#the show would need like blockbuster numbers to be renewed

[inkingthingsintotrees]

kaos is unlikely to get a second season just cuz it probably cost as much as blockbuster to make

[abitterlifethroughcinema]

      Three Summer Taquilla Behemoths in Cinemas!       WOKE! Film Reviews...Halfway Through Summer                                        by Lucas A Cavazos

It goes without saying that Disney is undoubtedly the strongest hand in all of cinema. They have proved that beyond any shadow of a doubt over many decades but definitely most recently, what with the takeover of Pixar and LucasFilms and Marvel Studios and and and… As I hinted at last time, growing up, whether in Texas or Brooklyn, my dorky bum always had that weekly subscription of Entertainment Weekly waiting for me come week’s end. And that meant I had all the box office data, top album sales, Nielsen TV ratings, book sales and such all there to satiate my stats-obsessed appetite. Now, I bring to you a summer run-down of what fare has been most successful throughout this first half of the summer. Believe it or not, we are only halfway through the summer cinema season and these last six or seven weeks mark the last summer fare that either got delayed from the early summer due to concern of being pulverised by these upcoming blockbusters, or they are merely getting rid of fodder too long on the shelf or in need of distribution.

I’d dare say in fact that it was a rather smart move on behalf of Guy Ritchie and the entire marketing team behind the live-action remake of Aladdin, to release it just before the summer season truly hit. It is now fast closing in on 25€M in Spain alone, and has surpassed 1.1€B globally…quite an accomplished feat and second in box office stealth only behind Endgame for 2019 so far.

But let’s please talk newer reviews first as Disney’s The Lion King ###-1/2 burst into Spanish cinemas with a loud roar two weeks ago, and the same can be said of its success worldwide. Now soon to pass 19€M in Spain in a matter of mere days and more than 1.0€B globally, we at Bitter Life are pleased to say that the film, much like the formerly mentioned live-action remake, is a thing of wonder. What director Jon Favreau, who so lovingly concocted the impeccable remake of The Jungle Book a few years ago, does so well is adapt a timeless, and much beloved, cartoon classic into a breathtaking adventure story of the animal kingdom. One thing is for certain, if you are a true lover of the cartoon, this film will merely be palatable. For those few of us who were none too keen on the cartoon and its cheese-tactic musical numbers nor its cornball last-attempts at Top 40 numbers by Elton John, this film is quite the spectacle to behold. Telling the story of a proud lineage of lions who preside over what could best be described more as a savannah than a jungle, this rendering gives us a lifelike portrayal of fathers and sons, duty and honour, and is easily a testament to whatever family means to any individual. Apart from the brilliant, yet almost frightening, way in which the creators have anthropomorphised the creatures into almost too-real perfection, there isn’t too much to tell that the viewer is not going to know already, and thereby lies a part of the challenge that I find intriguing. While Disney continues to take risks in revamping their classics into live-action newer ones, do they then run the risk of petering out of new ideas? I mean, now that they have Pixar and so many more studios to pick up the slack, will we slowly see the demise of the annual big, Disney cartoon classic? We already have Frozen 2 appearing soon enough in cinemas, but even that is not building anything new and original into the cartoon oeuvre…it’s a damn sequel. I say it’s fair enough that most all investments in Disney live-action prequels are bound to be successful in terms of box office. Still, few of them will boast the talent power of Beyonce and Donald Glover, along with original Mufasa James Earl Jones, plus John Oliver, Seth Rogen, Keegan-Michael Key, Alfre Woodard. Amy Sedaris and so many more. These artists breathe life into a fun, if tired, film that we’ve all seen before, just never in this way. Here’s to hoping the tots of today don’t scare too much from the frolicking if fierce, fun found in this film.

The next big movie that has blown up the taquillas here in Spain is also the best one of the lot…Toy Story 4 ####.  If we have to wait nearly a decade between film sequels to have this type of wonderment thrown lovingly at our eyes, I’ll gladly take it and wait. So far, the film has taken in a nearly whopping 19€M in Spain alone, and it is also nearing 950€M worldwide, so far be it from me to deny that absolute scores of millions agree that this film marks itself in our hearts yet again. It is rather surreal that over the span of well over a generation, the creators have moved through the mid-90s to damn near 2020 with the same revolving door of a family, while carefully detailing the intricacies of our own nostalgia…and playing on that also forces us to love it.  Again, I dare say that they have achieved that tremendously throughout the entirety of the series’ lifespan. The premise this time revolves around Andy, now all grown up and, I’d suppose well past grad school, has donated his toys to little sister Bonnie, who has her own taste on what she prefers to play with versus her older brother, and dear ol’ cowpoke Woody, sensing certain neglect under the ownership of Bonnie, sneaks himself into her rucksack one day y voila!…the new adventure commences. The others set off to search for Woody, outdone by no one less than Buzz Lightyear, who is allowing himself to be led by his inner voice, which fits wonderfully into the guffaws of this type of silly and campy humour. What I began to notice while the screening went on is that the film continues to come up with a specific theme that ties itself into the plot, the denouement and frankly, throughout the film. Simply put, that would be the fear of rejection or not being wanted/accepted. Herein is where story developers like John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Rashida Jones, Stephany Folsom, amongst others, and all under the directing tutelage of Josh Cooley, spring to life and steer the film into witty and on-fleek, au courant elements that should make excellent fodder for post-parental conversations! What more can be said? Steal away and grab a 10’er and retreat to the coolness of your local cineplex!

Lastly, the other big box office behemoth so far this summer in Spain’s movie houses is Spider Man: Far From Home ###-1/2, with just under 12€M reaped into the Spanish taquilla coffers. This time around finds us back in live-action mode and with our recurring Marvel characters picking up after the what can only be described as intense ending of Avengers:Endgame. Okay then, while I was not a fan of the new Peter Parker with Homecoming from a couple of years back, I can now see how Tom Holland has taken a stab at ye olde generic if endearing dork-that-could appeal, and he feels much more fluid now a few Marvel flicks in. Director Jon Watts and go-to writers McKenna and Sommers seem to strike a chord with their flow, though we really do have to wait until the last half of the film to see the ebb actually catch up with that flow. Here’s why…our Marvel superheroes have gone bye bye, you dig? Flashbacks of the fallen Marvel superheroes actually made me a tad sad to be honest, so when the injection of the last part kicks in with all its CGI glory, what I take the director and writers to be doing, this time around, is actually showing us how Parker is growing into his own belief within himself and his powers. Zendaya as his love interest, and I’ve monitored her from afar for quite some time, is fun as hell to watch, and she should seriously star in a film version of Sade’s life story, but it really does come down to the charm and vivid need for suspension of disbelief that envelops the characters towards the end of the film. This has a lot to do with the enter-stage-right presence of Quentin Beck, a.k.a. Mysterio, played with an enigmatic if smug awareness by Jake Gyllenhaal, and frankly, all of the myriad cast of characters do their thang to breathe a sense of renewal just when you think the film is getting a tad too slow and eager. From Sam Jackson to Marisa Tomei, though perhaps not Jon Favreau as Stark caretaker Happy Hogan…he’s best suited as a director of Disney re-boots these days, me thinks (see The Lion King review above). Apart from all that, I’d say the Marvel universe has quite rightly fixed another pathway into the continuance of the Spiderverse journey.

[is6621]

Disney+, It’s like Disney, with a cherry on top. - Kelsey Sullivan

At a 2+ hour investor meeting yesterday, Disney unveiled Disney+, their plan to take back over the entertainment industry. 

Disney+, a block centric interface seems also identical to Netflix, but Disney+ is differentiating themselves in a significant way - a $6.99 monthly subscription model vs. Netflix’s $12.99. 

Come November 12, the wide world of Disney gets wider. Similar (again) to Netflix, Disney+ will welcome users with rows of recommended content, including TV series and movies. Disney+ will feature all its franchises’ and have dedicated areas for each - Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars and National Geographic. 

Disney+ will enter an already saturated market, but has already secured deals with Roku and Sony. Subscribers will be able to set up individual profiles - queue customization and personalization and will also offer all content for offline download - meaning road trips to Disney featuring all things Disney! 

Like we saw with Apple, Disney+ needs to bring something new to the table. In that, they will offer new content and projects specific to Disney+. In their investor meeting yesterday, Disney confirmed that Marvel, a fan favorite, was working on a series based on Avengers characters. In addition, they have a number of series currently being developed across the franchise platform, including a Star Wars series.

The Hollywood Reported announced that Disney will launch their streaming service with “500 films from the Disney library, in addition to around 7,000 episodes of Disney TV.” Now let’s be serious, we can all get nostalgic over reruns of Lizzie McGuire and Even Stevens! Disney+ will have original documentaries, reality shows, competition series, behind the scenes features, nature and adventure titles, animated programming ---- just follow the yellow brick road.

Click below for  a comprehensive list of all the shows and movies confirmed:

https://www.cnet.com/news/disney-plus-every-show-and-movie-disney-confirmed/ 

Disney is in the business to take back over - they are ready to take on the competition from Netflix, Amazon and Apple. They may have an advantage here in that they have a majority stake in Hulu and are also looking into packaging subscription offerings for Disney+, ESPN and Hulu (as we have seen, sports are a HUGE value add when it comes to subscription offerings).

All this calls into question Disney’s existing shows offered on Netflix. Seems like Disney will disappear from Netflix by late 2019. Since 2016, Netflix has been the place to watch Disney movies. Translation? Netflix was the go-to place for the biggest US blockbusters of the last 3 years. Two top movies of 2017 and the three top movies of 2016 and 2018 were all from Disney. With the rollout and anticipation of all things Disney+, Disney did not renew their Netflix deal in their plot against the competitor. 

Unlike Netflix binge worthy shows, Disney does not plan to debut any of its big-budget motion pictures on the service (cannibalization is inevitable). Disney plans for its box office hits to run their course in theatres before making them available with a digital subscription.

Let’ s take a look at how the cost stacks up - Disney v. Netflix

Netflix - most popular option $12.99

Disney $6.99/mo, or discounted rate of $69.99 when paid yearly (lock ‘em in!)

With Neflix subscribers paying a higher cost starting in May, the thing to think about here is what CEO Bob Iger mention in yesterdays meeting - that Disney is not poised to replace Netflix or any other major streaming service. The pricing is less because it would be “substantially below Netflix because we’ll have substantially less volume.”

In a world where we are taking on too much, too many options being thrown in our face - this seems like a hard sell. It seems as though Disney+ is just an add on, similar to that of Hulu or Amazon Prime. 

As of today, Disney’s stock was on it’s track for its best day in nearly a decade. Somewhere, Mickey Mouse is singing, hoping that this add on can make dreams come true.

https://www.cnbc.com/video/2019/04/10/disney-is-a-legitimate-competitor-to-netflix-internet-analyst-says.html

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/12/investing/disney-stock/index.html

https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/03/29/better-buy-disney-vs-netflix.aspx

[adeleymccormick1990-blog]

auto insurance near dallas tx

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[wozman23]

My 2020 in Gaming

I finished my 100th video game of the year yesterday. In a normal year that would be an embarrassing feat. By in 2020, pretty much stuck within these four walls for nearly nine months now, I'm really proud of it. The last few years, my gaming habits took a severe hit due to working too much. I was fortunate to have the finances to pick up the PlayStation VR and the Switch, but I couldn't dedicate a lot of time to them, and when I did, the joy wasn't there as much since I was often exhausted. In 2018, I still managed to get through almost 40 games, but last year that number fell to 25. There was so much I wanted to play, but I just didn't have the free time. And then 2020 dealt me a lifeline... When LA came to a halt, three and a half months into the year, I was only working on finishing Game #6. Since then, I've been on a tear. A large part of my efficiency came from two choices. In late April, I signed up for Xbox Game Pass for $1 for the first month. Then in June, the “Racial Injustice” Bundle with hundreds of PC games – about a dozen of which I really wanted to play - released on itch.io. Overall, it was a solid mix of AAA games and indie games, although I've skewed more toward indies for years now. There were big anticipated releases like The Last of Us, Part II and Doom Eternal. Splatoon 2 finally got the shrink wrap pulled off that it's been suffocating in for years. (It was fantastic, so I'm not sure why I waited so long.) There were massive games that I put dozens of hours into, like my 77 hours descending into the madness of Hades, or my 69 soaking in the world of Ghost of Tsushima, with a sizeable chunk of those hours being me just toying around with Photo Mode. (Props to the PS5 for finally telling you your playtimes via the OS.) There were dozens of small indie games that only took a few hours to complete – which is kind of my sweet spot these days. A few weighed in at just 30 minutes, like Swarm, a Steam game I found through Get Indie Gaming's Youtube channel, or Syphonia, a student project from ISART Digital that I was anticipating. There were games I replayed, like some of my favorites of all time, Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy and Alan Wake, as well as the remastered versions of Ghostbusters: The Video Game and the Crash Bandicoot and Spyro trilogies. There was great stuff I paid for, and a few awesome games that I got for free through the Epic Games Store, or via subscriptions with PlayStation Plus, Game Pass Ultimate, or the times I took advantage of free trials of Amazon Prime. And I even got hooked on an online multiplayer only game, which has only happened on a handful of occasions in the history of online play.A lot of people are going to look back on 2020 as a terrible year, but for me it's been a godsend. It's allowed me to enjoy multiple passions, with gaming being one of the biggest. Like any hobby, my gaming habits over the years have ebbed and flowed. Overall, the last generation I've been fortunate to own every major console for the first time in a generation. Yet – outside of a few phenomenal games like Horizon Zero Dawn, ASTRO BOT Rescue Mission on VR, and the other aforementioned PlayStation first party titles – overall I wasn't really impressed as much with the AAA offerings. The indie scene is only gaining ground. But with the PS5, the proper return of my all-time favorite franchise, Ratchet & Clank, and my Game Pass renewed until 2022, I'm optimistic about where gaming is headed. As for my favorite games that released this year, here's my list: 1. The Last of Us, Part II 2. Battletoads 3. CARRION 4. Hades 5. ASTRO's Playroom 6. Filament 7. Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout 8. Bugsnax 9. Ghost of Tsushima 10. Ori and the Will of the Wisps The Last of Us, Part II The original The Last of Us was my favorite game of the previous generation, as well as the most impressive game of all time. It was mind-numbingly good, so much so that I really did not want a sequel. I didn't even want to replay it. It was one of those things that just felt complete. Nothing more needed to be said, and in doing so, there would be a large risk at ruining what made it great. Slowly, Naughty Dog eroded away at me, and I began to anticipate the sequel. Right before it I even replayed the remaster of the original. Part II is one of those rare project that manages to one-up what you thought was already perfection. It's like a 30 hour blockbuster movie that just keeps ramping up in intensity. So much of what makes it special is within the design of its details: the way it presents itself, the pacing, its message. Like many, key details were spoiled by online trolls prior to launch, but it really didn't matter. This post could be just as long and be only about The Last of Us, Part II. (I still may write something up at some point.) There's just so much of it to dissect. But it's impossible to talk about without spoiling all of its magical moments. It simply offers a masterclass in game design and narrative flow. I really don't need a Part III, but should one exist, I know damn well I'll be there. Battletoads I loved the original Battletoads. I even replayed it, and beat it with the help of the Rare Replay rewind feature right after playing the new entry. It's practically impossible otherwise. When there was talk of a new game I was hyped. But when it was finally revealed, with a completely different art style, I was taken aback. Because of that, I went in to the new entry not expecting much. However, that stylistic choice is exactly what put it in the Number 2 spot in my list. The original Battletoads concept was created to ape the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the original game felt much like the early TMNT brawlers. The new Battletoads doubles down though, expanding their empire to combat TMNT's cartoons. The game itself is a fairly straight forward 2D brawler, that looks and plays great, but the real stars are the cutscenes and the humor. It has this great Saturday morning cartoon vibe that I've never seen a game nail near as well. I don't watch a lot of the modern cartoons, but many have compared it to Rick & Morty. It's really quick, and silly, and feels exactly what a company should be aiming for if they wanted to create the next TMNT craze in the world today. Sure, the game itself is nowhere near perfect in all dimensions, but the way it tackles humor is really impressive and admirable. That's the main reason it occupies my Number 2 spot. CARRION CARRION reminds me a lot of INSIDE, typeset aside. INSIDE for me was this solid atmospheric game that at it's end became this awesome fever dream, but was over just when it was getting interesting. CARRION feels like INSIDE's spiritual successor. You play as this creepy creature, with all these grotesque tentacles, and you just run amok. It's just plain fun. Plus it's an insanely unique lifeform to play as, and there's nothing more I love than playing a game where you take on the role of some strange creature. Like many of the indie games I love, CARRION doesn't overstay its welcome. Over the few hours of its journey, it iterates, provides you with some unique challenges, they grabs its hat and coat and bids you adieu. There's nothing more I love than a game with that approach. Show me something cool. Make me play something that feels like something I've yet to experience in my over 30 years of gaming. Then get out of the way so that I can find another game that makes me feel that way. Kudos to Game Pass as well for partnering with the CARRION developers and offering the game on release day. I was looking forward to the game, but with so many games on my radar, I often simply can't get around to all of them. Had I needed to purchase CARRION, it might have had to wait in the wings for a while. I've played so many games on Game Pass this year that I may have otherwise never actually purchased, and many of them have found the ranks among my favorites from the last few years. Hades Up until now, I'd like Supergiant Games as a creative studio. I've played all of their games, and loved the artistry present in them. However, I've always felt like the gameplay was a bit lackluster. Not previously being a fan of roguelike games – although Game Pass has provided some great experiences there as well – I initially had no plans to buy Hades. But praise was unanimous, the Epic Store gave people a $10 coupon just for downloading Rocket League for free, and it was on sale for $5 off, so I scooped it up for $10. At first, I thought I had made a mistake. I wasn't really into it. But then it slowly started to sink its hooks into me. After about 30 runs, I'd finally vanquished Hades himself. And what was your reward: a brief encounter with your mother, followed by your death and cyclical return to The Underworld. And that's really where the brilliance of Hades comes in. In beating the game, you realize you have only scratched the surface. I played around 70 more runs. I got the full story from my mother. I tried out the different weapons. I played around with the perks and heat gauge. I maxed out the relationships with almost everyone. (I never got Demeter's final few dialog options to pop.) All along the way, I kept thinking, I'll quit after I do X, but then Y and Z would egg me on even further. I spent 77 hours in that world. Sometimes, with nothing to do during the day, I'd practically play all day long. No other game this year took up that much of my time. Few ever do. Not bad for a game I initially had buyers remorse for. ASTRO's Playroom I wasn't sure I was going to be able to get a PS5 at launch. I got lucky on release day thanks to the PlayStation Direct website. (Every other retailer is a giant hunk of shit, who doesn't care if they sell to an actually gaming fan or some asshole reseller.) Had I not secured an early PS5, it wasn't a big deal. Most of the games I wanted to play were coming to PS4 as well. The baked-in ASTRO's Playroom was the only exception. And there's always that extra special feeling of playing something right when it comes out. It's funny to think that the best PS5 game is given away for free with every console, but that is just the case. Much like ASTRO BOT Rescue Mission, which did wonders for showing off what PlayStation VR could do – it was my 2018 GOTY - ASTRO's Playroom shows off what the PS5 can do, primarily via the advancements of the DualSense controller and the solid state hard drive. I've never been one to care for graphics, and the PS5 will surely evolve over time, but those two details are what makes the device feel truly “next gen” so far. The way the triggers adjust tension is so wild. I really don't know how much they'll be used, but it's a cool option to have. And loading times are practically non-existent. (I've since went back to the Xbox One for a few more Game Pass releases, and loading times feel jarring.) As far as ASTRO goes, he's a terrific mascot in an age where mascot platformers aren't really a thing anymore. The experience relies heavily on nostalgia, as you collect relics of PlayStation's past. Also scattered throughout are other bots dressed up to reference other franchises. Dozens of franchises are represented, from characters like Crash, to Ratchet, to Kutaro from Puppeteer. It's really a lovely homage to PlayStation that any longtime fan will enjoy. Plus, it's a really fun game to play, with beautiful tech themed worlds, some infectious earworms, and some cool mechanics. Japan Studio has been a bit of an enigma for a while now. But the ASOBI Team is knocking it out of the park with ASTRO. ASTRO reminds me a lot of Iota from Tearaway: they're both cute mascot characters, crafted with a lot of love, from terrifically artistic games that did an excellent job of showing off new tech. I can't wait to see what ASTRO is up to next. Filament This one sat  near the top my Steam wishlist for nearly the entire year before I finally grabbed it about a week ago when it went on sale. I love a good puzzle game. Basically, you control a bot that tethers out a string-like filament that you use to interact with pillars. Sometimes you just make sure you graze the line by one; other times you loop around one. Sometimes you're simply turning a pillar on. Other times they must be linked in pairs, by color, or a specific number of times, just to name a few of the options. That's really where Filament glows. What starts of simple grows insanely complex by the end. You'll be combining mechanics in some rather brain-busting puzzle. And the game does very little to explain things to you, or help you along the way, yet it feels very inuitive. Still, many times I simply hit walls, where I was almost convinced the puzzles were impossible. In a few instances, it took a while to understand new rule sets. Eventually I solved every single puzzle without resorting to help. And it took me about 48 hours. (Granted I think my stat tracking was probably counting some idle time where I had the game running but walked away to do stuff like make a meal.) It's a surprising amount of content for a puzzle game that can easily be reduced to: solve puzzles by drawing lines. One other thing I appreciated was that I found myself taking notes and drawing things out on paper. That's a tactic I don't pull out often, but love when a game pushes me in that direction. One instance in particular even had me cut up squares of paper to piece together one of the secret text logs. By the way, I missed a ton of those logs. After completing the few I found, I did look how to unlock the rest, and some of the stuff there was absurdly complex. There's really not a lot to compare Filament to outside of The Witness. But if you like a really challenging puzzle game with a ton of content, give this one a look. Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout I don't like online multiplayer games. They rarely hold my interest. I put quite a bit of time into Rocket League, Uncharted 2, Resistance 2 Co-op, and Fat Princess, but that's been about it. And in some of those cases, the main reason I spent a good amount of time with them is because I was unemployed during their reign. Overall, I'm not one to interact with people online. And I don't like the idea of a game dictating when I play it. But when Fall Guys was included with PlayStation Plus, I liked the look of it enough to give it a try. Getting a win took a while, but after the first one, I started to become pretty consistent with my runs. Much like Hades, I thought, “I'll just play until I get the trophy for 7 wins.” Then I set my sights on 20. Then I got hooked on collecting the costumes. By the time I'd finished my first stint in Season 1, I'd reached the max Level 30 and had every trophy except for the one requiring five wins in a row. I've given up hope there. Sony says I logged 40 hours with it, which equates to a lot of rounds. One day I went back for Season 2, and enjoyed the new levels, even though I was getting eliminated since I was sight-reading them. I don't know how much time I'll be putting in with it in the future should I find gaps in my list of games. Usually with multiplayer games, the focus fades once I unlock all the trophies I can. And I'm not sure how much time I want to dedicate to becoming proficient at future season. But the fact that Fall Guys even got that much attention from me to begin with is a testament to how much fun it is. Bugsnax Bugsnax could have been a joke. The previous game from Young Horses, Octodad: Dadliest Catch was just that: a silly romp that equated to little more than just a goofy control scheme. Bugsnax was the butt of many jokes upon reveal, reaching meme status in which it became the Schrödinger's cat of games. When someone talked about it looking good, you weren't sure if they were being honest or a hipster. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I was intrigued. It's another fine example of a list of stellar games that have been given away for free with PlayStation Plus. Would I have played it otherwise? Who knows? But I'm glad I got to. It is silly, but the silliness works in unison with what turned out to be a very fun game to play. The world and its characters are weird. Everybody has a laughable name, Filbo Fiddlepie, Chandlo Funkbun, and C. Clumby Clumbernut, just to name a few. ( I wonder what the C stands for?) The Bugsnax, which are part bug, part snacks, follow suit, with the burger inspired Bunger, the french fry spider, Fryder, or the popsickle, Bobsickle. The most delightful part is when you catch one of the bugsnax and you hear them say their name from the speaker in the controller. Hearing “Weenieworm” never got old. Any sound coming from Bunger put a smile on my face. Feeding the bugnsax to the other characters was a blast as well. Certain bugsnax resulted in sheer silliness, while combinations could provide interesting fashion statements. But past all that silliness was a fun game too. You're given a few different tools to capture bugsnax, and are sent to figure out how. By the time I was reaching the end, having done all there was to do, I was sad to see it end. It was simply a joy to platinum the game, and I'd definitely be down for more Bugsnax adventures. Ghost of Tsushima I love Sucker Punch to death. Sly Cooper is one of my favorite series. On the other hand, I've never been into the world of the samurai, or watched any samurai movies. But Sucker Punch is a studio I'm happy to support, and I figured I'd be getting a good quality game, so I was in. (Plus, I had the free time. At the time, I thought it might be my gaming binge swan song as I thought we'd be coming out of this pandemic in July. Boy was I wrong!) The world of Tsushima is breathtaking. The partnership of style and graphical fidelity creates beauty in every square inch of the world. As far as the game is concerned, it what I would expect from a AAA open world game. There are main missions, and side missions, and things to upgrade, and all kinds of places to explore. It's fairly predictable in that regard, although I did enjoy some of the ways it tackled many of those side missions. The haiku system was a relaxing alternative to combat missions. Foxes and birds always encouraged me to meander from the main missions. And shrines provides some nice platforming challenges. Combat was unique, and being about to cater it to your preferred combat style was appreciated. It did wear out its welcome a bit after dozen of hours, but I appreciate its simplicity. Still, most impressive was just that living, breathing world. I spent a lot of time in photo mode. A LOT! I could easily spend an hour or two just traveling around finding beautiful vistas to tinker around with lighting and effects. In the end, most of my complaints really just boil down to the fact that it's a large AAA game, and comes with the tropes and restrictions of the territory. Otherwise, it would be higher up the list. Ori and the Will of the Wisps Ori and the Will of the Wisps is a great game, but ultimately it's just more Ori. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It just doesn't really subvert expectations. Everything that made the first game great is here too. It looks gorgeous. It's fun to traverse and explore. But looking back, it doesn't stick out as fondly in my memory as many of the other games in this list. Some of that could be the fact that it released early in the year. It was the game I was playing when the world crapped the bed. But it could also just be that I prefer the intrigue of new IP over sequels. Even so, it's hard to discredit just how well it plays and how beautiful and rich that fantasy world is. Honorable Mentions (that released this year): Carto, Lightmatter, Swarm, Symphonia, Bartlow's Dread Machine, Doom Eternal, Control's AWE Expansion Honorable Mentions (I played that released years prior): Bomb Chicken, SUPERHYPERCUBE, Dead Cells, Moonlighter, Songbird Symphony, The Messenger, JUMPGRID, ETHEREAL, Spring Falls, Unruly Heroes, Celeste, Lonely Mountains: Downhill, Splatoon 2, My Friend Pedro, A Short Hike, Future Grind, SOMOS, A Plague Tale: Innocence, The King's Bird

[sarumansorkorphanage]

What specific gun control measures would you propose for America and how would they work to realistically and effectively create an overall safer society in America? Furthermore, can you please provide credible evidence that any society throughout the world has been made safer as a whole as a direct result of strict gun control laws? Also, you claim that there is a school shooting every day in America. Can you please provide credible sources and evidence to back up this bold claim?

“From 2007 to this day we had 8 shootings in Germany (http://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/panorama/Uebersicht-Diese-Amoklaeufe-erschuetterten-Deutschland-id38580022.html). (Jan 20th 2018)

From January 7th (2018) to this day you had the 8 of school shootings in the USA. Guys there is a world without guns. And it’s one flight away. (http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/mass-shooting). (Jan 20th 2018)

[I think in comparison to you guys- we do have hardly any school shootings and street violents results in less deaths.]”

I posted this a couple of days ago and of course I can’t prove it’s a direct result of strict gun control. But either German’s are just very nice and reasonable people in comparison to the US or it might be linked to the direct availability.

Sorry ‘bout the school shooting:

https://everytownresearch.org/school-shootings/

School shootings are once a week. I confused them with with mass shootings which according to The Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/0/one-mass-shooting-every-day-seven-facts-gun-violence-america/ happen on a daily basis (in 2016 437, which is even more, in 307 which is a bit less).

So here’s the correct data: Mass shootings on about a daily basis, school shootings one per week. Which (you might agree) is far more than anyone can believe.

As for my propositions:

1st step: Background check - list any gun owner, check on their crime history and psychological background (if there is any, confiscate the guns).

2nd step: Introduce two licences

A- Licence which allows you to hold 5 light guns (idk where exactly you draw the line between heavy firearms and light, but you can copy on the Germans for that), can’t be given to anyone with a criminal register, needs a couple of training and teaching hours including an elaboration of your rights, self- defence, self-harm etc. As well as a psychobiological check to be renewed every three years.

B- Licence which is required for any profession which brings you in touch with guns, allows you to purchase and hold up to 8 guns including heavy firearms (except maybe for some illegal ones, I wouldn’t want anyone to own a bazooka), which would also require background checks, but separate listing and (Gun-owner-B) and psychological background checks every half a year.

3rd step: The systematic pursuit of illegal gun traffic and a progressive ban of firearms from public spaces, probably starting with touristic areas and inner cities and progressively expanding to the suburbs.

Each of these steps will take their time and they will probably cost a lot of resources in both time and money, but if you do want to get somewhere at some point you have got to start.

I know there is a lot of resistance to be expected during the implementation of these rules. But come on, guns are no toys. You don’t just let people buy cars and let them drive around so there has got to be some regulations with weapons and clearly- the current amount is not enough.

But here’s the deal: Everybody would face the same limitations.

You not having a gun at hand in public spaces makes you times and times less likely to be exposed to one. Police officers wouldn’t be so tense when pulling you out with your car if they knew most gun owners are psychologically stable and do not have a criminal history.

If ever you experience a government which you want to rebel against, remember you have the right to vote. You have the right to speak your mind and to do a number of other protesting activities which do not require physical violence and an open rebellion.

You’ve been raised in a society in which guns are very present. So will your kids probably be. But the future of your grand-children may yet be an unstained paper. You can shape the world they will see growing up.

And just because actual weapons are restricted it doesn’t mean you’re not allowed any Blockbusters ore shooters online.

I’m German. I can not shape your country. I hope I can show you how you can shape it. You guys helped us when Germany was ruled by Nazis. We might be able to return the favour now that the USA are ruled by a gun lobby in  politics and gangs on the streets. / When crime rules your every day life.

This world is fucked up, but who would we be to give up the struggle?

[bigyack-com]

Strong November Jobs Report Counters Anxieties Over Weakening Economy

■ The unemployment rate was 3.5 percent, down from the previous month. ■ Average hourly earnings rose 0.2 percent, with a year-over-year gain of 3.1 percent.

The Takeaway

The return of tens of thousands of striking workers to their jobs at General Motors helped supercharge hiring totals last month.The reassuring jobs report, released Friday morning by the Labor Department, offered a counterpoint to renewed anxieties about an escalating trade war and a weakening global economy.“I think that this report is a real blockbuster; payrolls smashed expectations,” said Daniel Zhao, senior economist at the career site Glassdoor. Another 41,000 jobs were added to September and October’s employment totals after revisions. A broader measure of unemployment, which includes part-timers who would prefer full-time jobs and people who are too discouraged to look for work, inched down to 6.9 percent.Stocks rose following the report, with the S&P 500 up by more than 0.8 percent in early trading.The health of the manufacturing sector has been somewhat clouded by the 40-day G.M. strike this fall and disruption in the aerospace industry stemming from the crash of two Boeing airplanes. Friday’s report showed a gain of 54,000 jobs in that sector, reversing last month’s losses, but it did not signal a significant upturn.“Manufacturing is still flat after you pull out the returning strike numbers,” Mr. Zhao said. “It’s still suffering from headwinds from the trade war, but at least it’s not worsening.”Average monthly payroll gains for the past three months reached 205,000, a hefty number for the 11th year of an economic expansion.Mr. Zhao noted that given the record-low jobless rate, wage growth over all remained stubbornly slow, and has decelerated this year. The overall employment picture was impressive, said Diane Swonk, chief economist for the accounting firm Grant Thornton, but manufacturing was lagging compared to a strong service sector. “We’re getting a lot of the gains in leisure, hospitality and health care,” she said, adding that the additions in professional services indicated more hiring of college graduates, which had softened slightly over the summer.

The Labor Market as a Toothpaste Tube

In a newsletter this week, David Kelly, chief global strategist at JPMorgan Funds, compared recent hiring to squeezing one more glob of toothpaste out of a seemingly empty tube. “Over the last few years,” he said, “an apparently fully tapped-out labor market has yielded a surprising number of new workers.”The buffet of available job postings has drawn many Americans back to work. Employers have widened their scope, recruiting people with disabilities or criminal records. Older baby boomers are working past retirement age and stay-at-home parents are switching to paid employment.The labor force participation rate inched up through most of the spring and fall, driven in part by an increase in women 25 to 34 getting jobs or starting to look for work. Over the last year, nearly 1.7 million people joined the ranks of workers.Mr. Kelly does not expect the historically low unemployment rates to fall much more. “Gains in employment going forward will have to come from an increase in the labor force,” he wrote. Economists are engaged in a vigorous debate about how tight the labor market is and how many more people are available to work. Mr. Trump’s more restrictive immigration policies have significantly shrunk the supply of foreigners who could come to work in the United States.Employment agencies say they are often unable to find candidates to fill the jobs that are open. “At every level of employment, it’s been super tight,” said Yvonne Rockwell, owner of an Express Employment Professionals agency in Santa Clarita, Calif. “I truly believe that anybody who wants to work is working.”Southern California has a lot of aerospace companies, and Ms. Rockwell focuses on skilled trades and higher-level positions. “This is our best year ever,” said Ms. Rockwell, who opened her franchise five years ago.The competition for workers has helped push up wages, particularly at the lower end of the scale.And Amazon’s decision last year to raise its minimum wage to $15 across the country has turned up the pressure in some places.“Everyone is struggling now to keep up with Amazon,” said John Dickey, who owns two Express Employment agencies in Massachusetts.One company he works with, a light manufacturer in the chemical and food industry, is looking to hire 30 people for jobs that pay $14 to $15 an hour. “This company does drug tests and background tests, and it requires 12 hours on your feet,” he said. “And you need to be able to speak and communicate in English.”Employers routinely complain about their inability to find reliable workers, but Mr. Dickey acknowledged that many of the available jobs could be less than desirable.“These can be pretty rough working conditions,” he said, pointing to the food industry, where people can spend a lot of time in refrigerated warehouses or near industrial ovens. “It’s cold, it’s hot, it’s wet, the floors are slippery, so there tends to be a fair amount of turnover,” he said.The clamor for more workers may make it easier for people who want to turn temporary holiday jobs into permanent ones. Historically, about 4 percent to 7 percent of seasonal workers are hired, said Amy Glaser, senior vice president of the staffing firm Adecco. This year, she expects that 20 percent could be retained after the new year.

Middle-Income Jobs Are Hard to Find

Despite the low unemployment rate, stable, secure jobs that pay a middle-income wage can be hard to find across a range of skills.Alan Kirshner worked as a budget analyst at Bristol Myers Squibb in New Jersey for 18 years before a restructuring eliminated his job in 2015.“My goal was to find something more permanent like I had in the past,” he said, “but those opportunities were much more limited.” Companies have used technology to reduce staffing, shifted full-time workers to contracts and often moved the better-paying jobs out of the country or to lower-cost areas in the United States. Mr. Kirschner is now a career coach — a business that he controls, but that offers no steady income or benefits.Researchers have often documented bias against workers over 50 and minorities, especially African-American women.

Mixed Messages

The job market can differ radically from one place to another, with a 1.6 percent jobless rate in Fargo, N.D., 4.2 percent in Binghamton, N.Y., and 6.1 percent in Bakersfield, Calif.Large urban centers tend to gulp much of the gains, said Julia Pollak, a labor economist at the online employment company ZipRecruiter.Holiday hiring plunged among traditional retailers, according to ZipRecruiter’s listings, with rural and suburban areas hit particularly hard. And a much larger share of temporary holiday job postings are in e-commerce compared to in stores, she said.

Trade Tensions

President Trump stoked trade tensions this week by imposing new tariffs on steel and aluminum from Brazil and Argentina, suggesting that the feud with China could continue for another year and threatening European allies with import taxes.The White House’s unpredictable trade policy has unsettled businesses and cramped investment. They have also helped heighten concerns about a faltering manufacturing sector. “When you look globally, there are some tentative signs that the global manufacturing slowdown is bottoming out,” Michael Gapen, chief United States economist for Barclays, said. “But it may take the U.S. manufacturing sector a little longer than the rest of the world to stabilize.”“We still don’t have a Phase 1 agreement,” he said, referring to the promised first edition of a comprehensive trade accord with China. “And private sector spending in the U.S. is moderate at best.”A trade agreement with China would, of course, be welcome, but Mr. Gapen said that at this point, he did not expect that it would help lift growth. “It’s more of a going back to the beginning,” he said, noting that in the end, China is likely to commit to agricultural purchases that it might have made earlier without tariffs.The government will revise its November estimates two more times, and its October estimate once more. “We have seen some moderation in jobs gains, which you would expect,” said Rubeela Farooqi, chief United States economist at High Frequency Economics. But the average monthly increases to date, the low jobless rate and the growing share of adults joining the work force all point to a strong foundation, she said. “I think the labor market over all is looking pretty healthy.” Source link Read the full article

[screenandcinema]

An Ode to the Oscar Telecast

Growing up, the Academy Awards was always a sacred event. When I was a kid, the Oscars were held on a Monday night and in my family that was one of the few times a year my brothers and I were allowed to skip Hebrew school. The Oscars were that important to us. Everything about the Oscar telecast was iconic to me as a kid from the host (Billy Crystal was always a personal favorite) to the Oscar poster (later this week I will list some of my favorite posters). That is why it so depressing to see the Oscar telecast fall into disarray over the past year.

Last year’s ceremony was the least-watched telecast in terms of total viewers since the number started being recorded in the mid-1980s. The number of total viewers has been in decline for each telecast since 2014, with numbers bottoming out when the 90th Academy Awards hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, the ceremony in which The Shape of Water won Best Picture, only garnered 26.5 million viewers. The Academy and ABC have spent the last year searching for a way to get more viewers to the telecast.

While the debacle surrounding the hunt for a new host of this year’s ceremony and ultimately the lack of one completely doesn’t tie specifically into an effort to increase ratings for the telecast as a whole, a handful of other mistakes the Academy has made this past year do.

Last August, the Academy announced a new award, the Academy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film, or most simply the award for Best Popular Film. The announcement of this new award was met with immediate backlash from both Academy members and the media. The objective of the award was abundantly clear, the Academy wanted a way to reward films that people have seen, even if they aren’t Best Picture worthy. Looking back at the ratings of telecasts of the last 30-odd years, the two highest rated ceremonies in terms of total viewers were the 70th Academy Awards and the 67th Academy Awards. The two films that won Best Picture at those ceremonies were Titanic and Forrest Gump, the highest and third-highest grossing Best Picture-winning films over that period respectively. The Academy was likely thinking “He, if we give an Oscar to a film like Avengers: Infinity War or Mission: Impossible – Fallout or Black Panther then more people will watch.” The logic is sound, but such an award would have both diminished the intrigue of the Oscars as a whole and the likelihood of any worthy blockbuster or “popular film” of earning a Best Picture nomination. The entire fiasco remained me of when the Academy expanded the Best Picture nomination field to ten films in 2009 as a direct reaction to the lack of a Best Picture nomination for The Dark Knight the year prior. In the end, a month after announcing the new category, the Academy reversed course and postponed it saying they would “examine and seek additional input regarding the new category.” These types of backpedaling would be a hallmark of the Academy’s approach to changes to the telecast moving forward. Funny enough, blockbuster and popular film, Black Panther was nominated for Best Picture after all and is the third highest grossing film of all-time in North America.

After the debacle over the Best Popular Film category, which was the Academy’s way of trying to make the telecast relevant again (though I would argue it is already relevant), the Academy and ABC set their sights on ways to make the telecast shorter and thus more manageable for viewing audiences. The first such attempt came last month when word came out that only two of the five nominees for Best Original Song would be performed live on the telecast. This announcement was also met with backlash, however, the precedent for performing some but all of the nominated songs had a long history. At the 85th Academy Awards in 2013 and the 88th Academy Awards in 2016, only three of the five nominated songs were performed and at the 84th Academy Awards in 2012, neither of the two nominated songs were performed – marking only the third time since 1946 that none of the nominated songs were performed. Six days after announced that only “All the Stars” from Black Panther and “Shallow” from A Star Is Born would be performed, the Academy again changed their mind and announced that all five of songs would be performed in some form live during the telecast.

The Academy’s latest attempt to make the telecast shorter came in the form of last week’s announcement that four awards – Best Cinematography, Best Live Action Short, Best Film Editing, and Best Makeup and Hairstyling – would be given out during the telecast’s commercial breaks and footage of the announcement and speech would be cut down and later aired during the telecast. This announcement caused a similar highly outspoken backlash, just like both the cutting of nominated song performances and the introduction of the Best Popular Film category, and once again the Academy reversed their decision an announced that all 24 categories would be presented live.

Personally, I don’t see finding reasons to nominate films that may or may not be deserving or trimming the show’s length are necessary to gain more viewers for the telecast. Truthfully, award shows as a whole are seeing lower ratings year after year, this isn’t just an Oscar problem, the Emmy Awards saw their lowest ratings ever in 2018 and the Grammy Awards in 2018 brought in their lowest viewership in a decade. Award show fatigue is real and adding an unnecessary category or cutting the show length won’t fix that. Instead, ABC and the Academy should focus on creating the best show possible. If they are so keen on creating a new category, which hasn’t been done since 2001, they should look to honoring the amazing stunt work that is cutting down on film. An Oscar for Best Stunt Coordination has been proposed and rejected by the Board of Governors time and time again over the past 25 years, but it is definitely more worthy of an Academy Award than Best Popular Film. 

Instead of finding ways to cut time from the Oscar telecast, instead, the producers of the ceremony should look for new and inventive ways to create Oscar moments that viewers will remember for years to come. I think back to the 82nd Academy Awards when instead of bringing out a single presenter for Best Actress and Best Actor, five people came out for each award, each with a connection to a nominee or to the role they portrayed to discuss their craft and honor the nominee. I vividly remember Colin Farrell who co-starred with Jeremy Renner in S.W.A.T. discussing their time on that film as Renner was honored for his role in The Hurt Locker, or Oprah Winfrey admiring the work that Gabourey Sidibe did in Precious as a first-time nominee. That telecast in 2010, was the second-most-watched ceremony of the past decade by total viewers. Though I should note that while 2010 telecast of the 82nd Academy Awards featured the lowest grossing Best Picture winner of the last 30 years with The Hurt Locker and its measly box office of $17 million, it did defeat fellow nominee Avatar which at the time was the highest grossing film of all time.

If you create Oscar-moments that stay with a viewer, moments that they will share with the friends during the telecast or the next day online, it doesn’t matter if the show is three hours or four-and-a-half, people will watch. For years the Oscars began at 9 pm, then it was later moved to 8:30 pm and last year it was moved to 8 pm, that is a positive progression, starting the show earlier gives you more time to great a great ceremony, not more opportunity to cut time. I love the Oscars, I love watching the Oscars, I love feeling like I am a part of the Oscars when I watch the telecast. The Academy Awards need a renewed focus on creating the best show, not the shortest show, or the most popular show. If you created the best film, you are honored with Oscar gold (regardless of length or box office), and the same will be true for the Academy Awards. Create a great telecast and the rest will come.

Tune into the 91st Academy Awards on Sunday, February 24th on ABC.

-MB-

[bwprowl]

It’s a bit of a slow news week as we inch towards the twin titanic reveal-fests of Winter WonFes and Toy Fair, but we’ve still got a few things to check out, with superstar Sentai and Russian-style Rangers from either side of the pond, plus some surprising new Marvel drops. I’ll also mull over available Transformers bootlegs, plus a recent release from a line I haven’t looked at enough. All that and an adorable, Nendorable Korra-ble, here on Tuesday Night Toys!

New Stuff: Cosmonauts

A new blockbuster movie means an explosion of new, previously-unheard-of merchandise for the source material. I saw it with Transformers back when the first film came out in 2007, and it’s set to happen again with Power Rangers and that movie next month that I’m still patently unsure about. In amongst all the new Funko Pops and plush toys and other collectible gewgaws, we’ll be getting this bizarre little piece: A set of Russian-style nesting dolls designed after the five original Rangers, plus Alpha 5! PPW Toys is putting these out, and as far as esoteric shelf-space hoggers go, you could do a lot worse. I hope for more fun stuff like this to come out of the renewed Power Rangers licensing blitz this movie will be leading, for better or for worse.

On the other side of the Power Coin, if you thought you could escape my pre-premier Kyuranger hype even here, then you thought way wrong. Pre-orders for the toys of the newly-numerous Super Sentai series have been steadily going up, headlined by the main mecha: The shamelessly Scramble-City-style KyurenOh! 

Boasting the unique-to-Sentai ability for each individual unit (here called ‘Voyagers’) to form either an arm or a leg around the red Ranger’s main Shishi Voyager, this ‘bot will start with an unprecedented number of configurations, especially including the four extra Voyagers that are sold separately from the main set. And how cool do Hebitsukai Voyager and Tenbin Voyager look?

Surprising no one, I think I’m going all-in on the mecha on this one, but as with Zyuohger, I’ll be sticking with the smaller, cheaper, but more posable mini-pla versions. Assisting in this is that AmiAmi is now offering those in single sets, for half the price of the full boxes you had to buy before. I’m glad I already got my pre-order in, since they’re all sold out already, natch.

Some new Marvel Legends figures were surprisingly revealed a little while ago. These would be the 3 ¾” Legends that were rebranded from the Marvel Universe line, and they’ll be filling out the Marvel Cinematic corners of your smaller display space. Looks like there will be at least three two packs all based on the most recent movies in the line: Dr. Strange with an astral projection of himself, Star-Lord and Yondu, and the current iteration of Spider-Man with the Vulture he’ll be fighting in that Homecoming movie. The Guardians of the Galaxy set is the most appealing to me, of course (look at Yondu’s goofy grin, he looks great!), but I really want that Spider-Man movie to be good, so if it is, I’ll likely get that one as well.

Wishlist: Lockoffs

Transformers has always been a line that attracted countless counterfeit versions of its wares, from dime-store knockoffs to convincingly-recreated G1 bootlegs. More recently though, a different variety has emerged, as Chinese eBay accounts and other somewhat-shady places offer tweaked fake versions of relatively-recent molds. You see these all over the place searching for TFs on eBay; they mostly encompass the recent movie toys, either being versions in new color schemes, or upscaled with die-cast added for value. There’s of course that delightful AoE Hound with the bio that was written based on Thew, but I recently had to throw this big ol’ black Lockdown on my watchlist, because the prospect of a bigger, badder version of design I liked (from a film I otherwise didn’t) is rather appealing, and these things don’t even cost that much! Maybe I’d feel a little bad going in on a fake, but not that much, as I spend plenty on Hasbro’s Transformers already. If nothing else, these are interesting purely from a standpoint of showing all the various pillars that make money off Transformers’ selling power, whether they legitimately should or not.

Speaking of things that popped back onto my radar, the ol’ Pose Skeleton line it appears is still going strong, with plenty of playsets and even a bunch of animal and dinosaur companions for your bony buddies! These little things have always been a hoot, especially with the accessorized options you can lend them, all for pretty dang cheap. The latest expansion just-released for your flesh-challenged family is the ‘Cute Person’, a shorter, pink-tinted skelley with a cute lil’ bow headband. It’s a good excuse to add another to your skeleton hoard, even if you had a few already.

And of course, unless you were living under a rock for the past couple weeks, you know the first Yuri on Ice Nendoroid went up for pre-order.

Yes, I still need to watch this show

On Desk: Uncommon Korra

Korra from the titular The Legend Of series was a pretty unexpected release for the Nendoroid line, for being a western cartoon as well as the show having been over for almost a year and a half when the toy was first revealed (GSC tends to like to do very recent, current series for their toys). Response must have been good though, since they opened the orders from western-only to worldwide through their usual Japanese avenues (which amusingly meant I was able to order this west-focused toy of an American character for cheaper through a Japanese shop), and even added a few extra accessories to it at the last minute!

The instructions even include English. They know what they're about.

Korra does feel like GSC testing the waters with this kind of release though. Even with the extra accessories, she still feels a bit bare-bones. She has a few different arms and legs, but they're all in service of just a few different generic action poses; the 'extra mile' Nendos sometimes go towards recreating specific points of the series isn't found here. She also only has two faces, and since one is the Avatar state, she really only has the one facial expression, which is almost unheard of for this line (especially given that Korra did have quite a few memorable faces throughout the show).

Granted, the base figure itself is very nice. All the details are present and nicely-accurately conveyed at the scaled-down chibi proportions. The hand-poses she comes with in particular are nicely effective for what they are, and her little hair-dainglies can even swivel around a bit! And she can use what she has to assume a variety of cool bending-based action poses (accompanied by the extremely nice elemental accessories). The fire and water streams especially look great, and just on their own make for an unmistakable awesome desktop Korra.

The one really cool thing the toy can do is assume that aforementioned Avatar state. Swapping in the faceplate and arranging all four element effect parts around does the trick, and it's actually surprisingly easy to get it all set up (nowhere near the madness I engaged in with Chris), and looks admittedly pretty impressive when it's all done. As a display piece, this might be the best way to default to having your Korra. It's eye-catching and adorable, as a Nendoroid should be.

Overall, Korra's impressive mostly that she got made, that GSC branched out like this. She's pretty light as far as Nendoroids go, not a bad toy by any means but not outstanding either. If you're a fan of the show like I am, she's pretty much a must-own, but there's simply not enough to her to recommend as a general purchase. I am really glad I got her though, and am excited to see if GSC follows up with anything else.

You enjoy the rest of your night, everyone! Have fun, I'll be here when you get back!

[businessliveme]

A once-core business for GE and Siemens shows new signs of life

(Bloomberg Opinion) –A once mighty engine of profit for Siemens AG and General Electric Co. isn’t dead just yet, but the business will remain a ghost of its former self.

The market in question is gas turbines, equipment that sits at the heart of natural gas power plants and helps to generate electricity. A glut of capacity and the reduced cost of renewable energy tanked demand for these engines, sparking years of painful slides in profitability and massive rounds of cost-cutting. Recently, though, orders have started to perk up modestly; regions such as China are converting to gas from coal or nuclear power, while elsewhere there is a growing recognition that the flexibility and reliability of turbines gives them a role to play even in a world tilting increasingly toward alternatives. In what may be a nod to this recent improvement, Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser told Bloomberg News this week that the company may keep only a 25% stake in the struggling energy unit it plans to spin off. That would constitute a more extensive break than what was envisioned when Siemens announced the overhaul in May with the intention of retaining a “somewhat less than 50%” holding — seemingly a bet that the apparent bottoming in demand will entice more support from the public market.

Read: The world’s only $100 billion utility owes its rise to wind power

Indeed, Siemens saw a 9% increase in comparable orders in its gas-and-power division in the fiscal fourth quarter and said its market share in large gas turbines held roughly steady in 2019. Deutsche Bank AG analysts led by Gael de-Bray this week outlined a path for a 20% recovery in Siemens gas turbine orders to 10 gigawatts annually. The analysts acknowledge this is an out-of-consensus view, but even GE, the poster child for gas power woes, has seen business come in better than expected. Year to date, GE logged gas power orders of 12.8 GWs, compared with 7.2 GWs in the same period in 2018, Chief Financial Officer Jamie Miller said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call. That adds support to CEO Larry Culp’s optimism that overall market volume may exceed GE’s dire forecast of just 25 to 30 GWs at the beginning of the year.

This recent stabilization in demand is encouraging, but the question isn’t just whether companies can attract orders, but whether they can deliver them and any associated maintenance work profitably. The Deutsche Bank analysts estimate the Siemens Energy spinoff (which includes a 59% stake in Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy SA) can reach its goal of doubling its adjusted profit margin to about 8% by 2021, a reflection of growth in more profitable service work and targeted cost savings of 700 million euros. Progress is progress, but it should be noted that an 8% margin isn’t exactly blockbuster profitability, and that number reinforces the idea that there is a more structural shift in the power market that will keep a lid on further improvements.

GE, for its part, has said fixed costs are down 9% year to date in the gas power business, although it has also pushed out some restructuring work, in part because negotiations in Europe are taking longer than expected. Its own gas-power service revenue has declined in the past three quarters. Even so, Melius Research analyst Scott Davis has argued there’s no structural reason that margins can’t return to the mid-teen levels of yesteryear. He bases this in part on the idea that Siemens, as its top competitor, cares deeply about boosting its own margins and that will help keep pricing rational. In response to that, I would point you to the other power market news making the headlines this week: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries CEO Seiji Izumisawa is leaving the door open to a combination or collaboration with Siemens’s power business once it’s carved out. Siemens had reportedly been in talks to merge the gas-turbine business with Mitsubishi before deciding to go ahead with the spinoff instead. “We do have a good relationship with Siemens,” Izumisawa said in an interview at Bloomberg Headquarters this week. “I will not deny the possibility that we could possibly work with them.”

Such a move would substantially shift the competitive landscape, and it’s far from clear that Mitsubishi would have the same discipline if it was in charge of the pricing for Siemens’s new units and service agreements. Asked whether market share or profitability was more important amid weak demand for turbines, Izumisawa said that the most important thing was for the business to make money and generate value for shareholders, but within that, there’s an understanding that after-market services are responsible for most of the profit in the gas turbine business. That gives the company an interest in making sure it’s delivering a consistent number of units, he said. While Izumisawa said the Siemens spinoff doesn’t directly affect Mitsubishi’s business strategy, he acknowledged competition is only getting tougher. Siemens’s Kaeser has spoken about the likelihood that China will want its own national champion to capitalize on an expected boom in gas power demand as the country converts from coal. To that end, Izumisawa touted the productivity and reliability benefits offered by Mitsubishi’s high-efficiency J-series turbines as a tool for luring customers. The company’s estimate of greater than 64% efficiency for that product exceeds the 62.2% for GE’s 9HA turbine, and Mitsubishi is working to further expand that lead with its next generation turbine, Gordon Haskett analyst John Inch wrote in a June report. Here I will remind you that GE has cut R&D at its power unit substantially over the past few years.

Point being, demand may be stabilizing, but the market is only getting more competitive.

LEAKING FUEL

Some worrying signals for the aerospace market emanated from the Dubai Air Show this week. Emirates trimmed order commitments for both Boeing Co. and Airbus SE jets, with the reductions adding up to $24 billion at list prices. Big aircraft like Boeing’s 777X are falling out of favor as weakening demand and fare competition sparks concern about airlines’ ability to fill the planes profitably. Emirates will take 126 777X jets, including six orders for older models that were upgraded to the newest version, and 30 of Boeing’s smaller 787 Dreamliners. All in, that’s 40 fewer planes than planned. The airline upped its order for Airbus’s A350 wide-body jet, but seemingly scrapped a commitment for 40 A330neos that was part of the original deal, resulting in a net loss.

A bright spot was Airbus’s longer-range A321 XLR model. Boeing’s counter to that, a potential new middle-market aircraft, remains a question mark amid the continuing crisis engulfing its 737 Max. The more orders Airbus is able to rack up in the meantime, the weaker the business case for that Boeing jet. Airbus is already moving on: The manufacturer talked about developing a narrow-body jet by the end of the 2020s if key technologies are available, likely kicking off a new front in the arms race with Boeing, notes Bloomberg Intelligence’s George Ferguson. The MCAS software system blamed for the Max’s two fatal crashes was installed to make up for the fact that the existing 737 model infrastructure was less adaptable to more fuel-efficient engines. Clean-sheet development programs like the one Airbus is contemplating won’t come cheap and the fact that the planemakers’ are considering them speaks to a potentially more structural shift away from wide-bodies in the current demand environment.

DEALS, ACTIVISTS AND CORPORATE GOVERNANCE

Thyssenkrupp AG’s plan to sell off its prized elevator division got more complicated this week. The company plunged the most since 2000 on Thursday after warning that a deepening cash crunch would force it to suspend dividend payments. Selling off the entire elevator business – whose exposure to the growing urbanization trend makes it a rare bright spot for Thyssenkrupp – would bring in much needed cash to fund restructuring for the remaining steel, submarines and industrial businesses. But that would also deprive Thyssenkrupp of its top source of cash flow should the turnaround plan fail to gain traction. Binding bids for the elevator unit are due in mid-January, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg News. Rival Kone Oyj has partnered with private equity firm CVC Capital Partners for a bid and has reportedly offered a sizable breakup fee to help convince Thyssenkrupp to put aside antitrust concerns. Also in the running are a consortium of Blackstone Group Inc., Carlyle Group LP and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board; an Advent International, Cinven and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority team; Brookfield Asset Management; Asian private equity firm Hillhouse Capital, whose connection to China may also draw scrutiny; and 3G Capital, which is better known for its troubled food investments.

Read: Renewables are booming, but not fast enough to cap greenhouse emissions

Cobham Plc’s planned sale to Advent International advanced a step this week after the U.K. government said it was likely to accept remedies designed to address national security concerns over the $5 billion takeover of a military supplier. The deal still risks being caught in the political crossfire with a final ruling not expected to come until Dec. 17, five days after the U.K. general election. The opposition Labour Party has taken a dim view of the deal amid a spike in foreign acquirers taking advantage of the pound’s Brexit-fueled weakness. The deal has few benefits for Britain, but a block on purely protectionist grounds would set a bad precedent, as my colleague Chris Hughes has written. “If the U.K. merely rues that Cobham is worth more in U.S. hands, it should instead ask whether past industrial policy is to blame and learn the lessons,” Chris writes. Approval likely comes with some strings, though, including job commitments and potentially an agreement to keep Cobham’s headquarters in the U.K.

The post A once-core business for GE and Siemens shows new signs of life appeared first on Businessliveme.com.

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[samuelpboswell]

Tapping Key Takeaways from Recent Research on Fortune 500 Social Media Usage

Blogs are booming. Instagram interest is on the rise. Facebook is forever fashionable. And LinkedIn continues to lead the pack. These all reflect trends found among Fortune 500 companies on social media, according to recent research from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth's Center for Marketing Research. We scoured UMass Dartmouth's research in search of key takeaways and surprising tidbits that would intrigue and inspire B2B and B2C brands large and small. Here’s what you need to know about how the world’s largest corporations are tackling social media, plus some helpful resources to help give your social media marketing efforts a boost.

More Than Half of F500 Companies Now Have a Blog

It’s kind of amusing to see blogging grouped into this study as a social media tactic. But hey, the research comes from an academic institution, not a marketing entity, and they started conducting it 10 years ago when the lines were more blurred. In any case, there’s still plenty of integration and overlap between blogging and social media (i.e., long-form posts on LinkedIn) so the medium is definitely fair game here. From 2017 to 2018, Dartmouth’s data finds one of the biggest year-to-year spikes in blog usage since they started tracking in 2008. The percentage of corporate blogs on company websites among Fortune 500 companies is up to 53%, rising 11 points from a year ago. If that number still seems low to you (it does to me), keep in mind the folks compiling this report aimed to include only blogs that: a) are public-facing, and b) include content that goes beyond “newsroom” type posts such as product announcements, press releases, and philanthropic involvement. The chart above offers a compelling visualization of the firm traction that content marketing is now seeing in the high-level business world, after failing to truly take off for several years. There’s little reason to think we won’t see this proliferation power ahead at a frantic pace. Of particular interest, to me, is the rapid decline in number of blogs that allow comments: This is emblematic of a real conundrum: the internet can be a nasty place. On large and well-trafficked blogs, moderating comments can prove to a be prohibitively time-consuming task. But dialogue is crucial, and preventing readers from being able to respond on corporate blogs really deters the openness and transparency brands should be striving to project. There’s no easy solution to this dilemma, but one way to inject the voice of your audience in a controlled yet still authentic way is via strategic user-generated content. UGC not only helps you spotlight your customers and their stories, but can also help build rapport and a sense of community, all at a relatively low cost. In general, we believe blogging is an essential digital marketing tactic for almost any business, large or small. For more insights on driving more targeted traffic to your own corporate blog, check out these recent posts:

Is Anybody Out There? How to Get More Eyes On Your Blog Content

How Amanda Todorovich and the Cleveland Clinic Monetized Their Blog (And Why the Resulting Revenue is Just Gravy)

CMWorld Interview: Path to 1M Monthly Readers Has No Shortcuts, Says J.P. Medved

Twitter and Facebook are Table Stakes for Top Dogs

Dartmouth reports that 455 of the 2018 F500 companies have active Twitter accounts (91%) and 445 (89%) have Facebook pages. On each, the top 10 companies are all accounted for. Commercial banks and specialty retailers are the only industry verticals with 100% representation across both channels. It's inexpensive to create a brand page on Facebook or Twitter, and keeping them updated requires only modest time investment, so it’s hardly surprising to see these high levels of penetration among heavy-hitters. The great challenge, now and going forward, will be finding ways to stand out and break through on these platforms. On our blog, we make a point of keeping readers up-to-date on changing social algorithms and how marketers can gain visibility on feeds. The posts below can offer some guidance on this front:

Twitter Has Renewed its Live Video Push & Here’s What You Need to Know

The Latest Evolution of Facebook: The Marketing Low-Down on 5 Recent Changes

The Future of Connection on Facebook: How Stories May Change the Marketing Game

Enterprise Instagram Adoption is Exploding

In 2013, 9% of Fortune 500 companies had an Instagram account. In 2018, that figure is up to 63%. As you can see below, the visually oriented platform has seen enormous year-to-year growth in the past half-decade: It isn’t hard to see why the corporate world is being drawn to Instagram like millennials to a group selfie – everyone’s there. Back in early 2013 the app had 100 million users; here in 2018 it just surpassed 1 billion. With that astonishing number in mind, it feels like malpractice for any brand not to have some Instagram presence. But how can you really connect with audiences there? What are B2B brands and big companies doing successfully on this leisure-driven platform? Here are some posts that can help you see the big picture, with examples and actionable tips:

What You Need to Know About Instagram Stories for B2B Marketing

How 5 B2B Brands Are Using Snapchat and Instagram Stories

What Marketers Can Learn from Fortune 500 Companies Mastering Instagram

Fortune 500 Companies Are All-In on LinkedIn

While Facebook and Twitter are creeping upward, and Instagram is experiencing rapid growth, LinkedIn remains the leader in terms of F500 penetration. The Dartmouth report shows 489 of the companies (98%) with a presence on the platform, same as last year and up slightly from 97% in 2016. Given its business-oriented context, and its audience of more than 500 million professionals, LinkedIn is clearly a no-brainer for any major company. I’m actually shocked that 100% of Fortune 500 brands aren’t linked up.   Check out these articles for tips on tightening up your LinkedIn game:

Allen Gannett Shares His Secrets to Racking Up Millions of LinkedIn Video Views #CMWorld

LinkedIn’s Megan Golden on Building a Blockbuster Content Marketing Strategy

LinkedIn Native Video: What Works, What Doesn’t, What Marketers Need to Know

Social Media is Big Business

Across all channels and platforms, the world’s most powerful corporations are increasingly recognizing social media marketing as a necessity rather than a nice-to-have — a trend we expect will continue into 2019. UMass Dartmouth’s research finds that an overwhelming majority of 2018 F500 companies are present on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook; meanwhile, visually-driven networks like Instagram and YouTube are picking up steam fast in alignment with evolving user preferences. If you want to get the full scoop on Fortune 500 social media usage, check out the full report. And if you’re hankering for more analysis of social media marketing trends in 2018, we’ve got you covered:

From Messenger Bots to the Growth of ‘Gram, Social Media Examiner’s Annual Report Reveals Trends to Watch

Social Media Marketing Benchmarks: What Works & Where to Focus

Best Practices for Choosing Effective and Captivating Social Media Visuals

The post Tapping Key Takeaways from Recent Research on Fortune 500 Social Media Usage appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

from The SEO Advantages https://www.toprankblog.com/2018/11/fortune-500-social-media-adoption/

[christopheruearle]

Tapping Key Takeaways from Recent Research on Fortune 500 Social Media Usage

Blogs are booming. Instagram interest is on the rise. Facebook is forever fashionable. And LinkedIn continues to lead the pack. These all reflect trends found among Fortune 500 companies on social media, according to recent research from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth's Center for Marketing Research. We scoured UMass Dartmouth's research in search of key takeaways and surprising tidbits that would intrigue and inspire B2B and B2C brands large and small. Here’s what you need to know about how the world’s largest corporations are tackling social media, plus some helpful resources to help give your social media marketing efforts a boost.

More Than Half of F500 Companies Now Have a Blog

It’s kind of amusing to see blogging grouped into this study as a social media tactic. But hey, the research comes from an academic institution, not a marketing entity, and they started conducting it 10 years ago when the lines were more blurred. In any case, there’s still plenty of integration and overlap between blogging and social media (i.e., long-form posts on LinkedIn) so the medium is definitely fair game here. From 2017 to 2018, Dartmouth’s data finds one of the biggest year-to-year spikes in blog usage since they started tracking in 2008. The percentage of corporate blogs on company websites among Fortune 500 companies is up to 53%, rising 11 points from a year ago. If that number still seems low to you (it does to me), keep in mind the folks compiling this report aimed to include only blogs that: a) are public-facing, and b) include content that goes beyond “newsroom” type posts such as product announcements, press releases, and philanthropic involvement. The chart above offers a compelling visualization of the firm traction that content marketing is now seeing in the high-level business world, after failing to truly take off for several years. There’s little reason to think we won’t see this proliferation power ahead at a frantic pace. Of particular interest, to me, is the rapid decline in number of blogs that allow comments: This is emblematic of a real conundrum: the internet can be a nasty place. On large and well-trafficked blogs, moderating comments can prove to a be prohibitively time-consuming task. But dialogue is crucial, and preventing readers from being able to respond on corporate blogs really deters the openness and transparency brands should be striving to project. There’s no easy solution to this dilemma, but one way to inject the voice of your audience in a controlled yet still authentic way is via strategic user-generated content. UGC not only helps you spotlight your customers and their stories, but can also help build rapport and a sense of community, all at a relatively low cost. In general, we believe blogging is an essential digital marketing tactic for almost any business, large or small. For more insights on driving more targeted traffic to your own corporate blog, check out these recent posts:

Is Anybody Out There? How to Get More Eyes On Your Blog Content

How Amanda Todorovich and the Cleveland Clinic Monetized Their Blog (And Why the Resulting Revenue is Just Gravy)

CMWorld Interview: Path to 1M Monthly Readers Has No Shortcuts, Says J.P. Medved

Twitter and Facebook are Table Stakes for Top Dogs

Dartmouth reports that 455 of the 2018 F500 companies have active Twitter accounts (91%) and 445 (89%) have Facebook pages. On each, the top 10 companies are all accounted for. Commercial banks and specialty retailers are the only industry verticals with 100% representation across both channels. It's inexpensive to create a brand page on Facebook or Twitter, and keeping them updated requires only modest time investment, so it’s hardly surprising to see these high levels of penetration among heavy-hitters. The great challenge, now and going forward, will be finding ways to stand out and break through on these platforms. On our blog, we make a point of keeping readers up-to-date on changing social algorithms and how marketers can gain visibility on feeds. The posts below can offer some guidance on this front:

Twitter Has Renewed its Live Video Push & Here’s What You Need to Know

The Latest Evolution of Facebook: The Marketing Low-Down on 5 Recent Changes

The Future of Connection on Facebook: How Stories May Change the Marketing Game

Enterprise Instagram Adoption is Exploding

In 2013, 9% of Fortune 500 companies had an Instagram account. In 2018, that figure is up to 63%. As you can see below, the visually oriented platform has seen enormous year-to-year growth in the past half-decade: It isn’t hard to see why the corporate world is being drawn to Instagram like millennials to a group selfie – everyone’s there. Back in early 2013 the app had 100 million users; here in 2018 it just surpassed 1 billion. With that astonishing number in mind, it feels like malpractice for any brand not to have some Instagram presence. But how can you really connect with audiences there? What are B2B brands and big companies doing successfully on this leisure-driven platform? Here are some posts that can help you see the big picture, with examples and actionable tips:

What You Need to Know About Instagram Stories for B2B Marketing

How 5 B2B Brands Are Using Snapchat and Instagram Stories

What Marketers Can Learn from Fortune 500 Companies Mastering Instagram

Fortune 500 Companies Are All-In on LinkedIn

While Facebook and Twitter are creeping upward, and Instagram is experiencing rapid growth, LinkedIn remains the leader in terms of F500 penetration. The Dartmouth report shows 489 of the companies (98%) with a presence on the platform, same as last year and up slightly from 97% in 2016. Given its business-oriented context, and its audience of more than 500 million professionals, LinkedIn is clearly a no-brainer for any major company. I’m actually shocked that 100% of Fortune 500 brands aren’t linked up.   Check out these articles for tips on tightening up your LinkedIn game:

Allen Gannett Shares His Secrets to Racking Up Millions of LinkedIn Video Views #CMWorld

LinkedIn’s Megan Golden on Building a Blockbuster Content Marketing Strategy

LinkedIn Native Video: What Works, What Doesn’t, What Marketers Need to Know

Social Media is Big Business

Across all channels and platforms, the world’s most powerful corporations are increasingly recognizing social media marketing as a necessity rather than a nice-to-have — a trend we expect will continue into 2019. UMass Dartmouth’s research finds that an overwhelming majority of 2018 F500 companies are present on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook; meanwhile, visually-driven networks like Instagram and YouTube are picking up steam fast in alignment with evolving user preferences. If you want to get the full scoop on Fortune 500 social media usage, check out the full report. And if you’re hankering for more analysis of social media marketing trends in 2018, we’ve got you covered:

From Messenger Bots to the Growth of ‘Gram, Social Media Examiner’s Annual Report Reveals Trends to Watch

Social Media Marketing Benchmarks: What Works & Where to Focus

Best Practices for Choosing Effective and Captivating Social Media Visuals

The post Tapping Key Takeaways from Recent Research on Fortune 500 Social Media Usage appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

[befoundonlinemarketing]

Tapping Key Takeaways from Recent Research on Fortune 500 Social Media Usage

Blogs are booming. Instagram interest is on the rise. Facebook is forever fashionable. And LinkedIn continues to lead the pack. These all reflect trends found among Fortune 500 companies on social media, according to recent research from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth's Center for Marketing Research. We scoured UMass Dartmouth's research in search of key takeaways and surprising tidbits that would intrigue and inspire B2B and B2C brands large and small. Here’s what you need to know about how the world’s largest corporations are tackling social media, plus some helpful resources to help give your social media marketing efforts a boost.

More Than Half of F500 Companies Now Have a Blog

It’s kind of amusing to see blogging grouped into this study as a social media tactic. But hey, the research comes from an academic institution, not a marketing entity, and they started conducting it 10 years ago when the lines were more blurred. In any case, there’s still plenty of integration and overlap between blogging and social media (i.e., long-form posts on LinkedIn) so the medium is definitely fair game here. From 2017 to 2018, Dartmouth’s data finds one of the biggest year-to-year spikes in blog usage since they started tracking in 2008. The percentage of corporate blogs on company websites among Fortune 500 companies is up to 53%, rising 11 points from a year ago. If that number still seems low to you (it does to me), keep in mind the folks compiling this report aimed to include only blogs that: a) are public-facing, and b) include content that goes beyond “newsroom” type posts such as product announcements, press releases, and philanthropic involvement. The chart above offers a compelling visualization of the firm traction that content marketing is now seeing in the high-level business world, after failing to truly take off for several years. There’s little reason to think we won’t see this proliferation power ahead at a frantic pace. Of particular interest, to me, is the rapid decline in number of blogs that allow comments: This is emblematic of a real conundrum: the internet can be a nasty place. On large and well-trafficked blogs, moderating comments can prove to a be prohibitively time-consuming task. But dialogue is crucial, and preventing readers from being able to respond on corporate blogs really deters the openness and transparency brands should be striving to project. There’s no easy solution to this dilemma, but one way to inject the voice of your audience in a controlled yet still authentic way is via strategic user-generated content. UGC not only helps you spotlight your customers and their stories, but can also help build rapport and a sense of community, all at a relatively low cost. In general, we believe blogging is an essential digital marketing tactic for almost any business, large or small. For more insights on driving more targeted traffic to your own corporate blog, check out these recent posts:

Is Anybody Out There? How to Get More Eyes On Your Blog Content

How Amanda Todorovich and the Cleveland Clinic Monetized Their Blog (And Why the Resulting Revenue is Just Gravy)

CMWorld Interview: Path to 1M Monthly Readers Has No Shortcuts, Says J.P. Medved

Twitter and Facebook are Table Stakes for Top Dogs

Dartmouth reports that 455 of the 2018 F500 companies have active Twitter accounts (91%) and 445 (89%) have Facebook pages. On each, the top 10 companies are all accounted for. Commercial banks and specialty retailers are the only industry verticals with 100% representation across both channels. It's inexpensive to create a brand page on Facebook or Twitter, and keeping them updated requires only modest time investment, so it’s hardly surprising to see these high levels of penetration among heavy-hitters. The great challenge, now and going forward, will be finding ways to stand out and break through on these platforms. On our blog, we make a point of keeping readers up-to-date on changing social algorithms and how marketers can gain visibility on feeds. The posts below can offer some guidance on this front:

Twitter Has Renewed its Live Video Push & Here’s What You Need to Know

The Latest Evolution of Facebook: The Marketing Low-Down on 5 Recent Changes

The Future of Connection on Facebook: How Stories May Change the Marketing Game

Enterprise Instagram Adoption is Exploding

In 2013, 9% of Fortune 500 companies had an Instagram account. In 2018, that figure is up to 63%. As you can see below, the visually oriented platform has seen enormous year-to-year growth in the past half-decade: It isn’t hard to see why the corporate world is being drawn to Instagram like millennials to a group selfie – everyone’s there. Back in early 2013 the app had 100 million users; here in 2018 it just surpassed 1 billion. With that astonishing number in mind, it feels like malpractice for any brand not to have some Instagram presence. But how can you really connect with audiences there? What are B2B brands and big companies doing successfully on this leisure-driven platform? Here are some posts that can help you see the big picture, with examples and actionable tips:

What You Need to Know About Instagram Stories for B2B Marketing

How 5 B2B Brands Are Using Snapchat and Instagram Stories

What Marketers Can Learn from Fortune 500 Companies Mastering Instagram

Fortune 500 Companies Are All-In on LinkedIn

While Facebook and Twitter are creeping upward, and Instagram is experiencing rapid growth, LinkedIn remains the leader in terms of F500 penetration. The Dartmouth report shows 489 of the companies (98%) with a presence on the platform, same as last year and up slightly from 97% in 2016. Given its business-oriented context, and its audience of more than 500 million professionals, LinkedIn is clearly a no-brainer for any major company. I’m actually shocked that 100% of Fortune 500 brands aren’t linked up.   Check out these articles for tips on tightening up your LinkedIn game:

Allen Gannett Shares His Secrets to Racking Up Millions of LinkedIn Video Views #CMWorld

LinkedIn’s Megan Golden on Building a Blockbuster Content Marketing Strategy

LinkedIn Native Video: What Works, What Doesn’t, What Marketers Need to Know

Social Media is Big Business

Across all channels and platforms, the world’s most powerful corporations are increasingly recognizing social media marketing as a necessity rather than a nice-to-have — a trend we expect will continue into 2019. UMass Dartmouth’s research finds that an overwhelming majority of 2018 F500 companies are present on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook; meanwhile, visually-driven networks like Instagram and YouTube are picking up steam fast in alignment with evolving user preferences. If you want to get the full scoop on Fortune 500 social media usage, check out the full report. And if you’re hankering for more analysis of social media marketing trends in 2018, we’ve got you covered:

From Messenger Bots to the Growth of ‘Gram, Social Media Examiner’s Annual Report Reveals Trends to Watch

Social Media Marketing Benchmarks: What Works & Where to Focus

Best Practices for Choosing Effective and Captivating Social Media Visuals

The post Tapping Key Takeaways from Recent Research on Fortune 500 Social Media Usage appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

Tapping Key Takeaways from Recent Research on Fortune 500 Social Media Usage posted first on http://www.toprankblog.com/

[supercooledsmash-blog]

Does Author Authority Matter for Your Content and SEO?

The concept of author authority (or “author rank”) in Google Search has a long and somewhat muddy history.

To many of us, it makes sense that Google would value the “EAT” (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) of content creators in its quest to judge the quality of content. After all, wouldn't you rather get medical advice from a properly credentialed M.D. than from some blogger who keeps WebMD open in a browser tab?

But does Google actually care about who created a content piece? And does it currently use that as an active factor in its search ranking algorithms?

TLDR Spoiler Alert! I'll give you my conclusions right up top. For my supporting evidence, read the rest of the post! Bottom line: I don't think we have sufficient evidence to say whether Google is using any kind of author authority in search. However, we do have evidence of an increasing (and renewed) interest by Google in identifying authors.  If your content is meant to project the authority and reliability of your brand, then it makes sense for users to see that it's written by credible subject matter experts. (Bonus: you'll be all set if Google ever does crank up “Author Rank”!)

A Brief History of Author Authority and Google

Agent Rank / Author Rank

The origins of the concept of using a content creator's authority and reputation go back to the agent rank patent granted to Google on July 21, 2009. The patent proposed a means of evaluating the contributors to various elements on a web page by determining the identity of each of the contributing “agents” with a “digital signature” and assigning a score to each one based on other content associated with it. (For an in-depth explanation of agent rank, see this post by Bill Slawski.)

The agent rank patent probably would have faded into the obscurity of Google history had it not been for a new Google project unveiled in 2011: Google Authorship.

Google Authorship

On June 7, 2011, Google announced authorship markup for web search. Authorship was a development that allowed publishers and authors to create a digital signature for authors using Schema.org's rel=”author” and rel=”me” structured data markup attributes.

Simply described, publishers could link an author byline to an author's identifiable profile on another site, and authors could link back to the publications. That two-way linkage created a digital signature that would give Google more confidence about the identity of authors, and it created a connection with their content across the web.

While there were no initial benefits announced for using Authorship markup, there was a blockbuster tease in the last paragraph of the Google blog post: “We know that great content comes from great authors, and we're looking closely at ways this markup could help us highlight authors and rank search results.”

It's very rare that Google even hints at something it might use to influence search rankings, so the SEO community immediately sat up and paid attention (including this author). 

Little did we know just how prepared Google was to move forward with putting Authorship into action. Just 22 days after the authorship blog post, Google unveiled Google+.

Google+ and Google Authorship

I've always believed that one of the chief reasons Google threw so much weight on Google+ in its early days was its hunger to be able to identify individuals on the web. This was a needed step for authorship to work, but it went far beyond that. 

Google highly incentivized (some would say coerced or even forced) individuals to create Google+ profiles. For a span of time, it was almost impossible to use many Google services without one. I think the primary importance of this was for advertising. If Google had a trackable identity for nearly every web user, it would make targeting advertising to those users many times more accurate. That's why I always laughed when people said Google+ was not “monetized”!

But this also meant that a lot of the web's authors would have Google profiles. Now Google had the anchor it needed on the digital signature side to put Authorship into action.

Authorship Goes Live

Authorship leaped from something Google might use someday to an active part of search in August 2011, when Google's Matt Cutts and Othar Hansen (then head of the Authorship project) released a YouTube video encouraging authors to connect their published content across the web to their Google+ profiles. Those profiles started showing a special section where authors could list links to their author bios or archive pages on the publications for which they wrote. 

Aside from the useful instructions on how to implement Authorship markup, this video also introduced Google's plan to begin showing the profile images of authors next to search results for their content. And Hansen also affirmed that “at some point” Google might use this markup to influence search rankings. 

Soon after that, Authorship rich snippets started appearing in search.

The appearance and components of Authorship rich snippets changed constantly over Authorship's three-year presence in the SERPs. The example above shows them at their most robust, with an author photo, byline, and the number of Google+ circles (followers).

At times, the byline was a link, leading to a dedicated search results page of that author's content. For a few months, clicking on a Google link with Authorship and then clicking back to Google opened up a dropdown of more content by that author.

Authorship results were never guaranteed. They didn't show for every author (even if the markup had been implemented), and even for those that got it, it didn't show for every result for their content. There seemed to be some algorithmic thresholds for an Authorship snippet to show. 

The Decline and Fall of Authorship

The first indication that Google was pulling back from Authorship came in early December 2013, when the number of Authorship snippets showing in search plunged overnight. Then, in June 2014, the author profile photos disappeared forever, leaving only the bylines.

On August 27, 2014, I got a phone call I never expected to get. Google's John Mueller messaged me to ask if he could speak to me under a temporary NDA. After a quick electronic transfer of the paperwork, John called me to let me know that in 24 hours Google would be shutting down Authorship snippets in search.

John's call was a much-appreciated courtesy to me, in recognition of the leadership and guidance I had shown to the Authorship community. It allowed Eric Enge and I to work through that night to create a 2,500-word article about the rise and fall of Authorship, which Danny Sullivan published on Search Engine Land minutes after John Mueller made the official Google announcement on Google+.

Why Was Authorship Abandoned?

I won't go into depth about the reasons (both known and speculative) why Google gave up on Authorship in search, because Eric and I covered them well in the aforementioned Search Engine Land article. However, here they are in brief:

Uneven adoption by authors and publishers. A study we did looked at Authorship markup adoption by authors on major publications, and it found less than a third of them had the necessary linkage. Google won't use a signal that's out of balance - one that potentially gives favoritism to some authors over others simply because they did some extra coding. Adoption also seemed skewed toward certain verticals, such as marketers (surprise!), and real estate and insurance agents.

Lack of value to searchers. During our phone call, John Mueller told me that their testing showed that Authorship snippets did not seem to be valued by searchers. 

Emphasis on mobile-first. In interviews and Webmaster Hangouts post-Authorship, Mueller frequently blamed the rise of a mobile-first philosophy at Google for the death of Authorship, apparently meaning that the Authorship rich snippets didn't fit well with that initiative.

In the end, whatever the reasons for the abandonment of the Authorship project, I think it was significant that it lasted as long as it did (three years). Most search experiments, especially those as prominently displayed on search pages as Authorship was, don't last that long. 

To me, that means despite the problems noted above, the idea of author authority in search was one Google thought had high potential. 

Did Authorship Include Author Rank?

First, Author Rank was never a term used officially by Google. Instead, it was a popular concept in the search marketing community, based in part on Bill Slawski's posts about the agent rank patent, but fueled by the hints from Google in 2011 that it “might someday” use Authorship as a search ranking signal.

Indeed, many in the search community simply assumed it must be in play, but they offered only anecdotal evidence. (“We got an authorship snippet for one post and three days later it went up three places in search!”) Eric Enge detailed the reasons why it was unlikely Google was using any sort of “Author Rank” back then, and I agreed with those reasons. 

I believe Google knew it would have been premature to activate any kind of author authority in ranking algorithms during its tenure. However, I also believe it was in part a “training exercise” for any future use of author authority. I'm betting that Google learned a lot during the life of Authorship. More on that later.

Did Author Authority Die with Authorship?

Short answer: we don't know.

But there are a number of hints and clues that indicate Google remains interested in the concept, if not as a ranking factor, then as an indicator of content quality and reliability. And we do know those things are more and more factoring into what Google likes to show users in search results.

Evidence That Author Authority Still Matters to Google

1. Content creators and the Google Search Quality Raters Guidelines

Renewed speculation about author authority began with the July 20, 2018, update to Google's Search Quality Raters Guidelines (SQRG). The SQRG is the training document for the Search Quality Raters, which are the Google contractors tasked with evaluating actual web pages that could be served up by Google search in response to a given query.

The raters are told that the purpose of their work is “to evaluate search engine quality.” They do this by scoring the pages they are shown according to the overall quality of the page and how well it meets the needs of a typical user. Google sometimes uses the raters to test proposed changes to its search algorithms.

To get the highest score, a page must rate highly in Google's three attributes of content quality, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (known by the acronym EAT). 

SQRG update. A major addition to SQRG in the July 2018 update was the inclusion of “content creators” as part of the measure of content quality. Raters are told to look for a named creator associated with the content on a page, and then research where that creator shows up online. Specifically, raters are told to evaluate the EAT of the creator(s). 

Google's Search Quality Raters Guidelines have a new emphasis on the reputation of the creator of a piece of content. Click To Tweet

So at least as far as Google's SQRG is concerned, the reputation and expertise of the creator(s) of a piece of content is an important component of the overall EAT rating of the piece.

In fact, the raters are told a low content creator score is enough to give the content piece itself a low-quality score. 

It is important to note that Google has been very clear that the work of these raters does not affect particular search results. In other words, even though the raters are given real-world examples of content that shows up in search for a given query, their ratings are never used to affect the results for that query. However, as noted above, their findings may be used to improve the overall algorithm.

Also, Google has stated clearly that something appearing in the SQRG does not necessarily mean it is a direct ranking factor. However, at the same time, Google recommends we read these guidelines to gain a good idea of what it wants to see in its search results (which is why it now releases them publicly). 

Google pushback? In a live YouTube video on August 21, Google's John Mueller was asked about author reputation in search. The question was inspired by speculation by some prominent SEOs (such as Marie Haynes) that author reputation may have been a factor in the August 1 Google update that affected many “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) content publishers.

This speculation was fueled by a tweet from Google Search Liaison Danny Sullivan suggesting that SEOs affected by the update review the SQRGs, which of course prominently mentioned creator reputation. 

However, John Mueller's response to the question about author reputation being a factor in the update seems, at first glance, to contradict that idea:

“I wouldn't look at the Quality Rater Guidelines as something our algorithms are looking at explicitly and checking out the reputation of all authors and then using that to rank your websites.” – John Mueller

To me, a significant word in this quote is “all.” I tweeted the following: 

“Glad for this confirmation of what I was sure was the case. IF Google is using any author EAT in search, I'd imagine it is with a limited set of well-known creators (starting with KP [Knowledge Panel] entities) and used as what I call a “confirmatory signal.” By confirmatory signal, I mean it is not a ranking signal in and of itself, but if the algo is comparing two sites with content that demands expertise, and all other things are equal (VERY hypothetical situation), the site using a known high-EAT author might get the nudge.”

For what it's worth, John Mueller himself liked my tweet. 

Related: Dave Davies included a nice summary of Google author-related patents in this post.

Did John Mueller rule out any use of author reputation as a content quality signal for search ranking? Click To Tweet

Significance: While we still can't say there is at present some sort of “creator quality score” in Google's search rankings, the major change to the SQRG is our strongest indication to date that who created a piece of content matters to Google.

2. Machine-Readable Entity IDs

As explained by Mike Arnesen in his excellent post Leveraging Machine-Readable Entity IDs for SEO, Machine-Readable Entity IDs (MREIDs) are unique codes in the form of a string of characters that identifies a particular entity anywhere on the web. An entity is any unique person, place, thing, or concept. So, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd President of the United States, is an entity, as are New York City and transcendentalism. 

MREIDs are necessary for search, because the nouns we use to describe entities are often ambiguous. For example, even though my name is fairly uncommon, there is another Mark Traphagen whom people search for because he is a prominent intellectual property attorney. A machine can't tell the difference between that Mark Traphagen and me by our names, but if we each have a unique code associated with us, then a machine can tell us apart. 

As Mike explains in his article, Google originally sourced MREIDs from entries in Freebase, a massive database of entities that Google acquired in 2010. But these days, Google uses many sources to find and tag entities with MREIDs, if they're significant enough to merit one. Based on Bill Slawski's evaluations of Google patents, it appears that Google is likely already using MREIDs for many search features, including Google Trends, Google Lens, and Google Reverse Image Search.

Significance: If Google wants to identify and evaluate the EAT of authors on the web, something like MREIDs would be absolutely necessary. As I mentioned above, one of the fail points of Google Authorship was its dependence on authors and publishers voluntarily coding in the necessary connections. MREIDs allow Google to find, associate, and disambiguate entities such as authors at the scale of the web.

3. Interesting Finds Author Boxes

Early in 2018, Google introduced Interesting Finds boxes for some mobile search queries. These expandable boxes displayed content relevant to the search query that might not show in the top 10 traditional results but might still be of interest to the searcher. 

For a brief period in August 2018, I noticed Google showing Interesting Finds boxes for searches of the names of some web authors, including yours truly. After about two weeks, I no longer saw the boxes for the authors who were getting them, which led me to believe this was a search test by Google.

Here's what many Interesting Finds box looked like:

Clicking on “10+ more stories” at the bottom of the box displayed a long list of content, all of it authored by me. 

Here's where it gets interesting. I do not currently have an MREID with Google, nor does a Knowledge Panel display for my name. But clearly Google had high confidence that I was the author of all of the articles displayed. 

Why were these boxes shown only for some authors? I believe that Google chose to show them in cases where people searched for a name that created some ambiguity (in my case there is another Mark Traphagen who is a well-known attorney), but where the prior behavior of searchers showed they were often looking for content by or about a particular author.

Significance: Even though this was a brief test in mobile search and no longer shows, it is another indication that Google thinks content authors might be significant for search.

4. That Gary Illyes Tweet

This isn't recent, but it was a significant moment that kept me on the path of watching Google's behavior toward authors even after the death of Google Authorship. At Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes's session at SMX Advanced 2016 I asked him whether Google was still paying any attention to the rel=author tags we had coded in during the days of Authorship. Michelle Robbins recorded his response on Twitter (@methode is Gary's Twitter handle):

from @methode “we are not using authorship at all anymore…we are smarter than that.” but thanks for giving them all that data, SEOs. #smx

- MichelleRobbins (@MichelleRobbins) June 23, 2016

There are two significant concepts in that brief response. 

“We are smarter than that” – an indication that Google was developing machine intelligence methods to identify and track authors at the scale and pace of the web.

“Thanks for all that data” – something many of us tracking Authorship had speculated on was that Google had used the Authorship experiment as a training set of data for a supervised machine learning program that would learn how to identify and track authors, as well as for data on how searchers respond to indications of author reputation. 

Again, we can't leap from this to say conclusively that Google is using such an algorithm at this point, or if they are, to what extent. However, it is another strong indicator that they are working on such a project. 

Summing It Up

So what can we say about Google Search and author identity and reputation today? Here are my takeaways:

1. Something is in the works. While I can't definitively state that author authority and reputation has any bearing on search results today, I am convinced that it continues to be something that Google is not only interested in, but is actively working on, and perhaps even testing in limited ways.

2. Not all authors. While Google Authorship was open to any author or publisher who bothered to implement the code, I believe one of the things Google discovered during the experiment was that not all authors matter. That sounds harsh, but it's true. It's likely that people are only swayed to any extent by who created a piece of content if they happen to recognize the author and already understand that author's significance. 

3. Not all content. In a similar fashion, I wouldn't expect that Google would care about who authored every single piece of content on the web. In recent years, Google has given us many indications that YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) content merits significantly more scrutiny than other types. This is content that could affect either people's finances or their well-being. It matters a lot whether investment advice is written by a trusted financial advisor, and even more if medical information is written by a legitimate doctor or scientist. 

4. The company you keep. Even in cases where users might not care or pay attention to who created a piece of content, the reputation and relevance of the author still might matter. This is where my idea of confirmatory signals for search comes in. Again, a confirmatory signal is not a direct ranking factor in and of itself. Rather, it could be used to “tip the scales” so-to-speak where Google needs some extra confirmation that a piece of content is high quality.

The most important takeaway though is that whether or not author authority affects search in any way now, it's still a good idea to apply two things to the content published on your site:

Seek out the best possible authors for your content. Don't let just anyone write for you. Before accepting a content submission, check out where and what the author has already published. Are the publications and topics relevant to what this author is writing for you? Is the content high quality, filled with accurate and significant information and original thought? What do others say about this author?

Clearly identify the authors of your content. Give each author their own bio page on your site with important information about their qualifications and experience. Link your article bylines to that bio page, and link out from it to other places where the author has published. 

Here at Perficient Digital we go above and beyond in vetting the authors we use to create content for our clients. We do that for many reasons, but one benefit we have found is that it makes our content much more likely to be accepted for publication when we pitch it to third-party publishers.

Learn more about our content marketing services!

But why should you care about your authors if it isn't (yet) certain that Google is using authorship as a search factor? For at least two reasons:

It's the right thing to do for your visitors and your brand. People form impressions of your brand based on the quality of your content, and one way to ensure higher quality content is to only use the best, most qualified authors.

It future-proofs your SEO. As I hope I've demonstrated, Google is showing that they remain interested in author expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Even if they are not using that as a search factor now, I expect they will be ramping it up in the years to come. Using high quality authors on your site now will make you ready if Google ever flips that switch (or more likely, turns up the knob a bit).

[dillenwaeraa]

Does Author Authority Matter for Your Content and SEO?

The concept of author authority (or “author rank”) in Google Search has a long and somewhat muddy history. To many of us, it makes sense that Google would value the “EAT” (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) of content creators in its quest to judge the quality of content. After all, wouldn’t you rather get medical advice from a properly credentialed M.D. than from some blogger who keeps WebMD open in a browser tab?

But does Google actually care about who created a content piece? And does it currently use that as an active factor in its search ranking algorithms?

TLDR Spoiler Alert! I’ll give you my conclusions right up top. For my supporting evidence, read the rest of the post! Bottom line: I don’t think we have sufficient evidence to say whether Google is using any kind of author authority in search. However, we do have evidence of an increasing (and renewed) interest by Google in identifying authors.  If your content is meant to project the authority and reliability of your brand, then it makes sense for users to see that it’s written by credible subject matter experts. (Bonus: you’ll be all set if Google ever does crank up “Author Rank”!)

A Brief History of Author Authority and Google

Agent Rank / Author Rank

The origins of the concept of using a content creator’s authority and reputation go back to the agent rank patent granted to Google on July 21, 2009. The patent proposed a means of evaluating the contributors to various elements on a web page by determining the identity of each of the contributing “agents” with a “digital signature” and assigning a score to each one based on other content associated with it. (For an in-depth explanation of agent rank, see this post by Bill Slawski.)

The agent rank patent probably would have faded into the obscurity of Google history had it not been for a new Google project unveiled in 2011: Google Authorship.

Google Authorship

On June 7, 2011, Google announced authorship markup for web search. Authorship was a development that allowed publishers and authors to create a digital signature for authors using Schema.org’s rel=”author” and rel=”me” structured data markup attributes.

Simply described, publishers could link an author byline to an author’s identifiable profile on another site, and authors could link back to the publications. That two-way linkage created a digital signature that would give Google more confidence about the identity of authors, and it created a connection with their content across the web.

While there were no initial benefits announced for using Authorship markup, there was a blockbuster tease in the last paragraph of the Google blog post: “We know that great content comes from great authors, and we’re looking closely at ways this markup could help us highlight authors and rank search results.”

It’s very rare that Google even hints at something it might use to influence search rankings, so the SEO community immediately sat up and paid attention (including this author). 

Little did we know just how prepared Google was to move forward with putting Authorship into action. Just 22 days after the authorship blog post, Google unveiled Google+.

Google+ and Google Authorship

I’ve always believed that one of the chief reasons Google threw so much weight on Google+ in its early days was its hunger to be able to identify individuals on the web. This was a needed step for authorship to work, but it went far beyond that. 

Google highly incentivized (some would say coerced or even forced) individuals to create Google+ profiles. For a span of time, it was almost impossible to use many Google services without one. I think the primary importance of this was for advertising. If Google had a trackable identity for nearly every web user, it would make targeting advertising to those users many times more accurate. That’s why I always laughed when people said Google+ was not “monetized”!

But this also meant that a lot of the web’s authors would have Google profiles. Now Google had the anchor it needed on the digital signature side to put Authorship into action.

Authorship Goes Live

Authorship leaped from something Google might use someday to an active part of search in August 2011, when Google’s Matt Cutts and Othar Hansen (then head of the Authorship project) released a YouTube video encouraging authors to connect their published content across the web to their Google+ profiles. Those profiles started showing a special section where authors could list links to their author bios or archive pages on the publications for which they wrote. 

Aside from the useful instructions on how to implement Authorship markup, this video also introduced Google’s plan to begin showing the profile images of authors next to search results for their content. And Hansen also affirmed that “at some point” Google might use this markup to influence search rankings. 

Soon after that, Authorship rich snippets started appearing in search.

The appearance and components of Authorship rich snippets changed constantly over Authorship’s three-year presence in the SERPs. The example above shows them at their most robust, with an author photo, byline, and the number of Google+ circles (followers).

At times, the byline was a link, leading to a dedicated search results page of that author’s content. For a few months, clicking on a Google link with Authorship and then clicking back to Google opened up a dropdown of more content by that author.

Authorship results were never guaranteed. They didn’t show for every author (even if the markup had been implemented), and even for those that got it, it didn’t show for every result for their content. There seemed to be some algorithmic thresholds for an Authorship snippet to show. 

The Decline and Fall of Authorship

The first indication that Google was pulling back from Authorship came in early December 2013, when the number of Authorship snippets showing in search plunged overnight. Then, in June 2014, the author profile photos disappeared forever, leaving only the bylines.

On August 27, 2014, I got a phone call I never expected to get. Google’s John Mueller messaged me to ask if he could speak to me under a temporary NDA. After a quick electronic transfer of the paperwork, John called me to let me know that in 24 hours Google would be shutting down Authorship snippets in search.

John’s call was a much-appreciated courtesy to me, in recognition of the leadership and guidance I had shown to the Authorship community. It allowed Eric Enge and I to work through that night to create a 2,500-word article about the rise and fall of Authorship, which Danny Sullivan published on Search Engine Land minutes after John Mueller made the official Google announcement on Google+.

Why Was Authorship Abandoned?

I won’t go into depth about the reasons (both known and speculative) why Google gave up on Authorship in search, because Eric and I covered them well in the aforementioned Search Engine Land article. However, here they are in brief:

Uneven adoption by authors and publishers. A study we did looked at Authorship markup adoption by authors on major publications, and it found less than a third of them had the necessary linkage. Google won’t use a signal that’s out of balance — one that potentially gives favoritism to some authors over others simply because they did some extra coding. Adoption also seemed skewed toward certain verticals, such as marketers (surprise!), and real estate and insurance agents.

Lack of value to searchers. During our phone call, John Mueller told me that their testing showed that Authorship snippets did not seem to be valued by searchers. 

Emphasis on mobile-first. In interviews and Webmaster Hangouts post-Authorship, Mueller frequently blamed the rise of a mobile-first philosophy at Google for the death of Authorship, apparently meaning that the Authorship rich snippets didn’t fit well with that initiative.

In the end, whatever the reasons for the abandonment of the Authorship project, I think it was significant that it lasted as long as it did (three years). Most search experiments, especially those as prominently displayed on search pages as Authorship was, don’t last that long. 

To me, that means despite the problems noted above, the idea of author authority in search was one Google thought had high potential. 

Did Authorship Include Author Rank?

First, Author Rank was never a term used officially by Google. Instead, it was a popular concept in the search marketing community, based in part on Bill Slawski’s posts about the agent rank patent, but fueled by the hints from Google in 2011 that it “might someday” use Authorship as a search ranking signal.

Indeed, many in the search community simply assumed it must be in play, but they offered only anecdotal evidence. (“We got an authorship snippet for one post and three days later it went up three places in search!”) Eric Enge detailed the reasons why it was unlikely Google was using any sort of “Author Rank” back then, and I agreed with those reasons. 

I believe Google knew it would have been premature to activate any kind of author authority in ranking algorithms during its tenure. However, I also believe it was in part a “training exercise” for any future use of author authority. I’m betting that Google learned a lot during the life of Authorship. More on that later.

Did Author Authority Die with Authorship?

Short answer: we don’t know.

But there are a number of hints and clues that indicate Google remains interested in the concept, if not as a ranking factor, then as an indicator of content quality and reliability. And we do know those things are more and more factoring into what Google likes to show users in search results.

Evidence That Author Authority Still Matters to Google

1. Content creators and the Google Search Quality Raters Guidelines

Renewed speculation about author authority began with the July 20, 2018, update to Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines (SQRG). The SQRG is the training document for the Search Quality Raters, which are the Google contractors tasked with evaluating actual web pages that could be served up by Google search in response to a given query.

The raters are told that the purpose of their work is “to evaluate search engine quality.” They do this by scoring the pages they are shown according to the overall quality of the page and how well it meets the needs of a typical user. Google sometimes uses the raters to test proposed changes to its search algorithms.

To get the highest score, a page must rate highly in Google’s three attributes of content quality, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (known by the acronym EAT). 

SQRG update. A major addition to SQRG in the July 2018 update was the inclusion of “content creators” as part of the measure of content quality. Raters are told to look for a named creator associated with the content on a page, and then research where that creator shows up online. Specifically, raters are told to evaluate the EAT of the creator(s). 

Google's Search Quality Raters Guidelines have a new emphasis on the reputation of the creator of a piece of content. Click To Tweet

So at least as far as Google’s SQRG is concerned, the reputation and expertise of the creator(s) of a piece of content is an important component of the overall EAT rating of the piece.

In fact, the raters are told a low content creator score is enough to give the content piece itself a low-quality score. 

It is important to note that Google has been very clear that the work of these raters does not affect particular search results. In other words, even though the raters are given real-world examples of content that shows up in search for a given query, their ratings are never used to affect the results for that query. However, as noted above, their findings may be used to improve the overall algorithm.

Also, Google has stated clearly that something appearing in the SQRG does not necessarily mean it is a direct ranking factor. However, at the same time, Google recommends we read these guidelines to gain a good idea of what it wants to see in its search results (which is why it now releases them publicly). 

Google pushback? In a live YouTube video on August 21, Google’s John Mueller was asked about author reputation in search. The question was inspired by speculation by some prominent SEOs (such as Marie Haynes) that author reputation may have been a factor in the August 1 Google update that affected many “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) content publishers.

This speculation was fueled by a tweet from Google Search Liaison Danny Sullivan suggesting that SEOs affected by the update review the SQRGs, which of course prominently mentioned creator reputation. 

However, John Mueller’s response to the question about author reputation being a factor in the update seems, at first glance, to contradict that idea:

“I wouldn’t look at the Quality Rater Guidelines as something our algorithms are looking at explicitly and checking out the reputation of all authors and then using that to rank your websites.” – John Mueller

To me, a significant word in this quote is “all.” I tweeted the following: 

“Glad for this confirmation of what I was sure was the case. IF Google is using any author EAT in search, I’d imagine it is with a limited set of well-known creators (starting with KP [Knowledge Panel] entities) and used as what I call a “confirmatory signal.” By confirmatory signal, I mean it is not a ranking signal in and of itself, but if the algo is comparing two sites with content that demands expertise, and all other things are equal (VERY hypothetical situation), the site using a known high-EAT author might get the nudge.”

For what it’s worth, John Mueller himself liked my tweet. 

Related: Dave Davies included a nice summary of Google author-related patents in this post.

Did John Mueller rule out any use of author reputation as a content quality signal for search ranking? Click To Tweet

Significance: While we still can’t say there is at present some sort of “creator quality score” in Google’s search rankings, the major change to the SQRG is our strongest indication to date that who created a piece of content matters to Google.

2. Machine-Readable Entity IDs

As explained by Mike Arnesen in his excellent post Leveraging Machine-Readable Entity IDs for SEO, Machine-Readable Entity IDs (MREIDs) are unique codes in the form of a string of characters that identifies a particular entity anywhere on the web. An entity is any unique person, place, thing, or concept. So, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd President of the United States, is an entity, as are New York City and transcendentalism. 

MREIDs are necessary for search, because the nouns we use to describe entities are often ambiguous. For example, even though my name is fairly uncommon, there is another Mark Traphagen whom people search for because he is a prominent intellectual property attorney. A machine can’t tell the difference between that Mark Traphagen and me by our names, but if we each have a unique code associated with us, then a machine can tell us apart. 

As Mike explains in his article, Google originally sourced MREIDs from entries in Freebase, a massive database of entities that Google acquired in 2010. But these days, Google uses many sources to find and tag entities with MREIDs, if they’re significant enough to merit one. Based on Bill Slawski’s evaluations of Google patents, it appears that Google is likely already using MREIDs for many search features, including Google Trends, Google Lens, and Google Reverse Image Search.

Significance: If Google wants to identify and evaluate the EAT of authors on the web, something like MREIDs would be absolutely necessary. As I mentioned above, one of the fail points of Google Authorship was its dependence on authors and publishers voluntarily coding in the necessary connections. MREIDs allow Google to find, associate, and disambiguate entities such as authors at the scale of the web.

3. Interesting Finds Author Boxes

Early in 2018, Google introduced Interesting Finds boxes for some mobile search queries. These expandable boxes displayed content relevant to the search query that might not show in the top 10 traditional results but might still be of interest to the searcher. 

For a brief period in August 2018, I noticed Google showing Interesting Finds boxes for searches of the names of some web authors, including yours truly. After about two weeks, I no longer saw the boxes for the authors who were getting them, which led me to believe this was a search test by Google.

Here’s what many Interesting Finds box looked like:

Clicking on “10+ more stories” at the bottom of the box displayed a long list of content, all of it authored by me. 

Here’s where it gets interesting. I do not currently have an MREID with Google, nor does a Knowledge Panel display for my name. But clearly Google had high confidence that I was the author of all of the articles displayed. 

Why were these boxes shown only for some authors? I believe that Google chose to show them in cases where people searched for a name that created some ambiguity (in my case there is another Mark Traphagen who is a well-known attorney), but where the prior behavior of searchers showed they were often looking for content by or about a particular author.

Significance: Even though this was a brief test in mobile search and no longer shows, it is another indication that Google thinks content authors might be significant for search.

4. That Gary Illyes Tweet

This isn’t recent, but it was a significant moment that kept me on the path of watching Google’s behavior toward authors even after the death of Google Authorship. At Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes’s session at SMX Advanced 2016 I asked him whether Google was still paying any attention to the rel=author tags we had coded in during the days of Authorship. Michelle Robbins recorded his response on Twitter (@methode is Gary’s Twitter handle):

from @methode “we are not using authorship at all anymore…we are smarter than that.” but thanks for giving them all that data, SEOs. #smx

— MichelleRobbins (@MichelleRobbins) June 23, 2016

There are two significant concepts in that brief response. 

“We are smarter than that” – an indication that Google was developing machine intelligence methods to identify and track authors at the scale and pace of the web.

“Thanks for all that data” – something many of us tracking Authorship had speculated on was that Google had used the Authorship experiment as a training set of data for a supervised machine learning program that would learn how to identify and track authors, as well as for data on how searchers respond to indications of author reputation. 

Again, we can’t leap from this to say conclusively that Google is using such an algorithm at this point, or if they are, to what extent. However, it is another strong indicator that they are working on such a project. 

Summing It Up

So what can we say about Google Search and author identity and reputation today? Here are my takeaways:

1. Something is in the works. While I can’t definitively state that author authority and reputation has any bearing on search results today, I am convinced that it continues to be something that Google is not only interested in, but is actively working on, and perhaps even testing in limited ways.

2. Not all authors. While Google Authorship was open to any author or publisher who bothered to implement the code, I believe one of the things Google discovered during the experiment was that not all authors matter. That sounds harsh, but it’s true. It’s likely that people are only swayed to any extent by who created a piece of content if they happen to recognize the author and already understand that author’s significance. 

3. Not all content. In a similar fashion, I wouldn’t expect that Google would care about who authored every single piece of content on the web. In recent years, Google has given us many indications that YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) content merits significantly more scrutiny than other types. This is content that could affect either people’s finances or their well-being. It matters a lot whether investment advice is written by a trusted financial advisor, and even more if medical information is written by a legitimate doctor or scientist. 

4. The company you keep. Even in cases where users might not care or pay attention to who created a piece of content, the reputation and relevance of the author still might matter. This is where my idea of confirmatory signals for search comes in. Again, a confirmatory signal is not a direct ranking factor in and of itself. Rather, it could be used to “tip the scales” so-to-speak where Google needs some extra confirmation that a piece of content is high quality.

The most important takeaway though is that whether or not author authority affects search in any way now, it’s still a good idea to apply two things to the content published on your site:

Seek out the best possible authors for your content. Don’t let just anyone write for you. Before accepting a content submission, check out where and what the author has already published. Are the publications and topics relevant to what this author is writing for you? Is the content high quality, filled with accurate and significant information and original thought? What do others say about this author?

Clearly identify the authors of your content. Give each author their own bio page on your site with important information about their qualifications and experience. Link your article bylines to that bio page, and link out from it to other places where the author has published. 

Here at Perficient Digital we go above and beyond in vetting the authors we use to create content for our clients. We do that for many reasons, but one benefit we have found is that it makes our content much more likely to be accepted for publication when we pitch it to third-party publishers.

Learn more about our content marketing services!

But why should you care about your authors if it isn’t (yet) certain that Google is using authorship as a search factor? For at least two reasons:

It’s the right thing to do for your visitors and your brand. People form impressions of your brand based on the quality of your content, and one way to ensure higher quality content is to only use the best, most qualified authors.

It future-proofs your SEO. As I hope I’ve demonstrated, Google is showing that they remain interested in author expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Even if they are not using that as a search factor now, I expect they will be ramping it up in the years to come. Using high quality authors on your site now will make you ready if Google ever flips that switch (or more likely, turns up the knob a bit).

from Marketing https://www.stonetemple.com/does-author-authority-matter-for-your-content-and-seo/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[donnafmae]

Does Author Authority Matter for Your Content and SEO?

The concept of author authority (or “author rank”) in Google Search has a long and somewhat muddy history. To many of us, it makes sense that Google would value the “EAT” (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) of content creators in its quest to judge the quality of content. After all, wouldn’t you rather get medical advice from a properly credentialed M.D. than from some blogger who keeps WebMD open in a browser tab?

But does Google actually care about who created a content piece? And does it currently use that as an active factor in its search ranking algorithms?

TLDR Spoiler Alert! I’ll give you my conclusions right up top. For my supporting evidence, read the rest of the post! Bottom line: I don’t think we have sufficient evidence to say whether Google is using any kind of author authority in search. However, we do have evidence of an increasing (and renewed) interest by Google in identifying authors.  If your content is meant to project the authority and reliability of your brand, then it makes sense for users to see that it’s written by credible subject matter experts. (Bonus: you’ll be all set if Google ever does crank up “Author Rank”!)

A Brief History of Author Authority and Google

Agent Rank / Author Rank

The origins of the concept of using a content creator’s authority and reputation go back to the agent rank patent granted to Google on July 21, 2009. The patent proposed a means of evaluating the contributors to various elements on a web page by determining the identity of each of the contributing “agents” with a “digital signature” and assigning a score to each one based on other content associated with it. (For an in-depth explanation of agent rank, see this post by Bill Slawski.)

The agent rank patent probably would have faded into the obscurity of Google history had it not been for a new Google project unveiled in 2011: Google Authorship.

Google Authorship

On June 7, 2011, Google announced authorship markup for web search. Authorship was a development that allowed publishers and authors to create a digital signature for authors using Schema.org’s rel=”author” and rel=”me” structured data markup attributes.

Simply described, publishers could link an author byline to an author’s identifiable profile on another site, and authors could link back to the publications. That two-way linkage created a digital signature that would give Google more confidence about the identity of authors, and it created a connection with their content across the web.

While there were no initial benefits announced for using Authorship markup, there was a blockbuster tease in the last paragraph of the Google blog post: “We know that great content comes from great authors, and we’re looking closely at ways this markup could help us highlight authors and rank search results.”

It’s very rare that Google even hints at something it might use to influence search rankings, so the SEO community immediately sat up and paid attention (including this author). 

Little did we know just how prepared Google was to move forward with putting Authorship into action. Just 22 days after the authorship blog post, Google unveiled Google+.

Google+ and Google Authorship

I’ve always believed that one of the chief reasons Google threw so much weight on Google+ in its early days was its hunger to be able to identify individuals on the web. This was a needed step for authorship to work, but it went far beyond that. 

Google highly incentivized (some would say coerced or even forced) individuals to create Google+ profiles. For a span of time, it was almost impossible to use many Google services without one. I think the primary importance of this was for advertising. If Google had a trackable identity for nearly every web user, it would make targeting advertising to those users many times more accurate. That’s why I always laughed when people said Google+ was not “monetized”!

But this also meant that a lot of the web’s authors would have Google profiles. Now Google had the anchor it needed on the digital signature side to put Authorship into action.

Authorship Goes Live

Authorship leaped from something Google might use someday to an active part of search in August 2011, when Google’s Matt Cutts and Othar Hansen (then head of the Authorship project) released a YouTube video encouraging authors to connect their published content across the web to their Google+ profiles. Those profiles started showing a special section where authors could list links to their author bios or archive pages on the publications for which they wrote. 

Aside from the useful instructions on how to implement Authorship markup, this video also introduced Google’s plan to begin showing the profile images of authors next to search results for their content. And Hansen also affirmed that “at some point” Google might use this markup to influence search rankings. 

Soon after that, Authorship rich snippets started appearing in search.

The appearance and components of Authorship rich snippets changed constantly over Authorship’s three-year presence in the SERPs. The example above shows them at their most robust, with an author photo, byline, and the number of Google+ circles (followers).

At times, the byline was a link, leading to a dedicated search results page of that author’s content. For a few months, clicking on a Google link with Authorship and then clicking back to Google opened up a dropdown of more content by that author.

Authorship results were never guaranteed. They didn’t show for every author (even if the markup had been implemented), and even for those that got it, it didn’t show for every result for their content. There seemed to be some algorithmic thresholds for an Authorship snippet to show. 

The Decline and Fall of Authorship

The first indication that Google was pulling back from Authorship came in early December 2013, when the number of Authorship snippets showing in search plunged overnight. Then, in June 2014, the author profile photos disappeared forever, leaving only the bylines.

On August 27, 2014, I got a phone call I never expected to get. Google’s John Mueller messaged me to ask if he could speak to me under a temporary NDA. After a quick electronic transfer of the paperwork, John called me to let me know that in 24 hours Google would be shutting down Authorship snippets in search.

John’s call was a much-appreciated courtesy to me, in recognition of the leadership and guidance I had shown to the Authorship community. It allowed Eric Enge and I to work through that night to create a 2,500-word article about the rise and fall of Authorship, which Danny Sullivan published on Search Engine Land minutes after John Mueller made the official Google announcement on Google+.

Why Was Authorship Abandoned?

I won’t go into depth about the reasons (both known and speculative) why Google gave up on Authorship in search, because Eric and I covered them well in the aforementioned Search Engine Land article. However, here they are in brief:

Uneven adoption by authors and publishers. A study we did looked at Authorship markup adoption by authors on major publications, and it found less than a third of them had the necessary linkage. Google won’t use a signal that’s out of balance — one that potentially gives favoritism to some authors over others simply because they did some extra coding. Adoption also seemed skewed toward certain verticals, such as marketers (surprise!), and real estate and insurance agents.

Lack of value to searchers. During our phone call, John Mueller told me that their testing showed that Authorship snippets did not seem to be valued by searchers. 

Emphasis on mobile-first. In interviews and Webmaster Hangouts post-Authorship, Mueller frequently blamed the rise of a mobile-first philosophy at Google for the death of Authorship, apparently meaning that the Authorship rich snippets didn’t fit well with that initiative.

In the end, whatever the reasons for the abandonment of the Authorship project, I think it was significant that it lasted as long as it did (three years). Most search experiments, especially those as prominently displayed on search pages as Authorship was, don’t last that long. 

To me, that means despite the problems noted above, the idea of author authority in search was one Google thought had high potential. 

Did Authorship Include Author Rank?

First, Author Rank was never a term used officially by Google. Instead, it was a popular concept in the search marketing community, based in part on Bill Slawski’s posts about the agent rank patent, but fueled by the hints from Google in 2011 that it “might someday” use Authorship as a search ranking signal.

Indeed, many in the search community simply assumed it must be in play, but they offered only anecdotal evidence. (“We got an authorship snippet for one post and three days later it went up three places in search!”) Eric Enge detailed the reasons why it was unlikely Google was using any sort of “Author Rank” back then, and I agreed with those reasons. 

I believe Google knew it would have been premature to activate any kind of author authority in ranking algorithms during its tenure. However, I also believe it was in part a “training exercise” for any future use of author authority. I’m betting that Google learned a lot during the life of Authorship. More on that later.

Did Author Authority Die with Authorship?

Short answer: we don’t know.

But there are a number of hints and clues that indicate Google remains interested in the concept, if not as a ranking factor, then as an indicator of content quality and reliability. And we do know those things are more and more factoring into what Google likes to show users in search results.

Evidence That Author Authority Still Matters to Google

1. Content creators and the Google Search Quality Raters Guidelines

Renewed speculation about author authority began with the July 20, 2018, update to Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines (SQRG). The SQRG is the training document for the Search Quality Raters, which are the Google contractors tasked with evaluating actual web pages that could be served up by Google search in response to a given query.

The raters are told that the purpose of their work is “to evaluate search engine quality.” They do this by scoring the pages they are shown according to the overall quality of the page and how well it meets the needs of a typical user. Google sometimes uses the raters to test proposed changes to its search algorithms.

To get the highest score, a page must rate highly in Google’s three attributes of content quality, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness (known by the acronym EAT). 

SQRG update. A major addition to SQRG in the July 2018 update was the inclusion of “content creators” as part of the measure of content quality. Raters are told to look for a named creator associated with the content on a page, and then research where that creator shows up online. Specifically, raters are told to evaluate the EAT of the creator(s). 

Google's Search Quality Raters Guidelines have a new emphasis on the reputation of the creator of a piece of content. Click To Tweet

So at least as far as Google’s SQRG is concerned, the reputation and expertise of the creator(s) of a piece of content is an important component of the overall EAT rating of the piece.

In fact, the raters are told a low content creator score is enough to give the content piece itself a low-quality score. 

It is important to note that Google has been very clear that the work of these raters does not affect particular search results. In other words, even though the raters are given real-world examples of content that shows up in search for a given query, their ratings are never used to affect the results for that query. However, as noted above, their findings may be used to improve the overall algorithm.

Also, Google has stated clearly that something appearing in the SQRG does not necessarily mean it is a direct ranking factor. However, at the same time, Google recommends we read these guidelines to gain a good idea of what it wants to see in its search results (which is why it now releases them publicly). 

Google pushback? In a live YouTube video on August 21, Google’s John Mueller was asked about author reputation in search. The question was inspired by speculation by some prominent SEOs (such as Marie Haynes) that author reputation may have been a factor in the August 1 Google update that affected many “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) content publishers.

This speculation was fueled by a tweet from Google Search Liaison Danny Sullivan suggesting that SEOs affected by the update review the SQRGs, which of course prominently mentioned creator reputation. 

However, John Mueller’s response to the question about author reputation being a factor in the update seems, at first glance, to contradict that idea:

“I wouldn’t look at the Quality Rater Guidelines as something our algorithms are looking at explicitly and checking out the reputation of all authors and then using that to rank your websites.” – John Mueller

To me, a significant word in this quote is “all.” I tweeted the following: 

“Glad for this confirmation of what I was sure was the case. IF Google is using any author EAT in search, I’d imagine it is with a limited set of well-known creators (starting with KP [Knowledge Panel] entities) and used as what I call a “confirmatory signal.” By confirmatory signal, I mean it is not a ranking signal in and of itself, but if the algo is comparing two sites with content that demands expertise, and all other things are equal (VERY hypothetical situation), the site using a known high-EAT author might get the nudge.”

For what it’s worth, John Mueller himself liked my tweet. 

Related: Dave Davies included a nice summary of Google author-related patents in this post.

Did John Mueller rule out any use of author reputation as a content quality signal for search ranking? Click To Tweet

Significance: While we still can’t say there is at present some sort of “creator quality score” in Google’s search rankings, the major change to the SQRG is our strongest indication to date that who created a piece of content matters to Google.

2. Machine-Readable Entity IDs

As explained by Mike Arnesen in his excellent post Leveraging Machine-Readable Entity IDs for SEO, Machine-Readable Entity IDs (MREIDs) are unique codes in the form of a string of characters that identifies a particular entity anywhere on the web. An entity is any unique person, place, thing, or concept. So, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd President of the United States, is an entity, as are New York City and transcendentalism. 

MREIDs are necessary for search, because the nouns we use to describe entities are often ambiguous. For example, even though my name is fairly uncommon, there is another Mark Traphagen whom people search for because he is a prominent intellectual property attorney. A machine can’t tell the difference between that Mark Traphagen and me by our names, but if we each have a unique code associated with us, then a machine can tell us apart. 

As Mike explains in his article, Google originally sourced MREIDs from entries in Freebase, a massive database of entities that Google acquired in 2010. But these days, Google uses many sources to find and tag entities with MREIDs, if they’re significant enough to merit one. Based on Bill Slawski’s evaluations of Google patents, it appears that Google is likely already using MREIDs for many search features, including Google Trends, Google Lens, and Google Reverse Image Search.

Significance: If Google wants to identify and evaluate the EAT of authors on the web, something like MREIDs would be absolutely necessary. As I mentioned above, one of the fail points of Google Authorship was its dependence on authors and publishers voluntarily coding in the necessary connections. MREIDs allow Google to find, associate, and disambiguate entities such as authors at the scale of the web.

3. Interesting Finds Author Boxes

Early in 2018, Google introduced Interesting Finds boxes for some mobile search queries. These expandable boxes displayed content relevant to the search query that might not show in the top 10 traditional results but might still be of interest to the searcher. 

For a brief period in August 2018, I noticed Google showing Interesting Finds boxes for searches of the names of some web authors, including yours truly. After about two weeks, I no longer saw the boxes for the authors who were getting them, which led me to believe this was a search test by Google.

Here’s what many Interesting Finds box looked like:

Clicking on “10+ more stories” at the bottom of the box displayed a long list of content, all of it authored by me. 

Here’s where it gets interesting. I do not currently have an MREID with Google, nor does a Knowledge Panel display for my name. But clearly Google had high confidence that I was the author of all of the articles displayed. 

Why were these boxes shown only for some authors? I believe that Google chose to show them in cases where people searched for a name that created some ambiguity (in my case there is another Mark Traphagen who is a well-known attorney), but where the prior behavior of searchers showed they were often looking for content by or about a particular author.

Significance: Even though this was a brief test in mobile search and no longer shows, it is another indication that Google thinks content authors might be significant for search.

4. That Gary Illyes Tweet

This isn’t recent, but it was a significant moment that kept me on the path of watching Google’s behavior toward authors even after the death of Google Authorship. At Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes’s session at SMX Advanced 2016 I asked him whether Google was still paying any attention to the rel=author tags we had coded in during the days of Authorship. Michelle Robbins recorded his response on Twitter (@methode is Gary’s Twitter handle):

from @methode “we are not using authorship at all anymore…we are smarter than that.” but thanks for giving them all that data, SEOs. #smx

— MichelleRobbins (@MichelleRobbins) June 23, 2016

There are two significant concepts in that brief response. 

“We are smarter than that” – an indication that Google was developing machine intelligence methods to identify and track authors at the scale and pace of the web.

“Thanks for all that data” – something many of us tracking Authorship had speculated on was that Google had used the Authorship experiment as a training set of data for a supervised machine learning program that would learn how to identify and track authors, as well as for data on how searchers respond to indications of author reputation. 

Again, we can’t leap from this to say conclusively that Google is using such an algorithm at this point, or if they are, to what extent. However, it is another strong indicator that they are working on such a project. 

Summing It Up

So what can we say about Google Search and author identity and reputation today? Here are my takeaways:

1. Something is in the works. While I can’t definitively state that author authority and reputation has any bearing on search results today, I am convinced that it continues to be something that Google is not only interested in, but is actively working on, and perhaps even testing in limited ways.

2. Not all authors. While Google Authorship was open to any author or publisher who bothered to implement the code, I believe one of the things Google discovered during the experiment was that not all authors matter. That sounds harsh, but it’s true. It’s likely that people are only swayed to any extent by who created a piece of content if they happen to recognize the author and already understand that author’s significance. 

3. Not all content. In a similar fashion, I wouldn’t expect that Google would care about who authored every single piece of content on the web. In recent years, Google has given us many indications that YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) content merits significantly more scrutiny than other types. This is content that could affect either people’s finances or their well-being. It matters a lot whether investment advice is written by a trusted financial advisor, and even more if medical information is written by a legitimate doctor or scientist. 

4. The company you keep. Even in cases where users might not care or pay attention to who created a piece of content, the reputation and relevance of the author still might matter. This is where my idea of confirmatory signals for search comes in. Again, a confirmatory signal is not a direct ranking factor in and of itself. Rather, it could be used to “tip the scales” so-to-speak where Google needs some extra confirmation that a piece of content is high quality.

The most important takeaway though is that whether or not author authority affects search in any way now, it’s still a good idea to apply two things to the content published on your site:

Seek out the best possible authors for your content. Don’t let just anyone write for you. Before accepting a content submission, check out where and what the author has already published. Are the publications and topics relevant to what this author is writing for you? Is the content high quality, filled with accurate and significant information and original thought? What do others say about this author?

Clearly identify the authors of your content. Give each author their own bio page on your site with important information about their qualifications and experience. Link your article bylines to that bio page, and link out from it to other places where the author has published. 

Here at Perficient Digital we go above and beyond in vetting the authors we use to create content for our clients. We do that for many reasons, but one benefit we have found is that it makes our content much more likely to be accepted for publication when we pitch it to third-party publishers.

Learn more about our content marketing services!

But why should you care about your authors if it isn’t (yet) certain that Google is using authorship as a search factor? For at least two reasons:

It’s the right thing to do for your visitors and your brand. People form impressions of your brand based on the quality of your content, and one way to ensure higher quality content is to only use the best, most qualified authors.

It future-proofs your SEO. As I hope I’ve demonstrated, Google is showing that they remain interested in author expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Even if they are not using that as a search factor now, I expect they will be ramping it up in the years to come. Using high quality authors on your site now will make you ready if Google ever flips that switch (or more likely, turns up the knob a bit).

from Marketing https://www.stonetemple.com/does-author-authority-matter-for-your-content-and-seo/ via http://www.rssmix.com/