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mostlysignssomeportents · 8 months ago

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Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (May 3) in CALGARY, then TOMORROW (May 4) in VANCOUVER, then onto Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

Even Google admits – grudgingly – that it is losing the spam wars. The explosive proliferation of botshit has supercharged the sleazy "search engine optimization" business, such that results to common queries are 50% Google ads to spam sites, and 50% links to spam sites that tricked Google into a high rank (without paying for an ad):

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies#site-reputation

It's nice that Google has finally stopped gaslighting the rest of us with claims that its search was still the same bedrock utility that so many of us relied upon as a key piece of internet infrastructure. This not only feels wildly wrong, it is empirically, provably false:

https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf

Not only that, but we know why Google search sucks. Memos released as part of the DOJ's antitrust case against Google reveal that the company deliberately chose to worsen search quality to increase the number of queries you'd have to make (and the number of ads you'd have to see) to find a decent result:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Google's antitrust case turns on the idea that the company bought its way to dominance, spending the some of the billions it extracted from advertisers and publishers to buy the default position on every platform, so that no one ever tried another search engine, which meant that no one would invest in another search engine, either.

Google's tacit defense is that its monopoly billions only incidentally fund these kind of anticompetitive deals. Mostly, Google says, it uses its billions to build the greatest search engine, ad platform, mobile OS, etc that the public could dream of. Only a company as big as Google (says Google) can afford to fund the R&D and security to keep its platform useful for the rest of us.

That's the "monopolistic bargain" – let the monopolist become a dictator, and they will be a benevolent dictator. Shriven of "wasteful competition," the monopolist can split their profits with the public by funding public goods and the public interest.

Google has clearly reneged on that bargain. A company experiencing the dramatic security failures and declining quality should be pouring everything it has to righting the ship. Instead, Google repeatedly blew tens of billions of dollars on stock buybacks while doing mass layoffs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Those layoffs have now reached the company's "core" teams, even as its core services continue to decay:

https://qz.com/google-is-laying-off-hundreds-as-it-moves-core-jobs-abr-1851449528

(Google's antitrust trial was shrouded in secrecy, thanks to the judge's deference to the company's insistence on confidentiality. The case is moving along though, and warrants your continued attention:)

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-2-trillion-secret-trial-against

Google wormed its way into so many corners of our lives that its enshittification keeps erupting in odd places, like ordering takeout food:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

Back in February, Housefresh – a rigorous review site for home air purifiers – published a viral, damning account of how Google had allowed itself to be overrun by spammers who purport to provide reviews of air purifiers, but who do little to no testing and often employ AI chatbots to write automated garbage:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

In the months since, Housefresh's Gisele Navarro has continued to fight for the survival of her high-quality air purifier review site, and has received many tips from insiders at the spam-farms and Google, all of which she recounts in a followup essay:

https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

One of the worst offenders in spam wars is Dotdash Meredith, a content-farm that "publishes" multiple websites that recycle parts of each others' content in order to climb to the top search slots for lucrative product review spots, which can be monetized via affiliate links.

A Dotdash Meredith insider told Navarro that the company uses a tactic called "keyword swarming" to push high-quality independent sites off the top of Google and replace them with its own garbage reviews. When Dotdash Meredith finds an independent site that occupies the top results for a lucrative Google result, they "swarm a smaller site’s foothold on one or two articles by essentially publishing 10 articles [on the topic] and beefing up [Dotdash Meredith sites’] authority."

Dotdash Meredith has keyword swarmed a large number of topics. from air purifiers to slow cookers to posture correctors for back-pain:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/keyword-swarming-dotdash.jpg

The company isn't shy about this. Its own shareholder communications boast about it. What's more, it has competition.

Take Forbes, an actual news-site, which has a whole shadow-empire of web-pages reviewing products for puppies, dogs, kittens and cats, all of which link to high affiliate-fee-generating pet insurance products. These reviews are not good, but they are treasured by Google's algorithm, which views them as a part of Forbes's legitimate news-publishing operation and lets them draft on Forbes's authority.

This side-hustle for Forbes comes at a cost for the rest of us, though. The reviewers who actually put in the hard work to figure out which pet products are worth your money (and which ones are bad, defective or dangerous) are crowded off the front page of Google and eventually disappear, leaving behind nothing but semi-automated SEO garbage from Forbes:

https://twitter.com/ichbinGisele/status/1642481590524583936

There's a name for this: "site reputation abuse." That's when a site perverts its current – or past – practice of publishing high-quality materials to trick Google into giving the site a high ranking. Think of how Deadspin's private equity grifter owners turned it into a site full of casino affiliate spam:

https://www.404media.co/who-owns-deadspin-now-lineup-publishing/

The same thing happened to the venerable Money magazine:

https://moneygroup.pr/

Money is one of the many sites whose air purifier reviews Google gives preference to, despite the fact that they do no testing. According to Google, Money is also a reliable source of information on reprogramming your garage-door opener, buying a paint-sprayer, etc:

https://money.com/best-paint-sprayer/

All of this is made ten million times worse by AI, which can spray out superficially plausible botshit in superhuman quantities, letting spammers produce thousands of variations on their shitty reviews, flooding the zone with bullshit in classic Steve Bannon style:

https://escapecollective.com/commerce-content-is-breaking-product-reviews/

As Gizmodo, Sports Illustrated and USA Today have learned the hard way, AI can't write factual news pieces. But it can pump out bullshit written for the express purpose of drafting on the good work human journalists have done and tricking Google – the search engine 90% of us rely on – into upranking bullshit at the expense of high-quality information.

A variety of AI service bureaux have popped up to provide AI botshit as a service to news brands. While Navarro doesn't say so, I'm willing to bet that for news bosses, outsourcing your botshit scams to a third party is considered an excellent way of avoiding your journalists' wrath. The biggest botshit-as-a-service company is ASR Group (which also uses the alias Advon Commerce).

Advon claims that its botshit is, in fact, written by humans. But Advon's employees' Linkedin profiles tell a different story, boasting of their mastery of AI tools in the industrial-scale production of botshit:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Advon-AI-LinkedIn.jpg

Now, none of this is particularly sophisticated. It doesn't take much discernment to spot when a site is engaged in "site reputation abuse." Presumably, the 12,000 googlers the company fired last year could have been employed to check the top review keyword results manually every couple of days and permaban any site caught cheating this way.

Instead, Google is has announced a change in policy: starting May 5, the company will downrank any site caught engaged in site reputation abuse. However, the company takes a very narrow view of site reputation abuse, limiting punishments to sites that employ third parties to generate or uprank their botshit. Companies that produce their botshit in-house are seemingly not covered by this policy.

As Navarro writes, some sites – like Forbes – have prepared for May 5 by blocking their botshit sections from Google's crawler. This can't be their permanent strategy, though – either they'll have to kill the section or bring it in-house to comply with Google's rules. Bringing things in house isn't that hard: US News and World Report is advertising for an SEO editor who will publish 70-80 posts per month, doubtless each one a masterpiece of high-quality, carefully researched material of great value to Google's users:

https://twitter.com/dannyashton/status/1777408051357585425

As Navarro points out, Google is palpably reluctant to target the largest, best-funded spammers. Its March 2024 update kicked many garbage AI sites out of the index – but only small bottom-feeders, not large, once-respected publications that have been colonized by private equity spam-farmers.

All of this comes at a price, and it's only incidentally paid by legitimate sites like Housefresh. The real price is borne by all of us, who are funneled by the 90%-market-share search engine into "review" sites that push low quality, high-price products. Housefresh's top budget air purifier costs $79. That's hundreds of dollars cheaper than the "budget" pick at other sites, who largely perform no original research.

Google search has a problem. AI botshit is dominating Google's search results, and it's not just in product reviews. Searches for infrastructure code samples are dominated by botshit code generated by Pulumi AI, whose chatbot hallucinates nonexistence AWS features:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/pulumi_ai_pollution_of_search/

This is hugely consequential: when these "hallucinations" slip through into production code, they create huge vulnerabilities for widespread malicious exploitation:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

We've put all our eggs in Google's basket, and Google's dropped the basket – but it doesn't matter because they can spend $20b/year bribing Apple to make sure no one ever tries a rival search engine on Ios or Safari:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-payments-apple-reached-20-220947331.html

Google's response – laying off core developers, outsourcing to low-waged territories with weak labor protections and spending billions on stock buybacks – presents a picture of a company that is too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Google promised us a quid-pro-quo: let them be the single, authoritative portal ("organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful"), and they will earn that spot by being the best search there is:

https://www.ft.com/content/b9eb3180-2a6e-41eb-91fe-2ab5942d4150

But – like the spammers at the top of its search result pages – Google didn't earn its spot at the center of our digital lives.

It cheated.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

Image: freezelight (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spam_wall_-_Flickr_-_freezelight.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

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probablyasocialecologist · 1 year ago

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Ex-Meta employee Madelyn Machado recently posted a TikTok video claiming that she was getting paid $190,000 a year to do nothing. Another Meta employee, also on TikTok, posted that “Meta was hiring people so that other companies couldn’t have us, and then they were just kind of like hoarding us like Pokémon cards.” Over at Google, a company known to have pioneered the modern tech workplace, one designer complained of spending 40 percent of their time on “the inefficien[cy] overhead of simply working at Google.” Some report spending all day on tasks as simple as changing the color of a website button. Working the bare minimum while waiting for stock to vest is so common that Googlers call it “resting and vesting.” In an anonymous online poll on how many “focused hours of work” software engineers put in each day, 71 percent of the over four thousand respondents claimed to work six hours a day or less, while 12 percent said they did between one and two hours a day. During the acute phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, it became common for tech workers to capitalize on all this free time by juggling multiple full-time remote jobs. According to the Wall Street Journal, many workers who balance two jobs do not even hit a regular forty-hour workload for both jobs combined. One software engineer reported logging between three and ten hours of actual work per week when working one job, with the rest of his time spent on pointless meetings and pretending to be busy. My own experience supports this trend: toward the end of my five-year tenure as a software engineer for Microsoft, I was working fewer than three hours a day. And of what little code I produced for them, none of it made any real impact on Microsoft’s bottom line—or the world at large. For much of this century, optimism that technology would make the world a better place fueled the perception that Silicon Valley was the moral alternative to an extractive Wall Street—that it was possible to make money, not at the expense of society but in service of it. In other words, many who joined the industry did so precisely because they thought that their work would be useful. Yet what we’re now seeing is a lot of bullshit. If capitalism is supposed to be efficient and, guided by the invisible hand of the market, eliminate inefficiencies, how is it that the tech industry, the purported cradle of innovation, has become a redoubt of waste and unproductivity?

#meta #google #silicon valley #bullshit jobs #Innovation

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sybbi · 7 months ago

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The thing I really don't understand about AI in response to search results is what exactly services gain from it. I know just about every tech service is now dipping their hands into training AI programs with the hopes of monetizing it somehow someday, but in the meantime, isn't it like shooting themselves in the foot? The value of search engines isn't just that an answer is put in front of you, it's that people can look through sources themselves and find the information they need or evaluate the veracity of the sources themselves. For websites, it's supposed to be that if you've optimized yourself enough, you'll appear higher in the search results, thus more traffic and potential ad revenue. But if people were to just take the AI results at their word and not click through to anything else, doesn't that tank the value of search engine optimization in the first place? If you're not driving traffic and ad revenue for certain sites, and you're promoting potential garbage to your non-business users, what is the value of your engine? Aren't the people who were paying to have their links placed higher on Google's results pages pissed that, not only are they potentially not getting the traffic they may once have been getting, but the thing they were paying for -- to be at the top of the page, no scrolling necessary -- isn't what they're getting? You have to scroll past all that AI shit, and while you're at it you might as well scroll past all the links marked as ads to the stuff that is there on merit, right? How does any of this make sense?

#WHAT. IS. THE. PLAN.#i mean i know in the abstract the plan is undercut labor costs #(and ignore that if you undercut labor enough people wont have money to buy the shit you're trying to sell)#(thus either tanking the economy or driving us into a more genuine state of mass indentured servitude)#but i havrnt heard anything about the cost analysis of whether pouring all these resources #into something like this is even worth it in the end #or maybe this is just another instance of techies trying to dupe easily impressed investors into giving them money #ai

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mariacallous · 25 days ago

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Black Friday is not just about cheap TVs, cut price gaming consoles, and saving money on laptops; it’s also about getting a bargain on Faraday cages to stop 5G from melting your brain, grabbing a great deal on biblically inspired diet pills, and securing that hot-pink T-shirt with a picture of president-elect Donald Trump on the front.

This year, far-right extremists, MAGAworld, and conspiracists are all jumping on the Black Friday bandwagon to try and persuade their followers to buy untested health supplements, unfunny novelty mugs, and guns—lots and lots of guns.

Rather than advertising on mainstream online marketplaces offered by sites including Google or Facebook, these groups are targeting their audience where they live, on fringe and alternative online platforms with little or no moderation. Spaces like Gab, a white-supremacist-friendly social network run by a christian nationalist. Or Telegram, where election deniers and neo-Nazi groups happily sit side-by-side despite new privacy changes being introduced this year. And of course,Trump’s own Truth Social, where his most devoted followers can be found.

Gab and Truth Social did not immediately respond to a request to comment. Telegram spokesperson Remi Vaughn said that ads placed through the Telegram Ads platform are vetted before they are shown.

For those feeling a little drained after Thanksgiving, alternative health company Exodus Strong is offering discounts on a dietary supplement which has “7 Biblically-inspired ingredients and a molecular hydrogen generating blend that optimize your Mind and Body to function the way God intended.” The tablets, which are currently being advertised up to 60 percent off on Truth Social, include, among other biblical ingredients, frankincense and myrrh. Those who purchase one of these supplements will even get a free gift: a prayer plan.

Undermining the boasts about the product slightly, however, is the disclaimer on the company’s own website that reads: “These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.”

Launched just in time for Black Friday, the new online store from right-wing YouTube-alternative Rumble features a who’s who of conspiracy theorists and conservative agitators on its front page, including Trump confidante Laura Loomer and underpants-wearing baptiser Russell Brand.

The store itself is a cornucopia of unimagined gems, everything from Faraday cages for your phone to stop 5G melting your brain, to nuclear fallout preparedness kits for the bargain price of $349. Rumble did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Many far-right and conspiracy newsletters and subscription services are offering huge discounts to lock in their audiences for the next 12 months. Gab for example is offering 50 percent discounts on yearly subscriptions to its AI service, whose racist chatbots have been trained to deny the Holocaust.

An antisemitic Irish blogger who is a close ally of white supremacist Nick Fuentes is offering 40 percent off his Substack subscriptions directly to his existing readers, showing that the effort to cash in on Black Friday hype is not limited to extremists in the US.

By far the most popular Black Friday ads on these platforms are from gun manufacturers, who are offering huge discounts on everything from high-powered rifles to a pink “no drill cheek rest” for your scoped long gun. (The “MAGA Patriot,” a Trump-themed AR-15 that was created in the wake of the president-elect surviving an assassination attempt by the same gun, is not discounted for Black Friday.)

Some of these promotions are simply flogging pro-MAGA paraphernalia. On Truth Social, Fox News host Sean Hannity is promoting the Black Friday deals available in his own merch store. From coffee cups with the phrase “leftist tears” to a “Daddy’s Home” T-shirt featuring a picture of Trump in front of the White House wearing a hot-pink jacket, Hannity has something for all tastes—as long as those tastes align with a pro-Trump, MAGA, Christian nationalist view of America.

For those Trump supporters who may be missing the glory days of 2020 when they could come together online to rage against the voting machines for stealing the election, conspiracy group Audit the Vote PA has got you covered with a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “election denier,” advertised on Gab.

And the biggest election denier of them all, pillow salesman Mike Lindell, is, of course, having a massive Black Friday sale. The man who has sponsored huge swathes of the far-right media ecosystem with promotional codes for the last four years is now offering a two-pack of “We the People” pillow covers for just $25.

On these alternative platforms, discussions about Black Friday are not only about getting 50 percent off “Make Christmas Great Again” T-shirts. Those promotions are interspersed with incredibly antisemitic and racist posts about the day, including several featuring children in black face.

Some users of Gab and Truth Social are also pushing back against Black Friday, calling out the “deranged libtards who turn into dangerous NCPs” during the event (misspelling NPC, which is used to describe someone who is predictable or robotic.) Others insist they are “boycotting Black Friday” because it’s a cash grab by the globalist elite.

And of course, conspiracies are never far away.

One user on Trump’s Truth Social, who calls themselves “Trust the Plan” (spelled like trusttheplqn), believes they have uncovered a secret message in one store’s Black Friday promotional material based on “intel” provided by another Truth Social account called Entheos. The conspiracy theory centers on the store promoting a “storewide blackout” for Black Friday, which “Trust the Plan” believes is code for something sinister taking place, though they fail to say exactly what this is.

“Black friday is on the 29th, but their sale starts on 27th (date that Entheos gave). And why would there be a ‘blackout storewide’ for black friday? You want complete opposite of a blackout...so people can actually shop.”

For others however, the situation appears much more dire. One Gab poster shared an article from a conspiracy site discussing a “global escalation” on Friday. The piece suggests that recent comments by Russian president Vladimir Putin related to launching a nuclear strike signal a looming apocalypse. “Stay Armed, Stay Safe, Patriots,” the poster wrote on Gab.

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repguardians · 7 months ago

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Unlocking Marketing Success: The Importance of Online Reputation Management

In today's digital era, where consumers have instant access to information and can voice their opinions widely, online reputation management (ORM) has become a critical aspect of any marketing strategy. ORM involves monitoring, influencing, and controlling your business's reputation on the internet. It’s about making sure that people see your brand in the best possible light, which can directly impact your marketing success. Here’s why ORM is essential and how it can unlock marketing success for your business.

The Digital Landscape and Consumer Behavior

With the advent of the internet, the power dynamics between businesses and consumers have shifted. Consumers now have the ability to research products, compare services, and read reviews before making purchasing decisions. According to a study by BrightLocal, 87% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses, with 72% saying that positive reviews make them trust a business more. This shift in consumer behavior underscores the importance of managing your online reputation.

Building Trust and Credibility

Trust is the cornerstone of any successful business relationship. A positive online reputation helps build this trust. When potential customers see positive reviews, testimonials, and high ratings, they are more likely to trust your brand. On the other hand, negative reviews and unresolved complaints can erode trust and drive potential customers away.

By actively managing your online reputation, you can ensure that positive feedback is highlighted and negative feedback is addressed promptly and professionally. This not only builds credibility but also shows that you care about your customers' experiences and are committed to continuous improvement.

Enhancing Brand Image

Your brand image is how your business is perceived by the public. A strong, positive brand image can set you apart from competitors and attract more customers. ORM plays a vital role in shaping and maintaining this image. By consistently promoting positive content about your business and engaging with your audience, you can create a favorable perception that aligns with your brand values and mission.

Effective ORM involves monitoring what is being said about your brand online and responding appropriately. This includes managing social media profiles, engaging with customer reviews, and publishing high-quality content that reflects your brand's strengths and values.

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No business is immune to crises, whether it's a product recall, negative press, or a social media mishap. How you handle these crises can significantly impact your reputation. Effective ORM prepares you to respond quickly and effectively to any negative situation, minimizing potential damage to your brand.

Having a crisis management plan in place as part of your ORM strategy can help you navigate through challenging times. This plan should include clear protocols for addressing negative feedback, communicating with stakeholders, and rectifying the situation. Transparency and swift action are key to maintaining trust during a crisis.

Increasing Customer Engagement

Engaging with your customers online is crucial for building strong relationships and fostering loyalty. ORM encourages proactive engagement, where you actively participate in conversations about your brand, respond to reviews, and address customer concerns. This engagement not only improves customer satisfaction but also provides valuable insights into your customers' needs and preferences.

By showing that you listen and respond to your customers, you can build a community of loyal supporters who are more likely to advocate for your brand. Positive interactions can lead to word-of-mouth marketing, which is one of the most effective forms of promotion.

Improving SEO and Visibility

A positive online reputation can also boost your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Search engines like Google take into account the quality and quantity of online reviews, ratings, and other user-generated content when ranking websites. By maintaining a positive online reputation, you can improve your search engine rankings, making it easier for potential customers to find you.

Moreover, positive reviews and high ratings can increase your visibility on review platforms and social media, driving more traffic to your website. This increased visibility can translate into higher conversion rates and, ultimately, greater revenue.

In conclusion, online reputation management is not just an optional component of your marketing strategy—it is essential. By actively managing your online reputation, you can build trust and credibility, enhance your brand image, effectively handle crises, increase customer engagement, and improve your SEO and visibility. All these factors contribute to unlocking marketing success and ensuring long-term growth for your business.

Investing time and resources into ORM can yield significant returns, helping you attract and retain customers, build a strong brand, and stay ahead of the competition. In the digital age, where your reputation can make or break your business, effective ORM is the key to unlocking marketing success.

#orm #online reputation management #reputation company

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digitaldetoxworld · 3 months ago

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anadeedigitalsolutions · 12 days ago

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PPC for E-commerce | Anadee Digital Solutions

PPC for E-commerce: A Complete Guide to Boosting Sales and Driving Growth

As the e-commerce industry expands, competition for consumer attention has become fiercer than ever. To effectively stand out and drive traffic to your online store, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising has become an essential tool. By targeting potential customers at every stage of their buying journey, PPC campaigns can significantly increase both visibility and sales. In this guide, we’ll break down how to implement PPC for e-commerce, along with actionable tips to maximize your returns.

Understanding PPC for E-commerce

PPC advertising involves paying a fee each time someone clicks on one of your ads. These ads are placed on search engines, social media platforms, and other sites where users may be interested in your products. For e-commerce businesses, PPC campaigns can bring targeted traffic directly to product pages, boosting the likelihood of conversions.

PPC ads can be tailored to reach specific demographics, locations, or interests, giving businesses greater control over who sees their ads and when. PPC also includes multiple formats such as Google Search Ads, Display Ads, Shopping Ads, and Social Media Ads, which makes it adaptable to various campaign objectives, from product awareness to driving sales.

Benefits of PPC for E-commerce Businesses

Quick Results: PPC campaigns can generate immediate traffic and results.

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Google Shopping Ads are essential for e-commerce. They display product images, prices, and descriptions directly on the search engine results page (SERP), making them more engaging and relevant to online shoppers. To make the most of Shopping Ads, ensure your product data feed is optimized. Use clear, high-quality images and relevant product titles and descriptions. Google uses this information to match search queries with your products, so precise descriptions help you reach a highly interested audience.

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Remarketing helps you target visitors who have previously shown interest in your products but didn’t complete a purchase. By creating tailored ads that remind them of items they viewed or abandoned in their cart, you increase the likelihood of conversions. Dynamic remarketing campaigns allow you to show personalized ads that feature specific products from your catalogue, keeping your brand and items top-of-mind for potential buyers.

3. Utilizing Social Media Ads

Social media platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, allow for highly detailed audience targeting. Social media ads are excellent for brand awareness, generating leads, and even retargeting website visitors. For e-commerce, carousel ads are particularly effective because they enable users to scroll through multiple products within a single ad, increasing interaction rates.

4. Keyword and Competitor Analysis

Before launching a PPC campaign, conduct thorough keyword research to determine which search terms are likely to drive relevant traffic to your site. Using tools like Google Keyword Planner can help you find high-intent keywords related to your products. Additionally, performing competitor analysis allows you to identify gaps in your strategy, adjust bids on competitive keywords, and keep a competitive edge in the SERPs.

5. A/B Testing and Optimization

Constantly test and optimize your ad copy, visuals, and calls-to-action (CTAs). A/B testing enables you to find the most effective ads and maximize performance. For instance, experiment with different headlines, descriptions, and images in Google Shopping Ads. Similarly, monitor your campaign’s performance data to adjust bids, targeting, and budgets based on what’s working.

Measuring Success in PPC

Key metrics to monitor include:

Click-Through Rate (CTR): Indicates the relevancy of your ads to the audience.

Conversion Rate: Measures how many clicks turn into sales.

Cost Per Click (CPC): Tracks spending efficiency.

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): Measures the revenue generated from your ad spend.

By analyzing these metrics, you can continually refine your PPC strategy to improve ROI and achieve better results.

PPC for e-commerce is a powerful way to drive targeted traffic, increase visibility, and boost sales. Anadee Digital offers the best-customized campaigns for your E-commerce business. By understanding your audience, using effective ad formats, and refining campaigns based on performance data, Anadee can create PPC campaigns that support your growth and revenue goals. With a well-executed PPC strategy, your e-commerce store can not only compete in today’s market but thrive. Contact us today to get a free audit of your e-commerce website and know more about the bottlenecks in your sales campaigns.

#PPC for E-commerce #Anadee Digital Solutions

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seoresellerca · 1 year ago

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Experience Strategic Excellence in Digital Marketing with SEO Resellers Canada

Businesses can leverage social media, content marketing, SEO, and PPC services to improve the brand’s ethical search engine ranking. Read more: https://freenews.cc/@seocanada9/experience-strategic-excellence-in-digital-marketing-with-seo-resellers-canada-f2tmtv725ozt

#google places optimization services #how to setup a google places page for my business #how to get my business on google places #google maps victoria canada

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phragmitessoftware · 12 days ago

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Why Digital Marketing Agency Matters to Your Business

World being a digital place, nobody does not wish to compete with one another because it builds itself into a business. Which might be rather easy with such tough competition around in this rapid change in the digital marketplace. This is the very reason why many companies use digital marketing agencies in order to gain more visibility in the virtual space and hence establish a momentum for their business. Now, so what is a digital marketing agency and why do any organizations need it? Let's discuss its key advantages and services.

What is a Digital Marketing Agency?

A firm with experts in each stage of digital marketing is known as a digital marketing agency. They try to reach the desired market target with creating brand awareness and revenues generated by effective digital marketing plans developed by them suitably. They use high-end tools and technologies for designing a suitable campaign on more than one channel, which include social media, search engines, email, and websites.

Core Services a Digital Marketing Agency Must Have

A good digital marketing agency should ensure that not any aspect of the digital marketing service goes unattended by offering different kinds of services to the clients. This may include:

SEO. Also known as web optimization, the top ranking on SERPS, perhaps, is the best gauge of how visible a website is. Therefore, agencies do keyword research; optimize on-page content and build backlinks that help your website gain organic traffic.

Pay per Click Advertising, PPC: PPC campaigns include Google Ads and create quick traffic to the website. The agency optimizes how the money spent in advertisements to ensure the reach of correct people and optimal ads' optimization towards conversion.

Social Media Marketing. Agencies run a paid campaign on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and every other space; business creates the ability to interact with the audience to develop a sense of brand loyalty.

Content Marketing: The best digital marketing is a great base of content. Blog posts, videos, infographics, and all other things are developed by an agency to attract and retain customers.

Email marketing. This has been there from the beginning of when digital marketing was at its start; it is still standing good as one of the most productive strategies. Agencies come up with campaigns to nourish leads and sell more.

Web Design and Development: Be your business small or big, your website has to be user-friendly as well as looking good. Agencies ensure that your site is optimized aesthetically as well as functionally.

Analytics and Reporting: It is quite crucial to track the performance of marketing campaigns. Agencies provide in-depth analytics and reports of ROI evaluation and data-driven decisions.

Why Hire a Digital Marketing Agency

Here are good reasons why partnering with a digital marketing agency is the right move:

1. Exposure to Expertise

This means that digital marketing covers all from graphic design to analytics. Here, a digital marketing agency has experts who have specialized in particular areas so your campaign is addressed by the professionals.

2. Cost-Effective

Engaging an in-house marketing team is expensive, especially to small-sized business concerns. The agency places an entire team of professionals right in front of you, without requiring a quarter of their billable amount.

3. Focus on core Business Activities

Time spent in the process of marketing campaigns is nothing short of monumental at its core. You’re getting freed off of your list, or even just simply transferring the follow-up work of marketing campaigns off of you are delegated by hiring a digital marketing agency.

4. Scalability

With how fast businesses are growing, does that mean that the need to expand one's marketing requirement. This is exactly what a digital marketing agency can do-to scale services upward when it's needed without having to hire more employees in your book.

5. Catch the Trends

Organizations keep side by side of the most recent patterns and advances to keep your trade ahead of the competition.

Not all agencies are the same, and it is always important to find a suitable one that aligns with your goals. Here are some tips:

Check Their Portfolio: Look into their past work to find out whether they have the experience needed in your industry.

Read reviews and testimonials: This is one of the best ways to know their dependability and effectiveness.

Ask them how they approach: the right agency will address it in a customized way with you not that blanket one-size-fits-all package.

Transparency: Keep them communicating and always apprised of your performance.

Digital marketing agencies no longer exist as luxuries but instead as a need in today's world of advancing technology. Expertise would be very well in line with cost effectiveness, while innovation would bring strategies together. Companies can navigate through these apparent online marketing complexities; it would be either for branding awareness, lead generation, or even to enhance sales.

#DigitalMarketingAgency #MarketingExperts #OnlineMarketing #DigitalGrowth #MarketingStrategy #SocialMediaMarketing #SEOExperts #ContentMarketing #BrandBuilding #DigitalMarketingTips

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azeeyfinance · 14 days ago

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Making money through blogging involves a combination of creating high-quality content, growing an audience, and monetizing your blog effectively.

Making money through blogging involves a combination of creating high-quality content, growing an audience, and monetizing your blog effectively. Here are some strategies to help you get started:

1. Choose a Profitable Niche

Pick a niche that you're passionate about but also has a potential audience interested in it. Popular niches include:

Personal finance

Health and fitness

Travel

Lifestyle

Technology

Food

Fashion

Ensure there's enough demand for content in that area and that you can create consistent, valuable content.

2. Build Your Audience

Consistent Content: Publish regularly and ensure your content is high quality. Write blog posts that address your audience’s problems or needs.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Optimize your content to rank in search engines like Google. Research keywords relevant to your niche and use them strategically in your posts.

Social Media: Promote your blog on social platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook to reach more people and drive traffic to your blog.

Email Marketing: Create an email list to nurture a dedicated audience. You can offer free resources like eBooks or checklists in exchange for email sign-ups.

3. Monetize Your Blog

There are several ways to make money from your blog:

a) Affiliate Marketing

Join affiliate programs where you promote other people's products and earn a commission for each sale made through your referral link.

Some popular affiliate programs include Amazon Associates, ShareASale, and CJ Affiliate.

Write reviews, how-to guides, or round-up lists with affiliate links.

b) Display Ads

You can make money by displaying ads on your blog. Google AdSense is a popular network that places ads on your site and pays you based on impressions or clicks.

The more traffic you have, the higher your potential earnings.

c) Sponsored Posts

Companies might pay you to write blog posts about their products or services.

Build a strong enough readership, and brands will reach out to you directly, or you can pitch to them.

d) Sell Products or Services

Digital Products: Create and sell eBooks, printables, courses, or guides.

Physical Products: If relevant to your niche, you can sell physical goods or branded merchandise.

Services: Offer services such as consulting, coaching, or freelance writing if you have expertise in your niche.

e) Membership or Subscription

Offer premium content to your audience for a monthly or yearly fee. You can create a membership area on your blog where subscribers get access to exclusive resources.

Examples include Patreon or building a private community for paid members.

f) Freelance Blogging

If you have good writing skills, offer freelance blogging services to other businesses. Many companies hire freelance bloggers to write for their websites, and you can earn by working with them.

g) Create a Course or Webinar

If you have expertise in your niche, create a course or webinar and sell it on platforms like Teachable, Udemy, or directly on your blog.

4. Grow Your Traffic

Collaborate with Others: Guest post on other blogs, collaborate with influencers in your niche, or participate in blogger round-ups.

Use Pinterest: For niches like lifestyle, food, fashion, and travel, Pinterest is a powerful tool to drive traffic. Design eye-catching pins that link to your blog.

Paid Advertising: Once you’ve optimized your content and built some organic traffic, consider investing in paid ads (Google Ads, Facebook Ads) to boost traffic further.

5. Optimize for Conversion

Clear Call-to-Action: Whether it's signing up for an email list, buying a product, or clicking an affiliate link, make sure your blog has clear CTAs (calls to action) to guide your audience toward the next step.

A/B Testing: Experiment with different designs, headlines, and strategies to see what resonates best with your audience and leads to higher conversions.

6. Track and Scale

Use analytics tools (like Google Analytics) to track your traffic, identify top-performing content, and make data-driven decisions.

As your blog grows, consider outsourcing tasks (e.g., content writing, social media management) to focus on scaling your income.

Summary of Monetization Methods:

Affiliate Marketing

Display Ads (e.g., Google AdSense)

Sponsored Posts

Selling Products/Services (Digital or Physical)

Membership or Subscription

Freelance Blogging

Creating and Selling Courses/Webinars

By combining these methods, consistently producing valuable content, and growing your audience, you can turn blogging into a profitable venture.

#and there's something else in there about like ....#tbh once i got over something like 1k followers #i stopped being specific about my ED for a REASON.#yes on ur personal locked blog that u use like a diary go ahead etc #but we are OBVIOUSLY not talking about that. we're talking about the sheer NUMBER of people i could be talking about #in that one paragraph. that you and i probably were thinking about 2 different influencers #bc they get to say that they're just posting FITNESS and if it's FITNESS it's OKAY and im like #jesus christ lord almighty #every person in recovery from an ED: this is incredibly dangerous holy shit do you know how much this would have triggered me #each of these ppl: how dare you!!!!!!!!! i am only harming those who WANT to engage with my content!!!!!#their followers: leave them alone !!! they can't help that they make an hours-long choice to frame their disorder as if it was #fucking cottagecore !!!!#like girlie this person needs THERAPY #again! i didn't even have that large of a following before i IMMEDIATELY deleted any specific mention of calories food etc #bc i recognize responsibility and i didnt EVER want to even ACCIDENTALLY encourage this #and im not even GETTING PAID FOR THIS!!!#aND THEY ARE!!!#something something something they know this content makes them money #they don't give a SHIT about u babe

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago

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Big Tech’s “attention rents”

Tomorrow (Nov 4), I'm keynoting the Hackaday Supercon in Pasadena, CA.

The thing is, any feed or search result is "algorithmic." "Just show me the things posted by people I follow in reverse-chronological order" is an algorithm. "Just show me products that have this SKU" is an algorithm. "Alphabetical sort" is an algorithm. "Random sort" is an algorithm.

Any process that involves more information than you can take in at a glance or digest in a moment needs some kind of sense-making. It needs to be put in some kind of order. There's always gonna be an algorithm.

But that's not what we mean by "the algorithm" (TM). When we talk about "the algorithm," we mean a system for ordering information that uses complex criteria that are not precisely known to us, and than can't be easily divined through an examination of the ordering.

There's an idea that a "good" algorithm is one that does not seek to deceive or harm us. When you search for a specific part number, you want exact matches for that search at the top of the results. It's fine if those results include third-party parts that are compatible with the part you're searching for, so long as they're clearly labeled. There's room for argument about how to order those results – do highly rated third-party parts go above the OEM part? How should the algorithm trade off price and quality?

It's hard to come up with an objective standard to resolve these fine-grained differences, but search technologists have tried. Think of Google: they have a patent on "long clicks." A "long click" is when you search for something and then don't search for it again for quite some time, the implication being that you've found what you were looking for. Google Search ads operate a "pay per click" model, and there's an argument that this aligns Google's ad division's interests with search quality: if the ad division only gets paid when you click a link, they will militate for placing ads that users want to click on.

Platforms are inextricably bound up in this algorithmic information sorting business. Platforms have emerged as the endemic form of internet-based business, which is ironic, because a platform is just an intermediary – a company that connects different groups to each other. The internet's great promise was "disintermediation" – getting rid of intermediaries. We did that, and then we got a whole bunch of new intermediaries.

Usually, those groups can be sorted into two buckets: "business customers" (drivers, merchants, advertisers, publishers, creative workers, etc) and "end users" (riders, shoppers, consumers, audiences, etc). Platforms also sometimes connect end users to each other: think of dating sites, or interest-based forums on Reddit. Either way, a platform's job is to make these connections, and that means platforms are always in the algorithm business.

Whether that's matching a driver and a rider, or an advertiser and a consumer, or a reader and a mix of content from social feeds they're subscribed to and other sources of information on the service, the platform has to make a call as to what you're going to see or do.

These choices are enormously consequential. In the theory of Surveillance Capitalism, these choices take on an almost supernatural quality, where "Big Data" can be used to guess your response to all the different ways of pitching an idea or product to you, in order to select the optimal pitch that bypasses your critical faculties and actually controls your actions, robbing you of "the right to a future tense."

I don't think much of this hypothesis. Every claim to mind control – from Rasputin to MK Ultra to neurolinguistic programming to pick-up artists – has turned out to be bullshit. Besides, you don't need to believe in mind control to explain the ways that algorithms shape our beliefs and actions. When a single company dominates the information landscape – say, when Google controls 90% of your searches – then Google's sorting can deprive you of access to information without you knowing it.

If every "locksmith" listed on Google Maps is a fake referral business, you might conclude that there are no more reputable storefront locksmiths in existence. What's more, this belief is a form of self-fulfilling prophecy: if Google Maps never shows anyone a real locksmith, all the real locksmiths will eventually go bust.

If you never see a social media update from a news source you follow, you might forget that the source exists, or assume they've gone under. If you see a flood of viral videos of smash-and-grab shoplifter gangs and never see a news story about wage theft, you might assume that the former is common and the latter is rare (in reality, shoplifting hasn't risen appreciably, while wage-theft is off the charts).

In the theory of Surveillance Capitalism, the algorithm was invented to make advertisers richer, and then went on to pervert the news (by incentivizing "clickbait") and finally destroyed our politics when its persuasive powers were hijacked by Steve Bannon, Cambridge Analytica, and QAnon grifters to turn millions of vulnerable people into swivel-eyed loons, racists and conspiratorialists.

As I've written, I think this theory gives the ad-tech sector both too much and too little credit, and draws an artificial line between ad-tech and other platform businesses that obscures the connection between all forms of platform decay, from Uber to HBO to Google Search to Twitter to Apple and beyond:

https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

As a counter to Surveillance Capitalism, I've proposed a theory of platform decay called enshittification, which identifies how the market power of monopoly platforms, combined with the flexibility of digital tools, combined with regulatory capture, allows platforms to abuse both business-customers and end-users, by depriving them of alternatives, then "twiddling" the knobs that determine the rules of the platform without fearing sanction under privacy, labor or consumer protection law, and finally, blocking digital self-help measures like ad-blockers, alternative clients, scrapers, reverse engineering, jailbreaking, and other tech guerrilla warfare tactics:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

One important distinction between Surveillance Capitalism and enshittification is that enshittification posits that the platform is bad for everyone. Surveillance Capitalism starts from the assumption that surveillance advertising is devastatingly effective (which explains how your racist Facebook uncles got turned into Jan 6 QAnons), and concludes that advertisers must be well-served by the surveillance system.

But advertisers – and other business customers – are very poorly served by platforms. Procter and Gamble reduced its annual surveillance advertising budget from $100m//year to $0/year and saw a 0% reduction in sales. The supposed laser-focused targeting and superhuman message refinement just don't work very well – first, because the tech companies are run by bullshitters whose marketing copy is nonsense, and second because these companies are monopolies who can abuse their customers without losing money.

The point of enshittification is to lock end-users to the platform, then use those locked-in users as bait for business customers, who will also become locked to the platform. Once everyone is holding everyone else hostage, the platform uses the flexibility of digital services to play a variety of algorithmic games to shift value from everyone to the business's shareholders. This flexibility is supercharged by the failure of regulators to enforce privacy, labor and consumer protection standards against the companies, and by these companies' ability to insist that regulators punish end-users, competitors, tinkerers and other third parties to mod, reverse, hack or jailbreak their products and services to block their abuse.

Enshittification needs The Algorithm. When Uber wants to steal from its drivers, it can just do an old-fashioned wage theft, but eventually it will face the music for that kind of scam:

https://apnews.com/article/uber-lyft-new-york-city-wage-theft-9ae3f629cf32d3f2fb6c39b8ffcc6cc6

The best way to steal from drivers is with algorithmic wage discrimination. That's when Uber offers occassional, selective drivers higher rates than it gives to drivers who are fully locked to its platform and take every ride the app offers. The less selective a driver becomes, the lower the premium the app offers goes, but if a driver starts refusing rides, the wage offer climbs again. This isn't the mind-control of Surveillance Capitalism, it's just fraud, shaving fractional pennies off your paycheck in the hopes that you won't notice. The goal is to get drivers to abandon the other side-hustles that allow them to be so choosy about when they drive Uber, and then, once the driver is fully committed, to crank the wage-dial down to the lowest possible setting:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

This is the same game that Facebook played with publishers on the way to its enshittification: when Facebook began aggressively courting publishers, any short snippet republished from the publisher's website to a Facebook feed was likely to be recommended to large numbers of readers. Facebook offered publishers a vast traffic funnel that drove millions of readers to their sites.

But as publishers became more dependent on that traffic, Facebook's algorithm started downranking short excerpts in favor of medium-length ones, building slowly to fulltext Facebook posts that were fully substitutive for the publisher's own web offerings. Like Uber's wage algorithm, Facebook's recommendation engine played its targets like fish on a line.

When publishers responded to declining reach for short excerpts by stepping back from Facebook, Facebook goosed the traffic for their existing posts, sending fresh floods of readers to the publisher's site. When the publisher returned to Facebook, the algorithm once again set to coaxing the publishers into posting ever-larger fractions of their work to Facebook, until, finally, the publisher was totally locked into Facebook. Facebook then started charging publishers for "boosting" – not just to be included in algorithmic recommendations, but to reach their own subscribers.

Enshittification is modern, high-tech enabled, monopolistic form of rent seeking. Rent-seeking is a subtle and important idea from economics, one that is increasingly relevant to our modern economy. For economists, a "rent" is income you get from owning a "factor of production" – something that someone else needs to make or do something.

Rents are not "profits." Profit is income you get from making or doing something. Rent is income you get from owning something needed to make a profit. People who earn their income from rents are called rentiers. If you make your income from profits, you're a "capitalist."

Capitalists and rentiers are in irreconcilable combat with each other. A capitalist wants access to their factors of production at the lowest possible price, whereas rentiers want those prices to be as high as possible. A phone manufacturer wants to be able to make phones as cheaply as possible, while a patent-troll wants to own a patent that the phone manufacturer needs to license in order to make phones. The manufacturer is a capitalism, the troll is a rentier.

The troll might even decide that the best strategy for maximizing their rents is to exclusively license their patents to a single manufacturer and try to eliminate all other phones from the market. This will allow the chosen manufacturer to charge more and also allow the troll to get higher rents. Every capitalist except the chosen manufacturer loses. So do people who want to buy phones. Eventually, even the chosen manufacturer will lose, because the rentier can demand an ever-greater share of their profits in rent.

Digital technology enables all kinds of rent extraction. The more digitized an industry is, the more rent-seeking it becomes. Think of cars, which harvest your data, block third-party repair and parts, and force you to buy everything from acceleration to seat-heaters as a monthly subscription:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

The cloud is especially prone to rent-seeking, as Yanis Varoufakis writes in his new book, Technofeudalism, where he explains how "cloudalists" have found ways to lock all kinds of productive enterprise into using cloud-based resources from which ever-increasing rents can be extracted:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

The endless malleability of digitization makes for endless variety in rent-seeking, and cataloging all the different forms of digital rent-extraction is a major project in this Age of Enshittification. "Algorithmic Attention Rents: A theory of digital platform market power," a new UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose paper by Tim O'Reilly, Ilan Strauss and Mariana Mazzucato, pins down one of these forms:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2023/nov/algorithmic-attention-rents-theory-digital-platform-market-power

The "attention rents" referenced in the paper's title are bait-and-switch scams in which a platform deliberately enshittifies its recommendations, search results or feeds to show you things that are not the thing you asked to see, expect to see, or want to see. They don't do this out of sadism! The point is to extract rent – from you (wasted time, suboptimal outcomes) and from business customers (extracting rents for "boosting," jumbling good results in among scammy or low-quality results).

The authors cite several examples of these attention rents. Much of the paper is given over to Amazon's so-called "advertising" product, a $31b/year program that charges sellers to have their products placed above the items that Amazon's own search engine predicts you will want to buy:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is a form of gladiatorial combat that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to surrender an ever-larger share of their profits in rent to Amazon for pride of place. Amazon uses a variety of deceptive labels ("Highly Rated – Sponsored") to get you to click on these products, but most of all, they rely two factors. First, Amazon has a long history of surfacing good results in response to queries, which makes buying whatever's at the top of a list a good bet. Second, there's just so many possible results that it takes a lot of work to sift through the probably-adequate stuff at the top of the listings and get to the actually-good stuff down below.

Amazon spent decades subsidizing its sellers' goods – an illegal practice known as "predatory pricing" that enforcers have increasingly turned a blind eye to since the Reagan administration. This has left it with few competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy

The lack of competing retail outlets lets Amazon impose other rent-seeking conditions on its sellers. For example, Amazon has a "most favored nation" requirement that forces companies that raise their prices on Amazon to raise their prices everywhere else, which makes everything you buy more expensive, whether that's a Walmart, Target, a mom-and-pop store, or direct from the manufacturer:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

But everyone loses in this "two-sided market." Amazon used "junk ads" to juice its ad-revenue: these are ads that are objectively bad matches for your search, like showing you a Seattle Seahawks jersey in response to a search for LA Lakers merch:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-02/amazon-boosted-junk-ads-hid-messages-with-signal-ftc-says

The more of these junk ads Amazon showed, the more revenue it got from sellers – and the more the person selling a Lakers jersey had to pay to show up at the top of your search, and the more they had to charge you to cover those ad expenses, and the more they had to charge for it everywhere else, too.

The authors describe this process as a transformation between "attention rents" (misdirecting your attention) to "pecuniary rents" (making money). That's important: despite decades of rhetoric about the "attention economy," attention isn't money. As I wrote in my enshittification essay:

You can't use attention as a medium of exchange. You can't use it as a store of value. You can't use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with "fiat" currency in exchange for it. You have to "monetize" it – that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money.

The authors come up with some clever techniques for quantifying the ways that this scam harms users. For example, they count the number of places that an advertised product rises in search results, relative to where it would show up in an "organic" search. These quantifications are instructive, but they're also a kind of subtweet at the judiciary.

In 2018, SCOTUS's ruling in American Express v Ohio changed antitrust law for two-sided markets by insisting that so long as one side of a two-sided market was better off as the result of anticompetitive actions, there was no antitrust violation:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3346776

For platforms, that means that it's OK to screw over sellers, advertisers, performers and other business customers, so long as the end-users are better off: "Go ahead, cheat the Uber drivers, so long as you split the booty with Uber riders."

But in the absence of competition, regulation or self-help measures, platforms cheat everyone – that's the point of enshittification. The attention rents that Amazon's payola scheme extract from shoppers translate into higher prices, worse goods, and lower profits for platform sellers. In other words, Amazon's conduct is so sleazy that it even threads the infinitesimal needle that the Supremes created in American Express.

Here's another algorithmic pecuniary rent: Amazon figured out which of its major rivals used an automated price-matching algorithm, and then cataloged which products they had in common with those sellers. Then, under a program called Project Nessie, Amazon jacked up the prices of those products, knowing that as soon as they raised the prices on Amazon, the prices would go up everywhere else, so Amazon wouldn't lose customers to cheaper alternatives. That scam made Amazon at least a billion dollars:

https://gizmodo.com/ftc-alleges-amazon-used-price-gouging-algorithm-1850986303

This is a great example of how enshittification – rent-seeking on digital platforms – is different from analog rent-seeking. The speed and flexibility with which Amazon and its rivals altered their prices requires digitization. Digitization also let Amazon crank the price-gouging dial to zero whenever they worried that regulators were investigating the program.

So what do we do about it? After years of being made to look like fumblers and clowns by Big Tech, regulators and enforcers – and even lawmakers – have decided to get serious.

The neoliberal narrative of government helplessness and incompetence would have you believe that this will go nowhere. Governments aren't as powerful as giant corporations, and regulators aren't as smart as the supergeniuses of Big Tech. They don't stand a chance.

But that's a counsel of despair and a cheap trick. Weaker US governments have taken on stronger oligarchies and won – think of the defeat of JD Rockefeller and the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911. The people who pulled that off weren't wizards. They were just determined public servants, with political will behind them. There is a growing, forceful public will to end the rein of Big Tech, and there are some determined public servants surfing that will.

In this paper, the authors try to give those enforcers ammo to bring to court and to the public. For example, Amazon claims that its algorithm surfaces the products that make the public happy, without the need for competitive pressure to keep it sharp. But as the paper points out, the only successful new rival ecommerce platform – Tiktok – has found an audience for an entirely new category of goods: dupes, "lower-cost products that have the same or better features than higher cost branded products."

The authors also identify "dark patterns" that platforms use to trick users into consuming feeds that have a higher volume of things that the company profits from, and a lower volume of things that users want to see. For example, platforms routinely switch users from a "following" feed – consisting of things posted by people the user asked to hear from – with an algorithmic "For You" feed, filled with the things the company's shareholders wish the users had asked to see.

Calling this a "dark pattern" reveals just how hollow and self-aggrandizing that term is. "Dark pattern" usually means "fraud." If I ask to see posts from people I like, and you show me posts from people who'll pay you for my attention instead, that's not a sophisticated sleight of hand – it's just a scam. It's the social media equivalent of the eBay seller who sends you an iPhone box with a bunch of gravel inside it instead of an iPhone. Tech bros came up with "dark pattern" as a way of flattering themselves by draping themselves in the mantle of dopamine-hacking wizards, rather than unimaginative con-artists who use a computer to rip people off.

These For You algorithmic feeds aren't just a way to increase the load of sponsored posts in a feed – they're also part of the multi-sided ripoff of enshittified platforms. A For You feed allows platforms to trick publishers and performers into thinking that they are "good at the platform," which both convinces to optimize their production for that platform, and also turns them into Judas Goats who conspicuously brag about how great the platform is for people like them, which brings their peers in, too.

In Veena Dubal's essential paper on algorithmic wage discrimination, she describes how Uber drivers whom the algorithm has favored with (temporary) high per-ride rates brag on driver forums about their skill with the app, bringing in other drivers who blame their lower wages on their failure to "use the app right":

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080

As I wrote in my enshittification essay:

If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you'll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.

The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket. No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he'd carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one:

https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html

The carny allocated a giant teddy bear to that poor sucker the way that platforms allocate surpluses to key performers – as a convincer in a "Big Store" con, a way to rope in other suckers who'll make content for the platform, anchoring themselves and their audiences to it.

Platform can't run the giant teddy-bear con unless there's a For You feed. Some platforms – like Tiktok – tempt users into a For You feed by making it as useful as possible, then salting it with doses of enshittification:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/

Other platforms use the (ugh) "dark pattern" of simply flipping your preference from a "following" feed to a "For You" feed. Either way, the platform can't let anyone keep the giant teddy-bear. Once you've tempted, say, sports bros into piling into the platform with the promise of millions of free eyeballs, you need to withdraw the algorithm's favor for their content so you can give it to, say, astrologers. Of course, the more locked-in the users are, the more shit you can pile into that feed without worrying about them going elsewhere, and the more giant teddy-bears you can give away to more business users so you can lock them in and start extracting rent.

For regulators, the possibility of a "good" algorithmic feed presents a serious challenge: when a feed is bad, how can a regulator tell if its low quality is due to the platform's incompetence at blocking spammers or guessing what users want, or whether it's because the platform is extracting rents?

The paper includes a suite of recommendations, including one that I really liked:

Regulators, working with cooperative industry players, would define reportable metrics based on those that are actually used by the platforms themselves to manage search, social media, e-commerce, and other algorithmic relevancy and recommendation engines.

In other words: find out how the companies themselves measure their performance. Find out what KPIs executives have to hit in order to earn their annual bonuses and use those to figure out what the company's performance is – ad load, ratio of organic clicks to ad clicks, average click-through on the first organic result, etc.

They also recommend some hard rules, like reserving a portion of the top of the screen for "organic" search results, and requiring exact matches to show up as the top result.

I've proposed something similar, applicable across multiple kinds of digital businesses: an end-to-end principle for online services. The end-to-end principle is as old as the internet, and it decrees that the role of an intermediary should be to deliver data from willing senders to willing receivers as quickly and reliably as possible. When we apply this principle to your ISP, we call it Net Neutrality. For services, E2E would mean that if I subscribed to your feed, the service would have a duty to deliver it to me. If I hoisted your email out of my spam folder, none of your future emails should land there. If I search for your product and there's an exact match, that should be the top result:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first

One interesting wrinkle to framing platform degradation as a failure to connect willing senders and receivers is that it places a whole host of conduct within the regulatory remit of the FTC. Section 5 of the FTC Act contains a broad prohibition against "unfair and deceptive" practices:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

That means that the FTC doesn't need any further authorization from Congress to enforce an end to end rule: they can simply propose and pass that rule, on the grounds that telling someone that you'll show them the feeds that they ask for and then not doing so is "unfair and deceptive."

Some of the other proposals in the paper also fit neatly into Section 5 powers, like a "sticky" feed preference. If I tell a service to show me a feed of the people I follow and they switch it to a For You feed, that's plainly unfair and deceptive.

All of this raises the question of what a post-Big-Tech feed would look like. In "How To Break Up Amazon" for The Sling, Peter Carstensen and Darren Bush sketch out some visions for this:

https://www.thesling.org/how-to-break-up-amazon/

They imagine a "condo" model for Amazon, where the sellers collectively own the Amazon storefront, a model similar to capacity rights on natural gas pipelines, or to patent pools. They see two different ways that search-result order could be determined in such a system:

"specific premium placement could go to those vendors that value the placement the most [with revenue] shared among the owners of the condo"

"leave it to owners themselves to create joint ventures to promote products"

Note that both of these proposals are compatible with an end-to-end rule and the other regulatory proposals in the paper. Indeed, all these policies are easier to enforce against weaker companies that can't afford to maintain the pretense that they are headquartered in some distant regulatory haven, or pay massive salaries to ex-regulators to work the refs on their behalf:

https://www.thesling.org/in-public-discourse-and-congress-revolvers-defend-amazons-monopoly/

The re-emergence of intermediaries on the internet after its initial rush of disintermediation tells us something important about how we relate to one another. Some authors might be up for directly selling books to their audiences, and some drivers might be up for creating their own taxi service, and some merchants might want to run their own storefronts, but there's plenty of people with something they want to offer us who don't have the will or skill to do it all. Not everyone wants to be a sysadmin, a security auditor, a payment processor, a software engineer, a CFO, a tax-preparer and everything else that goes into running a business. Some people just want to sell you a book. Or find a date. Or teach an online class.

Intermediation isn't intrinsically wicked. Intermediaries fall into pits of enshitffication and other forms of rent-seeking when they aren't disciplined by competitors, by regulators, or by their own users' ability to block their bad conduct (with ad-blockers, say, or other self-help measures). We need intermediaries, and intermediaries don't have to turn into rent-seeking feudal warlords. That only happens if we let it happen.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

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