

Virtual Real Estate

Wrastlin With The News

The current presidential cabinet includes a WWE co-founder & this passes for modern political discourse:

#FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017

CNN promised vengeance.

Something To Believe In

The pretense of objectivity has been dropped:

These reporters aren't ideologues. They're just right-thinking people who lean left. Somewhere along the line, they stopped pretending to be objective about Trump. ... People don't just disagree with each other. They can't imagine how a decent caring human being could disagree with their own view of race or the minimum wage or immigration or Trump. Being a member of the virtuous tribe means not only carrying the correct card in your wallet to reassure yourself. You have to also believe that the people carrying any other card are irrational, or worse, evil. They're not people to engage in conversation with. They are barriers to be ignored or pushed aside on the virtuous path to paradise. This intolerance and inability to imagine the virtue of the other side is the road to tyranny and chaos. It dehumanizes a good chunk of humanity and that in turn justifies the worst atrocities human beings are capable of.

The WSJ, typically a right-leaning publication, is differentiating their coverage of the president from most other outlets by attempting to be somewhat neutral.

The news is fake. Even historically left-leaning people are disgusted with outlets like CNN.

"I think the president is probably right to say, like, look you are witch-hunting me. You have no smoking gun, you have no real proof." - CNN supervising producer John Bonifield

"When you do shitty reporting like CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times & Rachel Maddow especially. When you do that & it is revealed to be bullshit, what you're doing is building up Trump. There's no greater way to build up Trump than to falsely report on him. There's no better way to build up Trump than to make him the victim." - Jimmy Dore

"Rachel Maddow was given the facts, she ignored them, & she kept right on going. That's MSNBC, that's CNN, that's the New York Times, the Washington Post - they're all horrible. That's why we had the Iraq war. That's why we have the Syria war. That's why we are still in Afghanistan. That's why we had Libya. That's why we have the biggest income disparity since the gilded age. Meanwhile we are spending more on the military than the rest of the world." - Jimmy Dore

And, since people need something to believe in, there are new American Gods:

"A half hour of cable news delivers enough psychic trauma for a whole year. The newspapers are talking of nothing but treason, espionage, investigations, protests." ... "Stocks are rallying because of how little faith we have in the government. The Mega Blue Chip Corporation is the new Sovereign."

Current Headwinds for Online Publishing

I struggle to keep up with the accelerating rate of change. A number of common themes in the current ecosystem are:

We are moving toward a world where more things are becoming fake (only accelerated by the demonetization of neutrality & the algorithmic boost associated with reliably delivering confirmation bias in an algorithmic or manual fashion)

risk keeps being radiated outward to the individual while monopoly platforms capture the spoils (forced-place health insurance purchases where the insurance company arbitrarily drops the sick member on the policy even though that is supposed to be illegal, more temp jobs where people don't get enough hours to get health insurance through their employer, under-funded pensions, outsourcing of core business functions to sweatshops where part-time workers don't get paid for dozens to hundreds of hours of required training & get to watch beheading videos all day)

the barrier to entry keeps increasing (increased marketing cost due to brand bias, heavy ad loads on dominant platforms, & central platforms making partners do "bet the farm" moves in how they adjust distribution to drive adoption of proprietary formats & temporarily over-promote select content formats)

the increasing chunk size of competition is making it much harder for individuals to build sustainable businesses. (Yes the tools of the trade are improving quickly, BUT the central platforms are demonetizing the adjacent fields faster than publishing tools & business options improve.)

In Europe publishers are aggressively leaning on regulators to try to rebalance power.

Some of this stuff is cyclical. About a decade ago the European Commission went after Microsoft for bundling Internet Explorer. Google complained about the monopolistic practices to ensure Microsoft was fined. And we've went from that to a web where Google syndicates native ads that blend into page content while directly funding robot journalism. And then Google is ranking the robot-generated crap too.

Speaking of robot journalists, check out the top 3 results for this query. All 3 are auto-written by automated insights (AI software). Yikes pic.twitter.com/ltFGFXHNiF— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 8, 2017

But to keep the ecosystem clean & spam free, Google is also planning to leverage their web browser to further dictate the terms of online publishing. Chrome will block autoplay audio & will automatically reroute .dev domains to https. Cutting edge developers suggest using a web browser other than Google Chrome to prevent proprietary lock in across the web.

Is this a test, @Google? pic.twitter.com/V9FZ2hL2cA— TNW (@TheNextWeb) September 5, 2017

While Google distributes their Chrome browser as unwanted bundleware, other web browsers must display uninstall links front & center when trying to gain awareness of their product using Google AdWords. Microsoft Edge is coming to Android, but without a BrowserChoice.eu screen it is unlikely most users will change their web browser as most are unaware of what a web browser even is, let alone the limitations of any of them or the tracking embedded in them.

If you go back several years, there was celebration of the fact that the cost of doing a startup was so low. You didn't have to pay Oracle a million dollars for a server license any more. You didn't even have to rack your own hardware. Now you can just dial it up on Amazon. But there are now these gatekeepers and toll-takers. Back in 2004, you had the wide-open internet. - Jeremy Stoppelman

The Mobile Revolution

If you are an anti-social work at home webmaster who has dual monitors it is easy to dismiss cell phones as inefficient and chalk most mobile usage up to the following.

Russian man visited Chinese click farm.They make fake ratings for mobile apps and things like this.He said they have 10,000 more phones pic.twitter.com/qE96vgCCsi— English Russia (@EnglishRussia1) May 11, 2017

The reality is cell phones are more powerful than they seem if you are strictly consuming rather than working.

Deflationary impact of technology: everything in this Radio Shack flyer from 1991 adds up to $3,285.12 and can be done today on a smartphone pic.twitter.com/ONh3waWVgq— Jeffrey Kleintop (@JeffreyKleintop) June 23, 2017

And that is how the unstoppable quickly becomes the extinct!

10 years ago. pic.twitter.com/ZCWfHfpedi— Harry Tucker (@harrytuckerr) September 11, 2017

Many people the world over are addicted to their cell phones to where viral game makers are self-regulating before regulators step in: "From Tuesday, users below 12 years of age will be limited to one hour of play time each day, while those aged between 12 years and 18 years will be limited to two hours a day, Tencent said."

While China is using their various tools to clamp down on Honour of Kings, Tencent is bringing the game to the west, which makes blocking VPN services (with Apple's help - they must play along or have the phones reduced to bricks) & requiring local data storage & technology transfer more important. Anything stored locally can be easily disappeared: "China's already formidable internet censors have demonstrated a new strength-the ability to delete images in one-on-one chats as they are being transmitted, making them disappear before receivers see them."

China has banned live streaming, threatened their largest domestic social networks, shut down chat bots, require extensive multimedia review: "an industry association circulated new regulations that at least two "auditors" will, with immediate effect, be required to check all audiovisual content posted online" AND they force users to install spyware on their devices.

In spite of all those restrictions, last year "Chinese consumers spent $5.5 trillion through mobile payment platforms, about 50 times more than their American counterparts." In the last quarter Baidu had ¥20.87 billion in revenues, with 72% of their revenues driven by mobile.

People can not miss that which they've never seen, thus platform socialism works. Those who doubt it will be tracked & scored accordingly.

History, as well, can be scrubbed. And insurance companies watch everything in real-time - careful what you post. The watchful eye of the Chinese pre-crime team is also looking over every move.

Last quarter Facebook had revenues of $9.164 billion, with 87% coming from mobile devices.

pic.twitter.com/JlPBSlmKlw— banksy (@thereaIbanksy) September 16, 2017

Simulacrum has ALMOST been perfected:

"We didn't have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people." ... "Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It's not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones." ... "Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy."

pic.twitter.com/QBLBXIDDLK— banksy (@thereaIbanksy) August 24, 2017

The web is becoming easier to get addicted to due to personalization algorithms that reinforce our worldviews even as they make us feel more isolated and left out. And the barrier to entry for consumers into one of the few central gatekeeper ecosystems is dropping like a rock due to the falling cost of mobile devices, coupled with with images & video displacing text making literacy optional. As we become more "connected" we feel more isolated:

"Social isolation, loneliness or living alone was each a significant factor contributing to premature death. And each one of these factors was a more significant risk factor for dying than obesity. ... No one knows precisely why loneliness is surging, threatening the lives of many millions of people, but it does seem that the burgeoning use of technology may have something to do with it. Personally, I would contend that technology may be the chief factor fueling it."

The primary role of the big data mining companies is leveraging surveillance for social engineering

Unsettling that according to Mark Zuckerberg purpose of Facebook is forced social engineering. From "World Without Mind" by Franklin Foer: pic.twitter.com/CHRnefg9m2— Murtaza Hussain (@MazMHussain) October 8, 2017

App Annie expects the global app economy to be worth $6.3 trillion by 2021.

The reason those numbers can easily sound fake & mobile can seem overblown is how highly concentrated usage has become: "over 80 percent of consumer time on mobile devices is now spent on the apps, websites and properties" of just five companies: Facebook, Google, Apple, Yelp and Bing.

Maslow 2.0 pic.twitter.com/X1OguQG8Gq— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) October 7, 2017

eMarketer stated Google will have more mobile ad revenue than desktop ad revenue in the US this year. They also predicted Google & Facebook will consume over 2/3 of US online ad spend within 2 years.

The central network operators not only maintain an outsized share of revenues, but also maintain an outsized share of profits. When the home team gets a 30% rake of any sale it is hard for anyone else to compete. Even after buying and gutting Motorola Google bought part of HTC for $1.1 billion. The game plan has never changed: commoditize the compliment to ensure user data & most of the profits flow to Google. Put up arbitrary roadblocks for competing services while launching free parallel offerings to drive lock-in.

For the last YEAR I've been battling App Store rejections - we made an app called Animoji with animated emojis...now I know why. https://t.co/jKJXfLMGj2— Ryan Jones (@rjonesy) September 9, 2017

Central data aggregators can keep collecting more user data & offer more granular ad distribution features. They can tell you that this micro moment RIGHT NOW is make or break:

it's intended to create a bizarre sense of panic among marketers - "OMG, we have to be present at every possible instant someone might be looking at their phone!" - which doesn't help them think strategically or make the best use of their marketing or ad spend.

The reality is that if you don't have a relationship with a person on their desktop computer they probably don't want your mobile app either.

If you have the relationship then mobile only increases profits.

Is iOS 11 specifically designed to make your older iPhones unusable and drain your battery so you have to upgrade to the newest phones?— Eric Jackson (@ericjackson) October 7, 2017

Many people attempting to build "the next mobile" will go bust, but wherever the attention flows the ads will follow.

Those with a broad & dominant tech platform can copy features from single-category devices and keep integrating them into their core products to increase user lock-in. And they can build accessories for those core devices while prohibiting the flow of data to third party devices to keep users locked into their ecosystem.

Smaller Screens, Shallower Attention

People often multi-task while using mobile devices.

Powerful stuff ...An very fucking true pic.twitter.com/enP98Z6B7r— Nev (@LFCNev) July 13, 2017

When multi-tasking it is easier to accidentally click an ad. This happens 10s of billions of times a year:

This year, in-app mobile ad spend will reach $45.3 billion, up $11 billion from last year, according to eMarketer. And apps are where the money is at for mobile advertising, comprising 80 percent of all U.S. media dollars spent on mobile.

But multi-tasking means doing almost everything else worse. The "always on" mode not only increases isolation, but also lowers our ability to focus:

"while our phones offer convenience and diversion, they also breed anxiety. Their extraordinary usefulness gives them an unprecedented hold on our attention and vast influence over our thinking and behavior. ... Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren't using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens. ... when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline. ... As the phone's proximity increased, brainpower decreased. ... Anticipating that information would be readily available in digital form seemed to reduce the mental effort that people made to remember it. ... people are all too quick to credit lies and half-truths spread through social media by Russian agents and other bad actors. If your phone has sapped your powers of discernment, you'll believe anything it tells you."

Further, the shallow attention stream makes it easy to displace content with ads:

4 Ads 3 map carrousel results 5 organic results 4 Ads

Then "see more results"

4 more Ads 5 organic results 4 more Ads

On desktop devices people don't accidentally misclick on ads at anywhere near the rate they fat thumb ads on mobile devices.

Desktop ad clicks convert to purchases. Mobile ad clicks convert to ad budget burned: "marketers are still seeing few shoppers purchasing on mobile. The 52% of share in traffic only has 26% share of revenue."

For traditional publishers mobile users drastically under-monetize desktop users due to

drastically lower conversion rates (true for almost everyone in ecommerce outside of Amazon perhaps)

limited cross-device tracking (how do you track people who don't even hit your site but hit a cached page hosted via Google AMP or Facebook Instant Articles?)

lower ad load allowed on publisher sites due to limited screen size

aggressive filtering of fat thumb ad clicks on partner sites from central ad networks

For the central network operators almost all the above are precisely the exact opposite.

higher ad CTR by making entire interface ads (& perhaps even disappearing the concept of non-ads in the result set)

great cross-device user tracking

higher ad load allowed by the small screen size pushing content below the fold

more lenient filtering of fat thumb accidental ad clicks

If you look at raw stats without understanding the underlying impact, it is easy to believe the ecosystem is healthy.

Assumption: Google's ads are more prominent, so organic must be dying.Reality: As of Oct. 2016, 20X more organic clicks than paid ones. pic.twitter.com/FaEBpBZWSw— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) July 1, 2017

However the huge number of "no click" results are demonetizing easy publisher revenues, which have traditionally helped to fund more in-depth investigative reporting. Further, much of the direct navigation which happened in the past is now being passed through brand-related search result pages. You can argue that is an increase in search traffic, or you can argue it is shifting the roll of the address bar from navigation to search.

The first page is nothing but ads

Yep, and here they are in Philly. Home service ads, then AdWords traditional ads, then the local pack (way down below). :) pic.twitter.com/VOVZPWWHsg— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 17, 2017

On mobile so is the second, and most of the third

Hey, only 2.5 screens before you get to the 10 blue links. A full 4 screens if you cannot crack the top 2 organics. pic.twitter.com/bbm1pz8hyF— Jeremy Bochenek (@J_Bochenek) July 17, 2017

If a search query has lots of easy to structure crap around it, a user might need 6 or 7 scrolls to get to an organic result

Very interesting Google SERP for GoT. One barely visible organic result after >70% scroll depth. Oh my... #seo #GameOfThones pic.twitter.com/Z6j7VvJMI4— Bastian Grimm (@basgr) August 24, 2017

Then if third parties go "well Google does this, so I should too" they are considered a low quality user experience and get a penalty.

Emailed a client one month ago when I picked up ultra-aggressive ads (especially on mobile). They just received an ad experiences warning. pic.twitter.com/QLLZci1xKW— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 25, 2017

31% ad coverage on mobile website is excessive / spam / low quality user experience for a publisher, while 301% coverage is reasonable for the central network operators.

Google not only displaces the result set, but also leverages their search suggestion features & algorithmic influence to alter how people search & what they search for.

Ads are getting integrated into mobile keyboards.

The standard keyboard on the HTC 10 has begun showing ads [X-Post from r/mildlyinfuriating] https://t.co/FuXDJzilZ6 #blog pic.twitter.com/VriK54dBHb— Android Facts (@manatweets) July 16, 2017

And when a user finally reaches the publisher's website (provided they scroll past the ads, the AMP listings, and all the other scrape-n-displace trash) then when they finally land on a publication Google will overlay other recommended articles from other sites.

Whoa -> While you're reading a page on the Google app for iOS, you'll now see suggestions for related content https://t.co/n6FjkNqx82 pic.twitter.com/DZYTt8T7fI— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 19, 2017

That feature will eventually end up including ads in it, where publishers will get 0.00% of the revenue generated.

Remember how Google suggested publishers should make their websites faster, remove ads, remove clutter, etc. What was the point of all that? To create free real estate for Google to insert a spam unit into your website?

Continuing coverage of Google's new content recos. I'm sure Best Buy is thrilled to see Amazon show up while someone is on their page. Ouch. pic.twitter.com/qpDyGKPyYh— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 24, 2017

This wouldn't be bad if mobile were a small, fringe slice of traffic, but it is becoming the majority of traffic. And as mobile increases desktop traffic is shrinking.

Even politically biased outlets that appear to be nearly perfectly optimized for a filter bubble that promotes identity politics struggle to make the numbers work: "As a result of continued decline in direct advertising, [Salon's] total revenue in the fiscal year 2017 decreased by 34% to $4.6 million. Following the market trend, 84% of our advertising revenue in fiscal year 2017 was generated by programmatic selling. ... [Monthly unique visitors to our website saw] a decrease of 23%. We attribute the decline primarily to the changes in the algorithms used by Facebook."

I knew the last year was bad for online publishing, but the Salon 10K shows *just how bad* pic.twitter.com/oyH7pdCDNI— josh laurito (@joshlaurito) June 26, 2017

The above sorts of numbers are the logical outcome to this:

we've heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it's difficult to find the actual content, they aren't happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don't have much content"above-the-fold" can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn't have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site's initial screen real estate to ads, that's not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.

Especially when combined with this:

As you scroll through it, you are then given travel ads for flight options through Google Flight search, hotels through Google Hotel search and restaurants through Google Local results. Then towards the bottom of the knowledge graph card, all the way at the end in a small grayish font, you have a link to "see web results."

Bad news for TripAdvisor.

Google has squeezed out SEO for travel. PCLN/EXPE SEM $ spend and higher conversion is a massive competitive advantage. Bad news for TRIP. pic.twitter.com/39QkxuN780— modest proposal (@modestproposal1) April 17, 2017

And amongst the good news for Expedia, there's also a bit of bad news for Expedia. The hotels are fighting Airbnb & OTAs. In travel Google is twice as big as the biggest OTA players. They keep eating more SERP real estate and adding more content behind tabs. On mobile they'll even disappear the concept of organic results.

Room previews in the search results not only means that second tier players are worth a song, but even the new growth players propped up by aggressive ad buying eventually hit a wall and see their stock crash.

As the entire ecosystem gets squeezed by middlemen and the market gets obfuscated with an incomplete selection it is ultimately consumers who lose: "Reservations made through Internet discount sites are almost always slated for our worst rooms."

The New York Times pitched Yelp as a pesky player holding a grudge:

"For six years, his company has been locked in a campaign on three continents to get antitrust regulators to punish Google, Yelp's larger, richer and more politically connected competitor. ... Yelp concluded that there was no better way to get Google's attention than to raise the specter of regulation. ... something [Mark Mahaney] calls the Death of Free Google. As the internet has migrated to mobile phones, Google has compensated for the smaller screen space by filling it with so many ads that users can have a hard time finding a result that hasn't been paid for."

In spite of how quick The New York Times was to dismiss Yelp, the monopoly platforms are stiffing competition & creativity while bundling fake reviews & junk features into their core platforms.

People can literally switch their name to "Loop dee Loop" and leave you terrible, fake reviews. Google's lack of effort & investment to clean up trash in their local services department highlights that they don't feel they need to compete on quality. Pay for core search distribution, throw an inferior service front & center, and win by default placement.

As AI advancements make fake reviews look more legit Google's lack of investment in creating a quality ecosystem will increasingly harm both consumers and businesses. Many low margin businesses will go under simply because their Google reviews are full of inaccurate trash or a competitor decided to hijack their business listing or list their business as closed.

To this day Google is still egregiously stealing content from Yelp:

Yelp said it investigated and found that over one hour, Google pulled images from Yelp's servers nearly 386,000 times for business listings in Google Maps, which Google exempted from its promise to not scrape content. Yelp then searched Google for 150 of the businesses from those map listings and found that for 110 of them, Google used a Yelp photo as the lead image in the businesses' listings in search results.

Stealing content & wrapping it in fake reviews is NOT putting the user first.

Facebook has their own matching parallel shifts.

The aggregate quality of mobile ad clicks is quite low. So as mobile becomes a much higher percent of total ad clicks, those who don't have scale and narrative control are reduced to taking whatever they can get. And mainstream media outlets are reduced to writing puff pieces so the brands they cover will pay to promote the stories on the main channels.

As programmatic advertising, ad blockers, unpatched Android-powered botnets & malware spread each day gets a little uglier for everyone but the central market operators. It is so bad that some of the central market operators offer surveillance apps which claim to protect user privacy! Other app makers not connected to monopoly profit streams monetize any way they can.

The narrative of growth can be sold (we are launching a new food channel, we are investing in our internal video team, we have exclusive real estate listings, and, um, we acquired a food channel) but the competition is a zero sum game with Google & Facebook eating off the publisher's plates.

That's why Time is trying to shave $400 million off their expenses & wants to sell their magazine division. Newspaper companies are selling for $1. It is also why Business Insider is no longer chasing growth & the New York Times is setting up a charitable trust.

The rise of ad blocking only accelerates the underlying desperation.

I have some thoughts about why news orgs are finding that people won't read long articles: pic.twitter.com/G8Zh6GTA6w— Ben Chase (@bbchase) July 4, 2017

I feel terrible for journalists who invest time and effort into doing a hard job well only to have it presented like this. pic.twitter.com/jIZxuJqVAq— Jeff Long (@banterability) October 5, 2017

As long as news websites make their own customer experience worse than what can be found as a cached copy on the monopoly platforms there is no reason to visit the end publisher website. That is why the proprietary formats promoted by the monopoly platforms are so dangerous. They force lighter monetization & offset the lack of revenue by given preferential placement:

click through rate from Google search went from 5.9% (Regular) to 10.3% (AMP), and average search position went from 5.9 (Regular) to 1.7 (AMP). Since then, we have deployed AMP across fifteen of our brands and we have been very pleased with the results. Today, AMP accounts for 79% of our mobile search traffic and 36% of our total mobile visits.

As long as almost nobody is using the new proprietary, ghetto lock-in format the math may work out there, but once many people adopt it then it becomes another recurring sunk cost with no actual benefit:

the only voices promoting AMP's performance benefits are coming from inside Google. ... given how AMP pages are privileged in Google's search results, the net effect of the team's hard, earnest work comes across as a corporate-backed attempt to rewrite HTML in Google's image.

Even if you get a slight uptick in traffic from AMP, it will lead to lower quality user engagement as users are browsing across websites rather than within websites. Getting a bit more traffic but 59% fewer leads is a fail.

No amount of collaborative publisher partnerships, begging for anti-trust exemptions, or whining about Google is going to fix the problem.

"The only way publishers can address this inexorable threat is by banding together. If they open a unified front to negotiate with Google and Facebook-pushing for stronger intellectual-property protections, better support for subscription models and a fair share of revenue and data-they could build a more sustainable future for the news business. But antitrust laws make such coordination perilous. These laws, intended to prevent monopolies, are having the unintended effect of preserving and protecting Google and Facebook's dominant position."

Wait a minute.

Wasn't it the New York Times which claimed Yelp was holding an arbitrary grudge against Google?

The following sounds a lot more desperate:

newspapers that once delivered their journalism with their own trucks increasingly have to rely on these big online platforms to get their articles in front of people, fighting for attention alongside fake news, websites that lift their content, and cat videos.

Well maybe that is just smaller publications & not the gray lady herself

"the temperature is rising in terms of concern, and in some cases anger, about what seems like a very asymmetric, disadvantageous relationship between the publishers and the very big digital platforms." - NYT CEO Mark Thompson

In unrelated news, there's another round of layoffs coming at the New York Times.

And the New York Times is also setting up a nonprofit division to expand journalism while their core company focuses on something else.

Apparently Yelp does not qualify as a publisher in this instance.

Or does it?

The Times is backing the move for what is called an anticompetitive safe haven, in part, Mr. Thompson said, "because we care about the whole of journalism as well as about The New York Times."

Ah, whole of journalism, which, apparently, no longer includes local business coverage.

You know the slogan: "news isn't news, unless it isn't local."

The struggles are all across the media landscape. The new Boston Globe CEO lasted a half-year. The San Diego Union-Tribune resorted to using GoFundMe. The Chicago Sun-Times sold for $1. Moody's issued a negative outlook for the US newspaper sector. As the industry declines the biggest players view consolidation as the only solution.

These struggles existed even before the largest brand advertisers like P&G cut back on low & no value ad venues like YouTube:

In the fourth quarter, the reduction in marketing that occurred was almost all in the digital space. And what it reflected was a choice to cut spending from a digital standpoint where it was ineffective: where either we were serving bots as opposed to human beings, or where the placement of ads was not facilitating the equity of our brands.

Google & Facebook are extending their grip on the industry with Google launching topical feeds & Facebook wanting to control subscription management.

Best of luck to journalists on the employment front:

The initiative, dubbed Reporters and Data and Robots (RADAR), will see a team of five journalists work with Natural Language Generation software to produce over 30,000 pieces of content for local media each month.

Hopefully editors catch the subtle errors the bots make, because most of them will not be this obvious & stupid.

The Guardian does not seem to know what a 40 is https://t.co/m7Gm1YrbXC pic.twitter.com/Y0sK9r0ltJ— Shuja Haider (@shujaxhaider) July 26, 2017

The cost of parasitic content recycling is coming down quickly:

In a show of strength last year, Microsoft used thousands of these chips at once to translate all of English Wikipedia into Spanish-3 billion words across five million articles-in less than a tenth of a second. Next Microsoft will let its cloud customers use these chips to speed up their own AI tasks.

Voice search makes it even easier to extract the rewards without paying publishers. Throwing pennies at journalists does nothing to change this.

If Google is subsidizing robotic journalism they are thus legitimizing robotic journalism. As big publishers employ the tactic, Google ranks it.

Checking some Heliograf articles (AI-written) reveals once again they do rank well. Google is in a tough position here. It's inevitable... pic.twitter.com/g0Etcx3rFj— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 16, 2017

It is almost impossible to compete economically with an entity that rewrites your work & has zero marginal cost of production.

YouTube has perhaps the worst comments on the web. Some mainstream news sites got rid of comments because they couldn't justify the cost of policing them. That in turn shifts the audience & attention stream to sites like Facebook & Twitter. Some news sites which are still leaving comments enabled rely on a Google filter, a technology Google can use on YouTube as they see fit.

Any plugins publishers use to lower their costs can later disappear. It looked like FindTheBest was doing well financially, but when it was acquired many news sites quickly found out the cost of free as they now have thousands of broken articles in their archives: "Last month, Graphiq announced that features for news publishers would no longer be available after Friday."

Driving costs toward zero by piling on external dependencies is no way to build a sustainable business. Especially when the central network operators are eating the playing field:

"Between fast-loading AMP articles from major news brands hosted in its domain, full pages of information scraped from outside sites that don't require you to visit them, basic shopping functions built into ads, YouTube, and a host of other features, the Google-verse is more of a digital walled garden than ever. ... If Google continues to choke these sites out, what incentive will there be for new ones to come along?"

Unprofitable partners which were buying growth with artificially cheap pricing eventually find out investors want profits more than growth & either reprice or go away. The longer you use something & the more locked in you are to it the more aggressively it can afford to reprice. Symbiotic relationships devolve into abusive ones:

"for every pound an advertiser spends programmatically on the Guardian only 30 pence actually goes to the publisher." - Mediatel

"Google wants to cut out the middlemen, which it turns out, are URLs." - MobileMoxie

"[AMP is] a way for Google to obfuscate your website, usurp your content & remove any personal credibility from the web" - TheRegister

"Though the stated initiative of ads.txt is to stop inventory resale, it achieves this by establishing 'preferred' channels, which naturally favors the industry's most influential companies" - Ad Exchanger

That Apple does extra work to undo AMP says a lot.

Those who think the central network operators are naive to the power structure being promoted by the faux solutions are either chasing short-term goals or are incredibly masochistic.

Arbitraging brand is the core business model of the attention merchant monopoly.

we've found out that 98% of our business was coming from 22 words. So, wait, we're buying 3,200 words and 98% of the business is coming from 22 words. What are the 22 words? And they said, well, it's the word Restoration Hardware and the 21 ways to spell it wrong, okay?

Publishers buying the "speed" narrative are failing themselves. The Guardian has 11 people working on AMP integration. And what is Google doing about speed? Google shut down Google Instant search results, often displays a screen or two full of ads which mobile users have to scroll past to find the organic search results AND is testing auto-playing videos in the search results.

Facebook is also promoting fast loading & mobile-friendly pages.

To keep bleeding clicks out of the "organic" ecosystem they don't even need to have explicit malicious intent. They can run a thousand different tests every month (new vertical sitelink formats, swipable sitelinks, showing 8 sitelinks on tiny mobile devices, MOAR sitelinks, message extensions, extensions on call-only ads, price discount labels, frame 3rd party content inline, dramatically ramp up featured snippets +QnA listings, more related searches, more features in ad units, larger ad units, ad units that replace websites & charge advertisers for sending clicks from Google to Google, launch a meta-search service where they over-promote select listings, test dropping URLs from listings, put ads in the local pack, change color of source links or other elements, pop ups of search results inside search results, etc.) & keep moving toward whatever layout drives more ad clicks, keeps users on Google longer & forces businesses to buy ads for exposure, claiming they are optimizing the user experience the whole time.

They can hard-code any data type or feature, price it at free to de-fund adjacent businesses, consolidate market power, then increase rents after they have a monopoly position in the adjacent market.

And they can fund research on how to remove watermarks from images.

Why not make hosting free, get people to publish into a proprietary format & try to shift news reading onto the Google app. With enough attention & market coverage they can further extort publishers into accepting perpetually worse deals. And free analytics & business plugins which are widely adopted can have key features get pushed into the paid version. Just look at Google Analytics - its free or $150,000+/yr.

The above sorts of moves can be done in isolation, or in a combinatorial approach. Publishers aloof of the ecosystem shifts may use microformats to structure their content. They'll then find it is integrated in Google's new image search layout, where Google copies the content wholesale & shows it near other third party images framed by Google.

How about some visually striking, yet irrelevant listings for competing brands on branded searches to force the brand ad buy. And, of course rounded card corners to eat a few more pixels, along with faint ad labeling on ads coupled with vibrant colored dots on the organic results to confuse end users into thinking the organic results are the ads.

While Google turns their search results into an adspam farm, they invite you to test showing fewer ads on your site to improve user experience. Google knows best - let them automate your ad load & ad placement.

What is the real risk of AI? Bias.

"It's important that we be transparent about the training data that we are using, and are looking for hidden biases in it, otherwise we are building biased systems," Giannandrea added. "If someone is trying to sell you a black box system for medical decision support, and you don't know how it works or what data was used to train it, then I wouldn't trust it."

And how does Google justify their AI investments? Through driving incremental ad clicks: "The DeepMind founders understand that their power within [Alphabet], and their ability to get their way with [Alphabet CEO] Larry Page, depends on how many eyeballs and clicks and ad dollars they can claim to be driving"

No bias at all there!

Truth: Google killed publishing in 2015. What you're reading now is detritus + new junk posted by crazies walking around empty offices— 11 (@searchsleuth998) August 1, 2017

And if publishing was killed in 2015, things have only got worse since then:

Looking at 2015 vs 2017 data for all keywords ranking organically on the first page, we’ve seen a dramatic change in CTR. Below we’ve normalized our actual CTR on a 1–10 scale, representing a total drop of 25% of click share on desktop and 55% on mobile.

SEOs who were overly reliant on the search channel were the first to notice all the above sorts of change, as it is their job to be hyper-aware of ecosystem shifts. But publishers far removed from SEO who never focused on SEO are now writing about the trends SEOs were writing about nearly a decade ago. Josh Marshall recently covered Google's awesome monopoly powers.

few publishers really want to talk about the depths or mechanics of Google's role in news publishing. Some of this is secrecy about proprietary information; most of it is that Google could destroy or profoundly damage most publications if it wanted to. So why rock the boat? ... Google's monopoly control is almost comically great. It's a monopoly at every conceivable turn and consistently uses that market power to deepen its hold and increase its profits. Just the interplay between DoubleClick and Adexchange is textbook anti-competitive practices. ... Is your favorite website laying off staff or 'pivoting to video'. In most cases, the root cause is not entirely but to a significant degree driven by the platform monopolies

His article details how Google owns many points of the supply chain

So let's go down the list: 1) The system for running ads, 2) the top purchaser of ads, 3) the most pervasive audience data service, 4) all search, 5) our email. ... But wait, there's more! Google also owns Chrome, the most used browser for visiting TPM.

He also covers the price dumping technique that is used to maintain control

In many cases, alternatives don't exist because no business can get a footing with a product Google lets people use for free.

And he shared an example of Google algorithms gone astray crippling his business, even though it was not related to search & unintentional:

Because we were forwarding to ourselves spam that other people sent to us, Google decided that the owner of the TPM url was a major spammer and blocked emails from TPM from being sent to anyone.

If the above comes across as depressing, don't worry. The search results now contain a depression diagnostic testing tool.

Categories: 

internet

source http://www.seobook.com/virtual-real-estate from Rising Phoenix SEO http://risingphoenixseo.blogspot.com/2017/10/virtual-real-estate.html

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Kris Graft is editor-in-chief, Gamasutra (@krisgraft)

Hey readers! I’m back with another quarterly roundup of Gamasutra articles over the past quarter (July-September), as I continue my heroic efforts to excavate the best recently-published work.

The 15 pieces below include 10 blogs and articles written by game developers, and five articles from Gamasutra writers and contributors. The list is a mix of our highest-trafficked articles, and some lower-trafficked-but-still-excellent articles. Bookmark this blog post or add it to your lists for later reading, or just go freaking nuts and read all of these articles right now. I'll highlight some more later down the line. (Make sure to check out my Q1 roundup and Q2 roundup.)

Last but not least, a HUGE thanks to our game developer bloggers and contributors who take the time to share their knowledge with their peers via our site -- Gamasutra simply would not be as good without you all. (If you'd like to start blogging on Gamasutra, here are the guidelines.)

Pokemon Go and the good things that can come from a bad UI – Chris Furniss (@chrisfurniss), senior UX/UI designer, PopCap Seattle.

PopCap Seattle UI/UX expert Chris Furniss argues how Pokemon Go’s confusing UI is applying meaningful friction and is feeding into the dense social experience of the game.

Postmortem: Renowned Explorers – Adriaan Jansen (@abbeyadriaan), co-founder and designer at Abbey Games.

The development of Renowned Explorers: International Society was a crazy ride. You can read about every twist and turn right here.

AR is an MMO – Raph Koster (@raphkoster), veteran game designer (Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxy, Crowfall, more) specializing in MMOs.

In the wake of Pokemon Go, it's a wise idea to look at the history of MMOs and virtual worlds for lessons learned.

Why successful games in China rarely thrive in the West – Mantin Lu (@MantinLu), director of product development at Seasun Inc.

Mantin Lu looks at some of the differences in taste, culture, monetization mindset, and development mentality between East and West.

Design tips: In-game proportion and scale – Yuriy Sivers (@yuriysivers), senior visual designer at Kongregate.

Many developers often face issues designing proportions of individual characters, and the relationship between these characters and the surrounding environment. Here's an approach you can take

Designing a combat HUD: Key user experience insights – Oliver Janoschek (@theonlyrapante), senior UI artist for Dreadnought at Yager.

Oliver Janoschek, senior UI artist at Yager explains how to use UX patterns like Fitts' Law to successfully improve upon your in-game UI.

Designing lag-compensating weapons in Mechwarrior Online – Neema Teymory, senior network engineer at Piranha Games.

Making multiplayer games is hard and there are many problems developers need to solve. In this article, I will discuss what MechWarrior Online's weapons system does to deal with lag.

Patch the process – Rami Ismail (@tha_rami), one-half of Nuclear Throne developer Vlambeer.

Vlambeer's Rami Ismail wants to talk about day one patches -- but no, this isn't (really) about No Man's Sky.

Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap: Reverse-engineering a 1989 original – Omar Cornut (@ocornut), technical director and programmer at Lizardcube.

Remaking the 1989 action-adventure game Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap wasn't just about nostalgia, but an exercise in developing a game that's faithful and respectful to the original's gameplay.

Programming principles from the early days of id Software – by Kris Graft (@krisgraft).

When it comes to game developers, id co-founder John Romero is among the most influential. At GDC Europe in Cologne, Germany, Romero ran down some of the key programming principles that the Doom studio adhered to in the 1990s.

Dispelling some myths about the autistic wunderkind programmer – by Simon Parkin (@SimonParkin).

Beyond the rigors of the [job] application process, for even high functioning autistic people, the strictures of the working environment can present an insurmountable challenge.

Staying happy, creative, and productive in the tumultuous world of game dev – by Bryant Francis (@RBryant2012).

Your e-mail keeps dinging off with JIRA notifications, your cell phone buzzes with word about social plans that you’re going to have to cancel now. And all the while, the game you’re working on isn’t filling you with the same passion and purpose it did when you kicked off development.

My God, it's full of stars: Event[0]'s AI is a near masterpiece – by Katherine Cross (@Quinnae_Moon).

Paris-based Ocelot Society has …[given] us a remarkable story about loneliness and empathy, setting Jupiter’s abyss of magnetic fields to jazz.

Writing Deus Ex: Mankind Divided to 'hold a mirror up to the world’ – by Alex Wawro (@awawro).

In a recent conversation, executive narrative director Mary DeMarle told Gamasutra that [Deus Ex:] Mankind Divided was written to "hold a mirror up to the world" and expose it. That's a notable challenge for any developer.

[ubizheroes]

Virtual Real Estate

Wrastlin With The News The current presidential cabinet includes a WWE co-founder & this passes for modern political discourse: #FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017 CNN promised vengeance. Something To Believe In The pretense of objectivity has been dropped: These reporters aren’t ideologues. They’re just right-thinking people who lean left. Somewhere along the line, they stopped pretending to be objective about Trump. … People don’t just disagree with each other. They can’t imagine how a decent caring human being could disagree with their own view of race or the minimum wage or immigration or Trump. Being a member of the virtuous tribe means not only carrying the correct card in your wallet to reassure yourself. You have to also believe that the people carrying any other card are irrational, or worse, evil. They’re not people to engage in conversation with. They are barriers to be ignored or pushed aside on the virtuous path to paradise. This intolerance and inability to imagine the virtue of the other side is the road to tyranny and chaos. It dehumanizes a good chunk of humanity and that in turn justifies the worst atrocities human beings are capable of. The WSJ, typically a right-leaning publication, is differentiating their coverage of the president from most other outlets by attempting to be somewhat neutral. The news is fake. Even historically left-leaning people are disgusted with outlets like CNN. “I think the president is probably right to say, like, look you are witch-hunting me. You have no smoking gun, you have no real proof.” – CNN supervising producer John Bonifield “When you do shitty reporting like CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times & Rachel Maddow especially. When you do that & it is revealed to be bullshit, what you’re doing is building up Trump. There’s no greater way to build up Trump than to falsely report on him. There’s no better way to build up Trump than to make him the victim.” – Jimmy Dore “Rachel Maddow was given the facts, she ignored them, & she kept right on going. That’s MSNBC, that’s CNN, that’s the New York Times, the Washington Post – they’re all horrible. That’s why we had the Iraq war. That’s why we have the Syria war. That’s why we are still in Afghanistan. That’s why we had Libya. That’s why we have the biggest income disparity since the gilded age. Meanwhile we are spending more on the military than the rest of the world.” – Jimmy Dore And, since people need something to believe in, there are new American Gods: “A half hour of cable news delivers enough psychic trauma for a whole year. The newspapers are talking of nothing but treason, espionage, investigations, protests.” … “Stocks are rallying because of how little faith we have in the government. The Mega Blue Chip Corporation is the new Sovereign.” Current Headwinds for Online Publishing I struggle to keep up with the accelerating rate of change. A number of common themes in the current ecosystem are: We are moving toward a world where more things are becoming fake (only accelerated by the demonetization of neutrality & the algorithmic boost associated with reliably delivering confirmation bias in an algorithmic or manual fashion) risk keeps being radiated outward to the individual while monopoly platforms capture the spoils (forced-place health insurance purchases where the insurance company arbitrarily drops the sick member on the policy even though that is supposed to be illegal, more temp jobs where people don’t get enough hours to get health insurance through their employer, under-funded pensions, outsourcing of core business functions to sweatshops where part-time workers don’t get paid for dozens to hundreds of hours of required training & get to watch beheading videos all day) the barrier to entry keeps increasing (increased marketing cost due to brand bias, heavy ad loads on dominant platforms, & central platforms making partners do “bet the farm” moves in how they adjust distribution to drive adoption of proprietary formats & temporarily over-promote select content formats) the increasing chunk size of competition is making it much harder for individuals to build sustainable businesses. (Yes the tools of the trade are improving quickly, BUT the central platforms are demonetizing the adjacent fields faster than publishing tools & business options improve.) In Europe publishers are aggressively leaning on regulators to try to rebalance power. Some of this stuff is cyclical. About a decade ago the European Commission went after Microsoft for bundling Internet Explorer. Google complained about the monopolistic practices to ensure Microsoft was fined. And we’ve went from that to a web where Google syndicates native ads that blend into page content while directly funding robot journalism. And then Google is ranking the robot-generated crap too. Speaking of robot journalists, check out the top 3 results for this query. All 3 are auto-written by automated insights (AI software). Yikes pic.twitter.com/ltFGFXHNiF— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 8, 2017 But to keep the ecosystem clean & spam free, Google is also planning to leverage their web browser to further dictate the terms of online publishing. Chrome will block autoplay audio & will automatically reroute .dev domains to https. Cutting edge developers suggest using a web browser other than Google Chrome to prevent proprietary lock in across the web. Is this a test, @Google? pic.twitter.com/V9FZ2hL2cA— TNW (@TheNextWeb) September 5, 2017 While Google distributes their Chrome browser as unwanted bundleware, other web browsers must display uninstall links front & center when trying to gain awareness of their product using Google AdWords. Microsoft Edge is coming to Android, but without a BrowserChoice.eu screen it is unlikely most users will change their web browser as most are unaware of what a web browser even is, let alone the limitations of any of them or the tracking embedded in them. If you go back several years, there was celebration of the fact that the cost of doing a startup was so low. You didn’t have to pay Oracle a million dollars for a server license any more. You didn’t even have to rack your own hardware. Now you can just dial it up on Amazon. But there are now these gatekeepers and toll-takers. Back in 2004, you had the wide-open internet. – Jeremy Stoppelman The Mobile Revolution If you are an anti-social work at home webmaster who has dual monitors it is easy to dismiss cell phones as inefficient and chalk most mobile usage up to the following. Russian man visited Chinese click farm.They make fake ratings for mobile apps and things like this.He said they have 10,000 more phones pic.twitter.com/qE96vgCCsi— English Russia (@EnglishRussia1) May 11, 2017 The reality is cell phones are more powerful than they seem if you are strictly consuming rather than working. Deflationary impact of technology: everything in this Radio Shack flyer from 1991 adds up to $3,285.12 and can be done today on a smartphone pic.twitter.com/ONh3waWVgq— Jeffrey Kleintop (@JeffreyKleintop) June 23, 2017 And that is how the unstoppable quickly becomes the extinct! 10 years ago. pic.twitter.com/ZCWfHfpedi— Harry Tucker (@harrytuckerr) September 11, 2017 Many people the world over are addicted to their cell phones to where viral game makers are self-regulating before regulators step in: “From Tuesday, users below 12 years of age will be limited to one hour of play time each day, while those aged between 12 years and 18 years will be limited to two hours a day, Tencent said.” While China is using their various tools to clamp down on Honour of Kings, Tencent is bringing the game to the west, which makes blocking VPN services (with Apple’s help – they must play along or have the phones reduced to bricks) & requiring local data storage & technology transfer more important. Anything stored locally can be easily disappeared: “China’s already formidable internet censors have demonstrated a new strength-the ability to delete images in one-on-one chats as they are being transmitted, making them disappear before receivers see them.” China has banned live streaming, threatened their largest domestic social networks, shut down chat bots, require extensive multimedia review: “an industry association circulated new regulations that at least two “auditors” will, with immediate effect, be required to check all audiovisual content posted online” AND they force users to install spyware on their devices. In spite of all those restrictions, last year “Chinese consumers spent $5.5 trillion through mobile payment platforms, about 50 times more than their American counterparts.” In the last quarter Baidu had Â¥20.87 billion in revenues, with 72% of their revenues driven by mobile. People can not miss that which they’ve never seen, thus platform socialism works. Those who doubt it will be tracked & scored accordingly. History, as well, can be scrubbed. And insurance companies watch everything in real-time – careful what you post. The watchful eye of the Chinese pre-crime team is also looking over every move. Last quarter Facebook had revenues of $9.164 billion, with 87% coming from mobile devices. pic.twitter.com/JlPBSlmKlw— banksy (@thereaIbanksy) September 16, 2017 Simulacrum has ALMOST been perfected: “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.” … “Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.” … “Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.” pic.twitter.com/QBLBXIDDLK— banksy (@thereaIbanksy) August 24, 2017 The web is becoming easier to get addicted to due to personalization algorithms that reinforce our worldviews even as they make us feel more isolated and left out. And the barrier to entry for consumers into one of the few central gatekeeper ecosystems is dropping like a rock due to the falling cost of mobile devices, coupled with with images & video displacing text making literacy optional. As we become more “connected” we feel more isolated: “Social isolation, loneliness or living alone was each a significant factor contributing to premature death. And each one of these factors was a more significant risk factor for dying than obesity. … No one knows precisely why loneliness is surging, threatening the lives of many millions of people, but it does seem that the burgeoning use of technology may have something to do with it. Personally, I would contend that technology may be the chief factor fueling it.” The primary role of the big data mining companies is leveraging surveillance for social engineering Unsettling that according to Mark Zuckerberg purpose of Facebook is forced social engineering. From “World Without Mind” by Franklin Foer: pic.twitter.com/CHRnefg9m2— Murtaza Hussain (@MazMHussain) October 8, 2017 App Annie expects the global app economy to be worth $6.3 trillion by 2021. The reason those numbers can easily sound fake & mobile can seem overblown is how highly concentrated usage has become: “over 80 percent of consumer time on mobile devices is now spent on the apps, websites and properties” of just five companies: Facebook, Google, Apple, Yelp and Bing. Maslow 2.0 pic.twitter.com/X1OguQG8Gq— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) October 7, 2017 eMarketer stated Google will have more mobile ad revenue than desktop ad revenue in the US this year. They also predicted Google & Facebook will consume over 2/3 of US online ad spend within 2 years. The central network operators not only maintain an outsized share of revenues, but also maintain an outsized share of profits. When the home team gets a 30% rake of any sale it is hard for anyone else to compete. Even after buying and gutting Motorola Google bought part of HTC for $1.1 billion. The game plan has never changed: commoditize the compliment to ensure user data & most of the profits flow to Google. Put up arbitrary roadblocks for competing services while launching free parallel offerings to drive lock-in. For the last YEAR I’ve been battling App Store rejections – we made an app called Animoji with animated emojis…now I know why. https://t.co/jKJXfLMGj2— Ryan Jones (@rjonesy) September 9, 2017 Central data aggregators can keep collecting more user data & offer more granular ad distribution features. They can tell you that this micro moment RIGHT NOW is make or break: it’s intended to create a bizarre sense of panic among marketers – “OMG, we have to be present at every possible instant someone might be looking at their phone!” – which doesn’t help them think strategically or make the best use of their marketing or ad spend. The reality is that if you don’t have a relationship with a person on their desktop computer they probably don’t want your mobile app either. If you have the relationship then mobile only increases profits. Is iOS 11 specifically designed to make your older iPhones unusable and drain your battery so you have to upgrade to the newest phones?— Eric Jackson (@ericjackson) October 7, 2017 Many people attempting to build “the next mobile” will go bust, but wherever the attention flows the ads will follow. Those with a broad & dominant tech platform can copy features from single-category devices and keep integrating them into their core products to increase user lock-in. And they can build accessories for those core devices while prohibiting the flow of data to third party devices to keep users locked into their ecosystem. Smaller Screens, Shallower Attention People often multi-task while using mobile devices. Powerful stuff …An very fucking true pic.twitter.com/enP98Z6B7r— Nev (@LFCNev) July 13, 2017 When multi-tasking it is easier to accidentally click an ad. This happens 10s of billions of times a year: This year, in-app mobile ad spend will reach $45.3 billion, up $11 billion from last year, according to eMarketer. And apps are where the money is at for mobile advertising, comprising 80 percent of all U.S. media dollars spent on mobile. But multi-tasking means doing almost everything else worse. The “always on” mode not only increases isolation, but also lowers our ability to focus: “while our phones offer convenience and diversion, they also breed anxiety. Their extraordinary usefulness gives them an unprecedented hold on our attention and vast influence over our thinking and behavior. … Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren’t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens. … when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline. … As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased. … Anticipating that information would be readily available in digital form seemed to reduce the mental effort that people made to remember it. … people are all too quick to credit lies and half-truths spread through social media by Russian agents and other bad actors. If your phone has sapped your powers of discernment, you’ll believe anything it tells you.” Further, the shallow attention stream makes it easy to displace content with ads: 4 Ads 3 map carrousel results 5 organic results 4 Ads Then “see more results” 4 more Ads 5 organic results 4 more Ads On desktop devices people don’t accidentally misclick on ads at anywhere near the rate they fat thumb ads on mobile devices. Desktop ad clicks convert to purchases. Mobile ad clicks convert to ad budget burned: “marketers are still seeing few shoppers purchasing on mobile. The 52% of share in traffic only has 26% share of revenue.” For traditional publishers mobile users drastically under-monetize desktop users due to drastically lower conversion rates (true for almost everyone in ecommerce outside of Amazon perhaps) limited cross-device tracking (how do you track people who don’t even hit your site but hit a cached page hosted via Google AMP or Facebook Instant Articles?) lower ad load allowed on publisher sites due to limited screen size aggressive filtering of fat thumb ad clicks on partner sites from central ad networks For the central network operators almost all the above are precisely the exact opposite. higher ad CTR by making entire interface ads (& perhaps even disappearing the concept of non-ads in the result set) great cross-device user tracking higher ad load allowed by the small screen size pushing content below the fold more lenient filtering of fat thumb accidental ad clicks If you look at raw stats without understanding the underlying impact, it is easy to believe the ecosystem is healthy. Assumption: Google’s ads are more prominent, so organic must be dying.Reality: As of Oct. 2016, 20X more organic clicks than paid ones. pic.twitter.com/FaEBpBZWSw— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) July 1, 2017 However the huge number of “no click” results are demonetizing easy publisher revenues, which have traditionally helped to fund more in-depth investigative reporting. Further, much of the direct navigation which happened in the past is now being passed through brand-related search result pages. You can argue that is an increase in search traffic, or you can argue it is shifting the roll of the address bar from navigation to search. The first page is nothing but ads Yep, and here they are in Philly. Home service ads, then AdWords traditional ads, then the local pack (way down below). pic.twitter.com/VOVZPWWHsg— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 17, 2017 On mobile so is the second, and most of the third Hey, only 2.5 screens before you get to the 10 blue links. A full 4 screens if you cannot crack the top 2 organics. pic.twitter.com/bbm1pz8hyF— Jeremy Bochenek (@J_Bochenek) July 17, 2017 If a search query has lots of easy to structure crap around it, a user might need 6 or 7 scrolls to get to an organic result Very interesting Google SERP for GoT. One barely visible organic result after >70% scroll depth. Oh my… #seo #GameOfThones pic.twitter.com/Z6j7VvJMI4— Bastian Grimm (@basgr) August 24, 2017 Then if third parties go “well Google does this, so I should too” they are considered a low quality user experience and get a penalty. Emailed a client one month ago when I picked up ultra-aggressive ads (especially on mobile). They just received an ad experiences warning. pic.twitter.com/QLLZci1xKW— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 25, 2017 31% ad coverage on mobile website is excessive / spam / low quality user experience for a publisher, while 301% coverage is reasonable for the central network operators. Google not only displaces the result set, but also leverages their search suggestion features & algorithmic influence to alter how people search & what they search for. Ads are getting integrated into mobile keyboards. The standard keyboard on the HTC 10 has begun showing ads [X-Post from r/mildlyinfuriating] https://t.co/FuXDJzilZ6 #blog pic.twitter.com/VriK54dBHb— Android Facts (@manatweets) July 16, 2017 And when a user finally reaches the publisher’s website (provided they scroll past the ads, the AMP listings, and all the other scrape-n-displace trash) then when they finally land on a publication Google will overlay other recommended articles from other sites. Whoa -> While you’re reading a page on the Google app for iOS, you’ll now see suggestions for related content https://t.co/n6FjkNqx82 pic.twitter.com/DZYTt8T7fI— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 19, 2017 That feature will eventually end up including ads in it, where publishers will get 0.00% of the revenue generated. Remember how Google suggested publishers should make their websites faster, remove ads, remove clutter, etc. What was the point of all that? To create free real estate for Google to insert a spam unit into your website? Continuing coverage of Google’s new content recos. I’m sure Best Buy is thrilled to see Amazon show up while someone is on their page. Ouch. pic.twitter.com/qpDyGKPyYh— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 24, 2017 This wouldn’t be bad if mobile were a small, fringe slice of traffic, but it is becoming the majority of traffic. And as mobile increases desktop traffic is shrinking. Even politically biased outlets that appear to be nearly perfectly optimized for a filter bubble that promotes identity politics struggle to make the numbers work: “As a result of continued decline in direct advertising, [Salon’s] total revenue in the fiscal year 2017 decreased by 34% to $4.6 million. Following the market trend, 84% of our advertising revenue in fiscal year 2017 was generated by programmatic selling. … [Monthly unique visitors to our website saw] a decrease of 23%. We attribute the decline primarily to the changes in the algorithms used by Facebook.” I knew the last year was bad for online publishing, but the Salon 10K shows *just how bad* pic.twitter.com/oyH7pdCDNI— josh laurito (@joshlaurito) June 26, 2017 The above sorts of numbers are the logical outcome to this: we’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don’t have much content”above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward. Especially when combined with this: As you scroll through it, you are then given travel ads for flight options through Google Flight search, hotels through Google Hotel search and restaurants through Google Local results. Then towards the bottom of the knowledge graph card, all the way at the end in a small grayish font, you have a link to “see web results.” Bad news for TripAdvisor. Google has squeezed out SEO for travel. PCLN/EXPE SEM $ spend and higher conversion is a massive competitive advantage. Bad news for TRIP. pic.twitter.com/39QkxuN780— modest proposal (@modestproposal1) April 17, 2017 And amongst the good news for Expedia, there’s also a bit of bad news for Expedia. The hotels are fighting Airbnb & OTAs. In travel Google is twice as big as the biggest OTA players. They keep eating more SERP real estate and adding more content behind tabs. On mobile they’ll even disappear the concept of organic results. Room previews in the search results not only means that second tier players are worth a song, but even the new growth players propped up by aggressive ad buying eventually hit a wall and see their stock crash. As the entire ecosystem gets squeezed by middlemen and the market gets obfuscated with an incomplete selection it is ultimately consumers who lose: “Reservations made through Internet discount sites are almost always slated for our worst rooms.” The New York Times pitched Yelp as a pesky player holding a grudge: “For six years, his company has been locked in a campaign on three continents to get antitrust regulators to punish Google, Yelp’s larger, richer and more politically connected competitor. … Yelp concluded that there was no better way to get Google’s attention than to raise the specter of regulation. … something [Mark Mahaney] calls the Death of Free Google. As the internet has migrated to mobile phones, Google has compensated for the smaller screen space by filling it with so many ads that users can have a hard time finding a result that hasn’t been paid for.” In spite of how quick The New York Times was to dismiss Yelp, the monopoly platforms are stiffing competition & creativity while bundling fake reviews & junk features into their core platforms. People can literally switch their name to “Loop dee Loop” and leave you terrible, fake reviews. Google’s lack of effort & investment to clean up trash in their local services department highlights that they don’t feel they need to compete on quality. Pay for core search distribution, throw an inferior service front & center, and win by default placement. As AI advancements make fake reviews look more legit Google’s lack of investment in creating a quality ecosystem will increasingly harm both consumers and businesses. Many low margin businesses will go under simply because their Google reviews are full of inaccurate trash or a competitor decided to hijack their business listing or list their business as closed. To this day Google is still egregiously stealing content from Yelp: Yelp said it investigated and found that over one hour, Google pulled images from Yelp’s servers nearly 386,000 times for business listings in Google Maps, which Google exempted from its promise to not scrape content. Yelp then searched Google for 150 of the businesses from those map listings and found that for 110 of them, Google used a Yelp photo as the lead image in the businesses’ listings in search results. Stealing content & wrapping it in fake reviews is NOT putting the user first. Facebook has their own matching parallel shifts. The aggregate quality of mobile ad clicks is quite low. So as mobile becomes a much higher percent of total ad clicks, those who don’t have scale and narrative control are reduced to taking whatever they can get. And mainstream media outlets are reduced to writing puff pieces so the brands they cover will pay to promote the stories on the main channels. As programmatic advertising, ad blockers, unpatched Android-powered botnets & malware spread each day gets a little uglier for everyone but the central market operators. It is so bad that some of the central market operators offer surveillance apps which claim to protect user privacy! Other app makers not connected to monopoly profit streams monetize any way they can. The narrative of growth can be sold (we are launching a new food channel, we are investing in our internal video team, we have exclusive real estate listings, and, um, we acquired a food channel) but the competition is a zero sum game with Google & Facebook eating off the publisher’s plates. That’s why Time is trying to shave $400 million off their expenses & wants to sell their magazine division. Newspaper companies are selling for $1. It is also why Business Insider is no longer chasing growth & the New York Times is setting up a charitable trust. The rise of ad blocking only accelerates the underlying desperation. I have some thoughts about why news orgs are finding that people won’t read long articles: pic.twitter.com/G8Zh6GTA6w— Ben Chase (@bbchase) July 4, 2017 I feel terrible for journalists who invest time and effort into doing a hard job well only to have it presented like this. pic.twitter.com/jIZxuJqVAq— Jeff Long (@banterability) October 5, 2017 As long as news websites make their own customer experience worse than what can be found as a cached copy on the monopoly platforms there is no reason to visit the end publisher website. That is why the proprietary formats promoted by the monopoly platforms are so dangerous. They force lighter monetization & offset the lack of revenue by given preferential placement: click through rate from Google search went from 5.9% (Regular) to 10.3% (AMP), and average search position went from 5.9 (Regular) to 1.7 (AMP). Since then, we have deployed AMP across fifteen of our brands and we have been very pleased with the results. Today, AMP accounts for 79% of our mobile search traffic and 36% of our total mobile visits. As long as almost nobody is using the new proprietary, ghetto lock-in format the math may work out there, but once many people adopt it then it becomes another recurring sunk cost with no actual benefit: the only voices promoting AMP’s performance benefits are coming from inside Google. … given how AMP pages are privileged in Google’s search results, the net effect of the team’s hard, earnest work comes across as a corporate-backed attempt to rewrite HTML in Google’s image. Even if you get a slight uptick in traffic from AMP, it will lead to lower quality user engagement as users are browsing across websites rather than within websites. Getting a bit more traffic but 59% fewer leads is a fail. No amount of collaborative publisher partnerships, begging for anti-trust exemptions, or whining about Google is going to fix the problem. “The only way publishers can address this inexorable threat is by banding together. If they open a unified front to negotiate with Google and Facebook-pushing for stronger intellectual-property protections, better support for subscription models and a fair share of revenue and data-they could build a more sustainable future for the news business. But antitrust laws make such coordination perilous. These laws, intended to prevent monopolies, are having the unintended effect of preserving and protecting Google and Facebook’s dominant position.” Wait a minute. Wasn’t it the New York Times which claimed Yelp was holding an arbitrary grudge against Google? The following sounds a lot more desperate: newspapers that once delivered their journalism with their own trucks increasingly have to rely on these big online platforms to get their articles in front of people, fighting for attention alongside fake news, websites that lift their content, and cat videos. Well maybe that is just smaller publications & not the gray lady herself “the temperature is rising in terms of concern, and in some cases anger, about what seems like a very asymmetric, disadvantageous relationship between the publishers and the very big digital platforms.” – NYT CEO Mark Thompson In unrelated news, there’s another round of layoffs coming at the New York Times. And the New York Times is also setting up a nonprofit division to expand journalism while their core company focuses on something else. Apparently Yelp does not qualify as a publisher in this instance. Or does it? The Times is backing the move for what is called an anticompetitive safe haven, in part, Mr. Thompson said, “because we care about the whole of journalism as well as about The New York Times.” Ah, whole of journalism, which, apparently, no longer includes local business coverage. You know the slogan: “news isn’t news, unless it isn’t local.” The struggles are all across the media landscape. The new Boston Globe CEO lasted a half-year. The San Diego Union-Tribune resorted to using GoFundMe. The Chicago Sun-Times sold for $1. Moody’s issued a negative outlook for the US newspaper sector. As the industry declines the biggest players view consolidation as the only solution. These struggles existed even before the largest brand advertisers like P&G cut back on low & no value ad venues like YouTube: In the fourth quarter, the reduction in marketing that occurred was almost all in the digital space. And what it reflected was a choice to cut spending from a digital standpoint where it was ineffective: where either we were serving bots as opposed to human beings, or where the placement of ads was not facilitating the equity of our brands. Google & Facebook are extending their grip on the industry with Google launching topical feeds & Facebook wanting to control subscription management. Best of luck to journalists on the employment front: The initiative, dubbed Reporters and Data and Robots (RADAR), will see a team of five journalists work with Natural Language Generation software to produce over 30,000 pieces of content for local media each month. Hopefully editors catch the subtle errors the bots make, because most of them will not be this obvious & stupid. The Guardian does not seem to know what a 40 is https://t.co/m7Gm1YrbXC pic.twitter.com/Y0sK9r0ltJ— Shuja Haider (@shujaxhaider) July 26, 2017 The cost of parasitic content recycling is coming down quickly: In a show of strength last year, Microsoft used thousands of these chips at once to translate all of English Wikipedia into Spanish-3 billion words across five million articles-in less than a tenth of a second. Next Microsoft will let its cloud customers use these chips to speed up their own AI tasks. Voice search makes it even easier to extract the rewards without paying publishers. Throwing pennies at journalists does nothing to change this. If Google is subsidizing robotic journalism they are thus legitimizing robotic journalism. As big publishers employ the tactic, Google ranks it. Checking some Heliograf articles (AI-written) reveals once again they do rank well. Google is in a tough position here. It’s inevitable… pic.twitter.com/g0Etcx3rFj— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 16, 2017 It is almost impossible to compete economically with an entity that rewrites your work & has zero marginal cost of production. YouTube has perhaps the worst comments on the web. Some mainstream news sites got rid of comments because they couldn’t justify the cost of policing them. That in turn shifts the audience & attention stream to sites like Facebook & Twitter. Some news sites which are still leaving comments enabled rely on a Google filter, a technology Google can use on YouTube as they see fit. Any plugins publishers use to lower their costs can later disappear. It looked like FindTheBest was doing well financially, but when it was acquired many news sites quickly found out the cost of free as they now have thousands of broken articles in their archives: “Last month, Graphiq announced that features for news publishers would no longer be available after Friday.” Driving costs toward zero by piling on external dependencies is no way to build a sustainable business. Especially when the central network operators are eating the playing field: “Between fast-loading AMP articles from major news brands hosted in its domain, full pages of information scraped from outside sites that don’t require you to visit them, basic shopping functions built into ads, YouTube, and a host of other features, the Google-verse is more of a digital walled garden than ever. … If Google continues to choke these sites out, what incentive will there be for new ones to come along?” Unprofitable partners which were buying growth with artificially cheap pricing eventually find out investors want profits more than growth & either reprice or go away. The longer you use something & the more locked in you are to it the more aggressively it can afford to reprice. Symbiotic relationships devolve into abusive ones: “for every pound an advertiser spends programmatically on the Guardian only 30 pence actually goes to the publisher.” – Mediatel “Google wants to cut out the middlemen, which it turns out, are URLs.” – MobileMoxie “[AMP is] a way for Google to obfuscate your website, usurp your content & remove any personal credibility from the web” – TheRegister “Though the stated initiative of ads.txt is to stop inventory resale, it achieves this by establishing ‘preferred’ channels, which naturally favors the industry’s most influential companies” – Ad Exchanger That Apple does extra work to undo AMP says a lot. Those who think the central network operators are naive to the power structure being promoted by the faux solutions are either chasing short-term goals or are incredibly masochistic. Arbitraging brand is the core business model of the attention merchant monopoly. we’ve found out that 98% of our business was coming from 22 words. So, wait, we’re buying 3,200 words and 98% of the business is coming from 22 words. What are the 22 words? And they said, well, it’s the word Restoration Hardware and the 21 ways to spell it wrong, okay? Publishers buying the “speed” narrative are failing themselves. The Guardian has 11 people working on AMP integration. And what is Google doing about speed? Google shut down Google Instant search results, often displays a screen or two full of ads which mobile users have to scroll past to find the organic search results AND is testing auto-playing videos in the search results. Facebook is also promoting fast loading & mobile-friendly pages. To keep bleeding clicks out of the “organic” ecosystem they don’t even need to have explicit malicious intent. They can run a thousand different tests every month (new vertical sitelink formats, swipable sitelinks, showing 8 sitelinks on tiny mobile devices, MOAR sitelinks, message extensions, extensions on call-only ads, price discount labels, frame 3rd party content inline, dramatically ramp up featured snippets +QnA listings, more related searches, more features in ad units, larger ad units, ad units that replace websites & charge advertisers for sending clicks from Google to Google, launch a meta-search service where they over-promote select listings, test dropping URLs from listings, put ads in the local pack, change color of source links or other elements, pop ups of search results inside search results, etc.) & keep moving toward whatever layout drives more ad clicks, keeps users on Google longer & forces businesses to buy ads for exposure, claiming they are optimizing the user experience the whole time. They can hard-code any data type or feature, price it at free to de-fund adjacent businesses, consolidate market power, then increase rents after they have a monopoly position in the adjacent market. And they can fund research on how to remove watermarks from images. Why not make hosting free, get people to publish into a proprietary format & try to shift news reading onto the Google app. With enough attention & market coverage they can further extort publishers into accepting perpetually worse deals. And free analytics & business plugins which are widely adopted can have key features get pushed into the paid version. Just look at Google Analytics – its free or $150,000+/yr. The above sorts of moves can be done in isolation, or in a combinatorial approach. Publishers aloof of the ecosystem shifts may use microformats to structure their content. They’ll then find it is integrated in Google’s new image search layout, where Google copies the content wholesale & shows it near other third party images framed by Google. How about some visually striking, yet irrelevant listings for competing brands on branded searches to force the brand ad buy. And, of course rounded card corners to eat a few more pixels, along with faint ad labeling on ads coupled with vibrant colored dots on the organic results to confuse end users into thinking the organic results are the ads. While Google turns their search results into an adspam farm, they invite you to test showing fewer ads on your site to improve user experience. Google knows best – let them automate your ad load & ad placement. What is the real risk of AI? Bias. “It’s important that we be transparent about the training data that we are using, and are looking for hidden biases in it, otherwise we are building biased systems,” Giannandrea added. “If someone is trying to sell you a black box system for medical decision support, and you don’t know how it works or what data was used to train it, then I wouldn’t trust it.” And how does Google justify their AI investments? Through driving incremental ad clicks: “The DeepMind founders understand that their power within [Alphabet], and their ability to get their way with [Alphabet CEO] Larry Page, depends on how many eyeballs and clicks and ad dollars they can claim to be driving” No bias at all there! Truth: Google killed publishing in 2015. What you’re reading now is detritus + new junk posted by crazies walking around empty offices— 11 (@searchsleuth998) August 1, 2017 SEOs who were overly reliant on the search channel were the first to notice all the above sorts of change, as it is their job to be hyper-aware of ecosystem shifts. But publishers far removed from SEO who never focused on SEO are now writing about the trends SEOs were writing about nearly a decade ago. Josh Marshall recently covered Google’s awesome monopoly powers. few publishers really want to talk about the depths or mechanics of Google’s role in news publishing. Some of this is secrecy about proprietary information; most of it is that Google could destroy or profoundly damage most publications if it wanted to. So why rock the boat? … Google’s monopoly control is almost comically great. It’s a monopoly at every conceivable turn and consistently uses that market power to deepen its hold and increase its profits. Just the interplay between DoubleClick and Adexchange is textbook anti-competitive practices. … Is your favorite website laying off staff or ‘pivoting to video’. In most cases, the root cause is not entirely but to a significant degree driven by the platform monopolies His article details how Google owns many points of the supply chain So let’s go down the list: 1) The system for running ads, 2) the top purchaser of ads, 3) the most pervasive audience data service, 4) all search, 5) our email. … But wait, there’s more! Google also owns Chrome, the most used browser for visiting TPM. He also covers the price dumping technique that is used to maintain control In many cases, alternatives don’t exist because no business can get a footing with a product Google lets people use for free. And he shared an example of Google algorithms gone astray crippling his business, even though it was not related to search & unintentional: Because we were forwarding to ourselves spam that other people sent to us, Google decided that the owner of the TPM url was a major spammer and blocked emails from TPM from being sent to anyone. If the above comes across as depressing, don’t worry. The search results now contain a depression diagnostic testing tool. Categories: internet from SEO Book http://www.seobook.com/virtual-real-estate via IFTTT from Local SEO Guru http://localseoguru.tumblr.com/post/166227650323 via IFTTT from Tumblr http://tomeucapella.tumblr.com/post/166231157730/virtual-real-estate via IFTTT

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