Probably the single best video to watch to understand the power of Google & Facebook (or even most of the major problems across society) is this following video about pleasure versus happiness.
In constantly seeking pleasure we forego happiness.
The "feed" based central aggregation networks are just like slot machines in your pocket: variable reward circuitry which self-optimizes around exploiting your flaws to eat as much attention as possible.
The above is not an accident. It is, rather, as intended:
"That means that we needed to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever ... It's a social validation feedback loop ... You're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology ... [The inventors] understood this, consciously, and we did it anyway."
Happy? Good! Share posed photos to make your friends feel their lives are worse than your life is.
Outraged? Good! Click an ad.
Hopeless? Good. There is a product which can deliver you pleasure...if only you can...click an ad.
For “Should abortion be legal?” Google cited a South African news site saying, “It is not the place of government to legislate against woman’s choices.”
When asked, “Should abortion be illegal?” it promoted an answer from obscure clickbait site listland.com stating, “Abortion is murder.”
Excellent work Google in using your featured snippets to help make the world more absolutist, polarized & toxic.
Most users tend to focus their attention on the left side of the page: "if we were to slice a maximized page down the middle, 80% of the fixations fell on the left half of the screen (even more than our previous finding of 69%). The remaining 20% of fixations were on the right half of the screen."
This behavior is even more prevalent on search results pages: "On SERPs, almost all fixations (94%) fell on the left side of the page, and 60% those fixations can be isolated to the leftmost 400px."
On mobile, obviously, the attention is focused on what is above the fold. That which is below the fold sort of doesn't even exist for a large subset of the population.
Outside of a few central monopoly attention merchant players, the ad-based web is dying.
Mashable has raised about $46 million in VC funding over the past 4 years. And they just sold for about $50 million.
Breaking even is about as good as it gets in a web controlled by the Google / Facebook duopoly. :D
Other hopeful unicorn media startups appear to have peaked as well. That BuzzFeed IPO is on hold: "Some BuzzFeed investors have become worried about the company’s performance and rising costs for expansions in areas like news and entertainment. Those frustrations were aired at a board meeting in recent weeks, in which directors took management to task, the people familiar with the situation said."
Google's Chrome web browser will soon have an ad blocker baked into it. Of course the central networks opt out of applying this feature to themselves. Facebook makes serious coin by blocking ad blockers. Google pays Adblock Plus to unblock ads on Google.com & boy are there a lot of ads there.
Format your pages like Google does their search results and they will tell you it is a piss poor user experience & a form of spam - whacking you with a penalty for it.
Of course Google isn't the only search engine doing this. Mix in ads with a double listing and sometimes there will only be 1 website listed above the fold.
I've even seen some Bing search results where organic results have a "Web" label on them - which is conveniently larger than the ad label that is on ads. That is in addition to other tricks like...
lots of ad extensions that push organics below the fold on anything with the slightest commercial intent
bolding throughout ads (title, description, URL) with much lighter bolding of organics
only showing 6 organic results on commercial searches that are likely to generate ad clicks
As bad as either of the above looks in terms of ad load or result diversity on the desktop, it is only worse on mobile.
In an online ecosystem where virtually every innovation is copied or deemed spam, sustainable publishing only works if your business model is different than the central network operators.
Not only is there the aggressive horizontal ad layer for anything with a hint of commercial intent, but now the scrape layer which was first applied to travel is being spread across other categories like ecommerce.
Ecommerce retailers beware. There is now a GIANT knowledge panel result on mobile that takes up the entire top half of the SERP -> Google updates mobile product knowledge panels to show even more info in one spot: https://t.co/3JMsMHuQmJhttp://pic.twitter.com/5uD8zZiSrK— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) November 14, 2017
Here are 2 examples. And alarms are going off at Amazon now. Yes, Prime is killer, but organic search traffic is going to tank. Go ahead & scroll down to the organic listings (if you dare).And if anyone clicks the module, they are taken away from the SERPs into G-Land. Wow. :) http://pic.twitter.com/SswOPj4iGd— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) November 14, 2017
The more of your content Google can scrape-n-displace in the search results the less reason there is to visit your website & the more ad-heavy Google can make their interface because they shagged the content from your site.
Simply look at the market caps of the big tech monopolies vs companies in adjacent markets. The aggregate trend is expressed in the stock price. And it is further expressed in the inability for the unicorn media companies to go public.
As big as Snapchat & Twitter are, nobody who invested in either IPO is sitting on a winner today.
Google is outraged anyone might question the numbers & if the current set up is reasonable:
Mr Harris described as “factually incorrect” suggestions that Google was “stealing” ad revenue from publishers, saying that two thirds of the revenues generated by online content went to its originators.
“I’ve heard lots of people say that Google and Facebook are “ruthlessly stealing” all the advertising revenue that publishers hoped to acquire through online editions,” he told the gathering.
“There is no advertising on Google News. Zero. Indeed you will rarely see advertising around news cycles in Google Search either.
Sure it is not the ad revenues they are stealing.
Rather it is the content.
Either by scraping, or by ranking proprietary formats (AMP) above other higher quality content which is not published using the proprietary format & then later attaching crappier & crappier deals to the (faux) "open source" proprietary content format.
Google keeps extracting content from publishers & eating the value chain. Some publishers have tried to offset this by putting more ads on their own site while also getting further distribution by adopting the proprietary AMP format. Those who realized AMP was garbage in terms of monetization viewed it as a way to offer teasers to drive users to their websites.
That is, after all, how monopolies negotiate - ultimatums.
Those who don't give Google their full content will soon receive manual action penalty notifications
Important: Starting 2/1/18, Google is requiring that AMP urls be comparable to the canonical page content. If not, Google will direct users to the non-AMP urls. And the urls won't be in the Top Stories carousel. Site owners will receive a manual action: https://t.co/ROhbI6TMVzhttp://pic.twitter.com/hb9FTluV0S— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) November 16, 2017
The value of news content is not zero.
Being the go-to resource for those sorts of "no money here" news topics also enables Google to be the go-to resource for searches for [auto insurance quote] and other highly commercial search terms where Google might make $50 or $100 per click.
Economics drive everything in publishing. But you have to see how one market position enables another. Google & Facebook are not strong in China, so Toutiao - the top news app in China - is valued at about $20 billion.
Firefox recently updated to make its underlying rendering engine faster & more stable. As part of the upgrade they killed off many third party extensions, including ours. We plan to update them soon (a few days perhaps), but those who need the extensions working today may want to install something like (Comodo Dragon (or another browser based on the prior Firefox core) & install our extensions in that web browser.
First, they signed a contract with Mozilla containing a change-of-ownership poison pill where Mozilla would still make $375 million a year from them even if they dump Yahoo!. Given what Yahoo! sold for this amounts to about 10% of the company price for the next couple years.
Second, Yahoo! overpaid for the Firefox distribution deal to where they had to make their user experience even more awful to try to get the numbers to back out.
Here is a navigational search result on Yahoo! where the requested site only appears in the right rail knowledge graph.
The "organic" result set has been removed. There's a Yahoo! News insert, a Yahoo Local insert, an ad inviting you to download Firefox (bet that has since been removed!), other search suggestions, and then graphical ads to try to get you to find office furniture or other irrelevant stuff.
Here is how awful those sorts of search results are: Yahoo! was so embarrassed at the lack of quality of their result set that they put their logo at the upper right edge of the page.
So now they'll be losing a million a day for a few years based on Marissa Mayer's fantastic Firefox deal.
And search is just another vertical they made irrelevant.
On our recent earnings call, Yahoo outlined out a plan to simplify our business and focus our effort on our four most successful content areas – News, Sports, Finance and Lifestyle. To that end, today we will begin phasing out the following Digital Magazines: Yahoo Food, Yahoo Health, Yahoo Parenting, Yahoo Makers, Yahoo Travel, Yahoo Autos and Yahoo Real Estate.
And for the key verticals they kept, they have pages like the following, which look like a diet version of eHow
Every day they send users away to other sites with deeper content. And eventually people find one they like (like TheAthletic or Dunc'd On) & then Yahoo! stops being a habit.
Meanwhile many people get their broader general news from Facebook, Google shifted their search app to include news, Apple offers a great news app, the default new tab on Microsoft Edge browser lists a localize news feed. Any of those is a superior user experience to Yahoo!.
It is hard to see what Yahoo!'s role is going forward.
Other than the user email accounts (& whatever legal liabilities are associated with the chronic user account hacking incidents), it is hard to see what Verizon bought in Yahoo!.
Much like publishers, employees at the big tech monopolies can end up little more than grist.
Products & product categories come & go, but even if you build "the one" you still may lose everything in the process.
Imagine building the most successful consumer product of all time only to realize:'The iPhone is the reason I'm divorced,' Andy Grignon, a senior iPhone engineer, tells me. I heard that sentiment more than once throughout my dozens of interviews with the iPhone's key architects and engineers.'Yeah, the iPhone ruined more than a few marriages,' says another.
"There's been essentially no dispersion of tech jobs,' said Mr. Kolko, who conducted the research.'Which metro is the next Silicon Valley? The answer is none, at least for the foreseeable future. Silicon Valley still stands apart.'
Making $180,000 a year can price one out of the local real estate market, requiring living in a van or a two hour commute. An $81,000 salary can require a 3 hour commute.
If you are priced out of the market by the monopoly de jour, you can always pray!
The hype surrounding transformative technology that disintermediates geography & other legacy restraints only lasts so long: "The narrative isn't the product of any single malfunction, but rather the result of overhyped marketing, deficiencies in operating with deep learning and GPUs and intensive data preparation demands."
A manager named LFEditorCat told the raters in chat that the pay cut had come at the behest of'Big G's lawyers,' referring to Google. Later, a rater asked Jackson,'If Google made this change, can Google reverse this change, in theory?' Jackson replied,'The chances of this changing are less than zero IMO.'
America really is undergoing a radical change in the structure of our political economy. And yet this revolutionary shift of power, control, and wealth has remained all but unrecognized and unstudied ... Since the 1990s, large companies have increasingly relied on temporary help to do work that formerly was performed by permanent salaried employees. These arrangements enable firms to hire and fire workers with far greater flexibility and free them from having to provide traditional benefits like unemployment insurance, health insurance, retirement plans, and paid vacations. The workers themselves go by many different names: temps, contingent workers, contractors, freelancers. But while some fit the traditional sense of what it means to be an entrepreneur or independent business owner, many, if not most, do not-precisely because they remain entirely dependent on a single power for their employment.
Dedication & devotion are important traits. Are you willing to do everything you can to go the last mile? "Lyft published a blog post praising a driver who kept picking up fares even after she went into labor and was driving to the hospital to give birth."
About 1.8 million workers were out of the labor force for "other" reasons at the beginning of this year, meaning they were not retired, in school, disabled or taking care of a loved one, according to Atlanta Federal Reserve data. Of those people, nearly half -- roughly 881,000 workers -- said in a survey that they had taken an opioid the day before, according to a study published last year by former White House economist Alan Krueger."
After a few years of buildup, Obamacare kicked the scams into high gear. .... With exchange plans largely locked into paying for medically required tests, patients (and their urine) became gold mines. Some labs started offering kickbacks to treatment centers, who in turn began splitting the profits with halfway houses that would tempt clients with free rent and other services. ... Street-level patient brokers and phone room lead generators stepped up to fill the beds with strategies across the ethical spectrum, including signing addicts up for Obamacare and paying their premiums.
The story says Wall Street is *unhappy* at the too low $475,000 price tag for this medicine. https://t.co/Fw4RXok2V1— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) September 4, 2017
When platform monopolies dictate the roll-out of technology, there is less and less innovation, fewer places to invest, less to invent. Eventually, the rhetoric of innovation turns into DISRUPT, a quickly canceled show on MSNBC, and Juicero, a Google-backed punchline.
This moment of stagnating innovation and productivity is happening because Silicon Valley has turned its back on its most important political friend: antitrust. Instead, it's embraced what it should understand as the enemy of innovation: monopoly.
Some marketing/framing savvy pple figured out that the most effective way to build a fascist movement is to call it:antifascist.— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) August 31, 2017
Celebrate diversity in all aspects of life - exceptthoughtTM.
Identity politics 2.0 wars come to Google. Oh no. But mass spying is fine since its equal opportunity predation.https://t.co/BArOsWb1ho— Julian Assange (@JulianAssange) August 6, 2017
Mob rule - with a splash of violence - for the win.
Social justice is the antithesis of justice.
It is the aspie guy getting fired for not understanding the full gender "spectrum."
Google exploits the mental abilities of its aspie workers but lets them burn at the stake when its disability, too much honesty, manifests. http://pic.twitter.com/Sd1A0KJvc0— Julian Assange (@JulianAssange) August 15, 2017
It is the repression of truth: "Truth equals virtue equals happiness. You cannot solve serious social problems by telling lies or punishing people who tell truth."
Most meetings at Google are recorded. Anyone at Google can watch it. We're trying to be really open about everything...except for this. They don't want any paper trail for any of these things. They were telling us about a lot of these potentially illegal practices that they've been doing to try to increase diversity. Basically treating people differently based on what their race or gender are. - James Damore
The recursive feedback loops & reactionary filtering are so bad that some sites promoting socialism are now being dragged to the Google gulag.
In a set of guidelines issued to Google evaluators in March, elaborated in April by Google VP of Engineering Ben Gomes, the company instructed its search evaluators to flag pages returning'conspiracy theories' or'upsetting' content unless'the query clearly indicates the user is seeking an alternative viewpoint.' The changes to the search rankings of WSWS content are consistent with such a mechanism. Users of Google will be able to find the WSWS if they specifically include'World Socialist Web Site' in their search request. But if their inquiry simply includes term such as'Trotsky,''Trotskyism,''Marxism,''socialism' or'inequality,' they will not find the site.
Every website which has a following & challenges power is considered "fake news" or "conspiracy theory" until many years later, when many of the prior "nutjob conspiracies" turn out to be accurate representations of reality.
Under its new so-called anti-fake-news program, Google algorithms have in the past few months moved socialist, anti-war, and progressive websites from previously prominent positions in Google searches to positions up to 50 search result pages from the first page, essentially removing them from the search results any searcher will see. Counterpunch, World Socialsit Website, Democracy Now, American Civil liberties Union, Wikileaks are just a few of the websites which have experienced severe reductions in their returns from Google searches.
What does the above say about tech monopolies wanting to alter the structure of society when their internal ideals are based on fundamental lies? They can't hold an internal meeting addressing sacred cows because "ultimately the loudest voices on the fringes drive the perception and reaction" but why not let them distribute swarms of animals with bacteria & see what happens? Let's make Earth a beta.
FANG
The more I study the macro picture the more concerned I get about the long term ramifications of a financially ever more divergent society. http://pic.twitter.com/KoY60fAfe2— Sven Henrich (@NorthmanTrader) August 9, 2017
Over the past three decades, the U.S. government has permitted corporate giants to take over an ever-increasing share of the economy. Monopoly-the ultimate enemy of free-market competition-now pervades every corner of American life ... Economic power, in fact, is more concentrated than ever: According to a study published earlier this year, half of all publicly traded companies have disappeared over the past four decades.
Nike selling on Amazon=media cos selling to Netflix=news orgs publishing straight to Facebook. https://t.co/3hpVIsymXD— Miriam Gottfried (@miriamgottfried) June 28, 2017
It is no coincidence that from 2012 to 2016, Amazon, Google and Facebook's revenues increased by $137 billion and the remaining Fortune 497 revenues contracted by $97 billion.
Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook ... are all aggressively investing in video content as bandwidth is getting cheaper & they need differentiated content to drive subscription revenues. If the big players are bidding competitively to have differentiated video content that puts a bid under some premium content, but for ad-supported content the relatively high CPMs on video content might fall sharply in the years to come.
From a partner perspective, if you only get a percent of revenue that transfers all the risk onto you, how is the new Facebook video feature going to be any better than being a YouTube partner? As video becomes more widespread, won't that lower CPMs?
One publisher said its Facebook-monetized videos had an average CPM of 15 cents. A second publisher, which calculated ad rates based on video views that lasted long enough to reach the ad break, said the average CPM for its mid-rolls is 75 cents. A third publisher made roughly $500 from more than 20 million total video views on that page in September.
That's how monopolies work. Whatever is hot at the moment gets pitched as the future, but underneath the hood all compliments get commoditized:
as a result of this increased market power, the big superstar companies have been raising their prices and cutting their wages. This has lifted profits and boosted the stock market, but it has also held down real wages, diverted more of the nation's income to business owners, and increased inequality. It has also held back productivity, since raising prices restricts economic output.
If in five years I'm just watching NFL-endorsed ESPN clips through a syndication deal with a messaging app, and Vice is just an age-skewed Viacom with better audience data, and I'm looking up the same trivia on Genius instead of Wikipedia, and'publications' are just content agencies that solve temporary optimization issues for much larger platforms, what will have been point of the last twenty years of creating things for the web?
We've been in the celebration phase all year as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Facebook take their place in the pantheon of classic American monopolists. These firms and a few others, it is now widely acknowledged, dominate everything. There is no day-part in which they do not dominate the battle for consumers' attention. There is no business safe from their ambitions. There are no industries in which their influence and encroachment are not currently being felt.
The web shifts information-based value chains to universal distribution at zero marginal cost, which shifts most of the value extraction to the attention merchants.
despite a user base near the size of Instagram's, Tumblr never quite figured out how to make money at the level Facebook has led managers and shareholders to expect ... running a platform for culture creation is, increasingly, a charity operation undertaken by larger companies. Servers are expensive, and advertisers would rather just throw money at Facebook than take a chance
Those resting in the shadows of the giants will keep getting crushed: "They let big tech crawl, parse, and resell their IP, catalyzing an extraordinary transfer in wealth from the creators to the platforms."
The. Problem. Everywhere. Is. Unaccountable. Monopoly. Power. That. Is. Why. Voters. Everywhere. Are. Angry.— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) September 24, 2017
They'll take the influence & margins, but not the responsibility normally associated with such a position:
"Facebook has embraced the healthy gross margins and influence of a media firm but is allergic to the responsibilities of a media firm," Mr. Galloway says. ... For Facebook, a company with more than $14 billion in free cash flow in the past year, to say it is adding 250 people to its safety and security efforts is'pissing in the ocean,' Mr. Galloway says.'They could add 25,000 people, spend $1 billion on AI technologies to help those 25,000 employees sort, filter and ID questionable content and advertisers, and their cash flow would decline 10% to 20%.'
Deregulation, as commonly understood, is actually just moving regulatory authority from democratic institutions to private ones.— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) September 23, 2017
Practically speaking, bypassing DRM isn't hard (Google's version of DRM was broken for six years before anyone noticed), but that doesn't matter. Even low-quality DRM gets the copyright owner the extremely profitable right to stop their customers and competitors from using their products except in the ways that the rightsholder specifies. ... for a browser to support EME, it must also license a "Content Decryption Module" (CDM). Without a CDM, video just doesn't work. All the big incumbents advocating for DRM have licenses for CDMs, but new entrants to the market will struggle to get these CDMs, and in order to get them, they have to make promises to restrict otherwise legal activities ... We're dismayed to see the W3C literally overrule the concerns of its public interest members, security experts, accessibility members and innovative startup members, putting the institution's thumb on the scales for the large incumbents that dominate the web, ensuring that dominance lasts forever.
More significantly, the GDPR extends the concept of'personal data' to bring it into line with the online world. The regulation stipulates, for example, that an online identifier, such as a device's IP address, can now be personal data. So next year, a wide range of identifiers that had hitherto lain outside the law will be regarded as personal data, reflecting changes in technology and the way organisations collect information about people. ... Facebook and Google should be OK, because they claim to have the'consent' of their users. But the data-broking crowd do not have that consent.
Oath's video unit, however, had begun doubling down on the type of highly shareable,'snackable' bites that people gobble up on their smartphones and Facebook feeds. ... . What frustrates her like nothing else, two people close to Couric told me, is when she encounters fans and they ask her what she's up to these days.
When content is atomized into the smallest bits & recycling is encouraged only the central network operators without editorial content costs win.
Even Reddit is pushing crappy autoplay videos for the sake of ads. There's no chance of it working for them, but they'll still try, as Google & Facebook have enviable market caps.
Some suggest the repackaging and reposting of ads highlights the'pivot to video' mentality many publishers now demonstrate. The push to churn out video content to feed platforms and to attract potentially lucrative video advertising is increasingly viewed as a potential solution to an increasingly challenging business model problem.
Publishers might also get paid a commission on any sales they help drive by including affiliate links alongside the videos. If these links drive users to purchase the products, then the publisher gets a cut.
Is there any chance recycling low quality infomercial styled ads as placeholder auto-play video content to run prerolls on is a sustainable business practice?
If that counts as strategic thinking in online publishing, count me as a short.
For years whenever the Adobe Flash plugin for Firefox had a security update users who hit the page got a negative option install of Google Chrome as their default web browser. And Google constantly markets Chrome across their properties:
Google is aggressively using its monopoly position in Internet services such as Google Mail, Google Calendar and YouTube to advertise Chrome. Browsers are a mature product and its hard to compete in a mature market if your main competitor has access to billions of dollars worth of free marketing.
It only takes a single yes on any of those billions of ad impressions (or an accidental opt in on the negative option bundling with security updates) for the default web browser to change permanently.
There's no way Mozilla can compete with Google on economics trying to buy back an audience.
Mozilla is willing to buy influence, too - particularly in mobile, where it's so weak. One option is paying partners to distribute Firefox on their phones.'We're going to have to put money toward it,' Dixon says, but she expects it'll pay off when Mozilla can share revenue from the resulting search traffic.
They have no chance of winning when they focus on wedge issues like fake news. Much like their mobile operating system, it is a distraction. And the core economics of paying for distribution won't work either. How can Mozilla get a slice of an advertiser's ad budget through Yahoo through Bing & compete against Google's bid?
Google is willing to enter uneconomic deals to keep their monopoly power. Look no further than the $1 billion investment they made in AOL which they quickly wrote down by $726 million.
Google pays Apple $3 billion PER YEAR to be the default search provider in Safari. Verizon acquired Yahoo! for $4.48 billion. There's no chance of Yahoo! outbidding Google for default Safari search placement & if Apple liked the idea they would have bought Yahoo!. It is hard to want to take a big risk & spend billions on something that might not back out when you get paid billions to not take any risk.
Even Microsoft would be taking a big risk in making a competitive bid for the Apple search placement. Microsoft recently disclosed "Search advertising revenue increased $124 million or 8%." If $124 million is 8% then their quarterly search ad revenue is $1.674 billion. To outbid Google they would have to bid over half their total search revenues.
Regulatory Capture
"I have a foreboding of an America in which my children's or grandchildren's time - when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of america is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance." - Carl Sagan, The Demon-haunted World, 1996
Fascinating. Obama felt he had zero authority even while President except to ask nicely. Zero will to govern. https://t.co/935OaRpV2X— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) September 25, 2017
The monopoly platforms have remained unscathed by government regulatory efforts in the U.S. Google got so good at lobbying they made Goldman Sachs look like amateurs. It never hurts to place your lawyers in the body that (should) regulate you: "Wright left the FTC in August 2015, returning to George Mason. Just five months later, he had a new position as'of counsel' at Wilson Sonsini, Google's primary outside law firm."
Remember how Google engineers repeatedly announced how people who bought or sold links without clear machine & human readable disclosure are scum? One way to take .edu link building to the next level is to sponsor academic research without disclosure:
Some researchers share their papers before publication and let Google give suggestions, according to thousands of pages of emails obtained by the Journal in public-records requests of more than a dozen university professors. The professors don't always reveal Google's backing in their research, and few disclosed the financial ties in subsequent articles on the same or similar topics, the Journal found. ... Google officials in Washington compiled wish lists of academic papers that included working titles, abstracts and budgets for each proposed paper-then they searched for willing authors, according to a former employee and a former Google lobbyist. ... Mr. Sokol, though, had extensive financial ties to Google, according to his emails obtained by the Journal. He was a part-time attorney at the Silicon Valley law firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, which has Google as a client. The 2016 paper's co-author was also a partner at the law firm, which didn't respond to requests for comment.
Buy link without disclosure = potential influence ranking in search results = evil spammer SEO
As bad as that is, Google has non profit think tanks fire ENTIRE TEAMS if they suggest regulatory action against Google is just:
"We are in the process of trying to expand our relationship with Google on some absolutely key points,' Ms. Slaughter wrote in an email to Mr. Lynn, urging him to'just THINK about how you are imperiling funding for others.'
"What happened has little to do with New America, and everything to do with Google and monopoly power. One reason that American governance is dysfunctional is because of the capture of much academic and NGO infrastructure by power. That this happened obviously and clumsily at one think tank is not the point. The point is that this is a *system* of power. I have deep respect for the scholars at New America and the work done there. The point here is how *Google* and monopolies operate. I'll make one other political point about monopoly power. Democracies all over the world are seeing an upsurge in anger. Why? Scholars have tended to look at political differences, like does a different social safety net have an impact on populism. But it makes more sense to understand what countries have in common. Multi-nationals stretch over... multiple nations. So if you think, we do, that corporations are part of our political system, then populism everywhere monopolies operate isn't a surprise. Because these are the same monopolies. Google is part of the American political system, and the European one, and so on and so forth." - Matt Stoller
in recent years, Google has become greedy about owning not just search capacities, video and maps, but also the shape of public discourse. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, Google has recruited and cultivated law professors who support its views. And as the New York Times recently reported, it has become invested in building curriculum for our public schools, and has created political strategy to get schools to adopt its products. This year, Google is on track to spend more money than any company in America on lobbying.
"I just got off the phone with Eric Schmidt and he is pulling all of his money." - Anne-Marie Slaughter
Google's director of policy communications, Bob Boorstin, emailed the Rose Foundation (a major funder of Consumer Watchdog) complaining about Consumer Watchdog and asking the charity to consider "whether there might be better groups in which to place your trust and resources."
Six years ago, I was pressured to unpublish a critical piece about Google's monopolistic practices after the company got upset about it. In my case, the post stayed unpublished. I was working for Forbes at the time, and was new to my job.
...
Google never challenged the accuracy of the reporting. Instead, a Google spokesperson told me that I needed to unpublish the story because the meeting had been confidential, and the information discussed there had been subject to a non-disclosure agreement between Google and Forbes. (I had signed no such agreement, hadn't been told the meeting was confidential, and had identified myself as a journalist.)
"You're already asking very difficult questions to Mr. Juncker,' the YouTube employee said before Birbes' interview in an exchange she captured on video.'You're talking about corporate lobbies. You don't want to get on the wrong side of YouTube and the European Commission… Well, except if you don't care about having a long career on YouTube.'
As more and more of the economy become sown up by monopolistic corporations, there are fewer and fewer opportunities for entrepreneurship. ... By design, the private business corporation is geared to pursue its own interests. It's our job as citizens to structure a political economy that keeps corporations small enough to ensure that their actions never threaten the people's sovereignty over our nation.
Google controls upwards of 80 percent of global search-and the capital to either acquire or crush any newcomers. They are bringing us a hardly gilded age of prosperity but depressed competition, economic stagnation, and, increasingly, a chilling desire to control the national conversation.
The switch is partly related to Google's transformation from a listed public company into a business owned by a holding company. The change helps keep potential challenges in one business from spreading to another, according to Dana Hobart, a litigator with the Buchalter law firm in Los Angeles.
Isn't that an admission they should be broken up?
Early Xoogler Doug Edwards wrote: "[Larry Page] wondered how Google could become like a better version of the RIAA - not just a mediator of digital music licensing - but a marketplace for fair distribution of all forms of digitized content."
In an explosive new allegation, a renowned architect has accused Google of racketeering, saying in a lawsuit the company has a pattern of stealing trade secrets from people it first invites to collaborate. ...'It's cheaper to steal than to develop your own technology,' Buether said.'You can take it from somebody else and you have a virtually unlimited budget to fight these things in court.' ...'It's even worse than just using the proprietary information - they actually then claim ownership through patent applications,' Buether said.
The following slide expresses Google's views on premium content
Google's efforts to monopolize civil society in support of the company's balance-sheet-driven agenda is as dangerous as it is wrong. For years, we have watched as Google used its monopoly powers to hurt artists and music creators while profiting off stolen content. For years, we have warned about Google's actions that stifle the views of anyone who disagrees with its business practices, while claiming to champion free speech.
"The 160-page critique, which was supposed to remain private but was inadvertently disclosed in an open-records request, concluded that Google's 'conduct has resulted - and will result - in real harm to consumers.' " But Google was never penalized, because the political appointees overrode the staff recommendation, an action rarely taken by the FTC. The Journal pointed out that Google, whose executives donated more money to the Obama campaign than any company, had held scores of meetings at the White House between the time the staff filed its report and the ultimate decision to drop the enforcement action.
Some scrappy (& perhaps masochistic players) have been fighting the monopoly game for over a decade:
June 2006: Foundem's Google search penalty begins. Foundem starts an arduous campaign to have the penalty lifted.
September 2007: Foundem is'whitelisted' for AdWords (i.e. Google manually grants Foundem immunity from its AdWords penalty).
December 2009: Foundem is'whitelisted' for Google natural search (i.e. Google manually grants Foundem immunity from its search penalty)
For many years Google has "manipulated search results to favor its own comparison-shopping service. ... Google both demotes competitors' offerings in search rankings and artificially inserts its own service in a box above all other search results, regardless of their relevance."
After losing for over a decade, on the 27th of June a win was finally delivered when the European Commission issued a manual action to negate the spam, when they fined Google €2.42 billion for abusing dominance as search engine by giving illegal advantage to own comparison shopping service.
"What Google has done is illegal under EU antitrust rules. It denied other companies the chance to compete on the merits and to innovate. And most importantly, it denied European consumers a genuine choice of services and the full benefits of innovation." - Margrethe Vestager
Quoting internal Google documents and emails, the report shows that the company created a list of rival comparison shopping sites that it would artificially lower in the general search results, even though tests showed that Google users'liked the quality of the [rival] sites' and gave negative feedback on the proposed changes. Google reworked its search algorithm at least four times, the documents show, and altered its established rating criteria before the proposed changes received'slightly positive' user feedback. ... Google's displayed prices for everyday products, such as watches, anti-wrinkle cream and wireless routers, were roughly 50 percent higher - sometimes more - than those on rival sites. A subsequent study by a consumer protection group found similar results. A study by the Financial Times also documented the higher prices.
Nonetheless, Google is appealing it. The ease with which Google quickly crafted a response was telling.
The competitors who were slaughtered by monopolistic bundling won't recover'The damage has been done. The industry is on its knees, and this is not going to put it back,' said Mr. Stables, who has decided to participate in Google's new auctions despite misgivings.'I'm sort of shocked that they've come out with this,' he added.
Google claims they'll be running their EU shopping ads as a separate company with positive profit margins & that advertisers won't be bidding against themselves if they are on multiple platforms. Anyone who believes that stuff hasn't dropped a few thousand dollars on a Flash-only website after AdWords turned on Enhanced campaigns against their wishes - charging the advertisers dollars per click to send users to a blank page which would not load.
"Monopolists can improve their products to better serve their customers just like any other market participant" <-- FTC Chair just said this— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) September 12, 2017
The Fight Against Rising (& Declining) Nationalism
As a global corporation above & beyond borders, Google has long been against nationalism. Eric Schmidt's Hillary Clinton once wrote: "My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere."
We are writing to express our deep concerns about the European Union's aggressive and heavy-handed antitrust enforcement action against American companies. It has become increasingly clear that, rather than being grounded in a transparent legal framework, these various investigations and complaints are being driven by politics and protectionist policies that harm open-competition practices, consumers, and unfairly target American companies,.
The above nonsense was in spite of Yelp carrying a heavy load.
The lion's share of work on EU case was advanced by US companies who had to go to Europe after a politically captured FTC failed them. 6/x— Luther Lowe (@lutherlowe) June 26, 2017
Yelp celebrated the victory: "Google has been found guilty of engaging in illegal conduct with the aim of promoting its vertical search services. Although the decision addresses comparison shopping services, the European Commission has also recognized that the same illegal behavior applies to other verticals, including local search."
It's not a'grudge.' Extractive platforms competing with their ecosystem is the Achilles heel of the entire economy https://t.co/uLKSLC6vQy— Tim O'Reilly (@timoreilly) July 2, 2017
These reporters aren't ideologues. They're just right-thinking people who lean left. Somewhere along the line, they stopped pretending to be objective about Trump. ... People don't just disagree with each other. They can't imagine how a decent caring human being could disagree with their own view of race or the minimum wage or immigration or Trump. Being a member of the virtuous tribe means not only carrying the correct card in your wallet to reassure yourself. You have to also believe that the people carrying any other card are irrational, or worse, evil. They're not people to engage in conversation with. They are barriers to be ignored or pushed aside on the virtuous path to paradise. This intolerance and inability to imagine the virtue of the other side is the road to tyranny and chaos. It dehumanizes a good chunk of humanity and that in turn justifies the worst atrocities human beings are capable of.
The WSJ, typically a right-leaning publication, is differentiating their coverage of the president from most other outlets by attempting to be somewhat neutral.
The news is fake. Even historically left-leaning people are disgusted with outlets like CNN.
"I think the president is probably right to say, like, look you are witch-hunting me. You have no smoking gun, you have no real proof." - CNN supervising producer John Bonifield
"When you do shitty reporting like CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times & Rachel Maddow especially. When you do that & it is revealed to be bullshit, what you're doing is building up Trump. There's no greater way to build up Trump than to falsely report on him. There's no better way to build up Trump than to make him the victim." - Jimmy Dore
"Rachel Maddow was given the facts, she ignored them, & she kept right on going. That's MSNBC, that's CNN, that's the New York Times, the Washington Post - they're all horrible. That's why we had the Iraq war. That's why we have the Syria war. That's why we are still in Afghanistan. That's why we had Libya. That's why we have the biggest income disparity since the gilded age. Meanwhile we are spending more on the military than the rest of the world." - Jimmy Dore
And, since people need something to believe in, there are new American Gods:
"A half hour of cable news delivers enough psychic trauma for a whole year. The newspapers are talking of nothing but treason, espionage, investigations, protests." ... "Stocks are rallying because of how little faith we have in the government. The Mega Blue Chip Corporation is the new Sovereign."
Current Headwinds for Online Publishing
I struggle to keep up with the accelerating rate of change. A number of common themes in the current ecosystem are:
We are moving toward a world where more things are becoming fake (only accelerated by the demonetization of neutrality & the algorithmic boost associated with reliably delivering confirmation bias in an algorithmic or manual fashion)
risk keeps being radiated outward to the individual while monopoly platforms capture the spoils (forced-place health insurance purchases where the insurance company arbitrarily drops the sick member on the policy even though that is supposed to be illegal, more temp jobs where people don't get enough hours to get health insurance through their employer, under-funded pensions, outsourcing of core business functions to sweatshops where part-time workers don't get paid for dozens to hundreds of hours of required training & get to watch beheading videos all day)
the barrier to entry keeps increasing (increased marketing cost due to brand bias, heavy ad loads on dominant platforms, & central platforms making partners do "bet the farm" moves in how they adjust distribution to drive adoption of proprietary formats & temporarily over-promote select content formats)
the increasing chunk size of competition is making it much harder for individuals to build sustainable businesses. (Yes the tools of the trade are improving quickly, BUT the central platforms are demonetizing the adjacent fields faster than publishing tools & business options improve.)
Some of this stuff is cyclical. About a decade ago the European Commission went after Microsoft for bundling Internet Explorer. Google complained about the monopolistic practices to ensure Microsoft was fined. And we've went from that to a web where Google syndicates native ads that blend into page content while directly funding robot journalism. And then Google is ranking the robot-generated crap too.
Speaking of robot journalists, check out the top 3 results for this query. All 3 are auto-written by automated insights (AI software). Yikes http://pic.twitter.com/ltFGFXHNiF— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 8, 2017
While Google distributes their Chrome browser as unwanted bundleware, other web browsers must display uninstall links front & center when trying to gain awareness of their product using Google AdWords. Microsoft Edge is coming to Android, but without a BrowserChoice.eu screen it is unlikely most users will change their web browser as most are unaware of what a web browser even is, let alone the limitations of any of them or the tracking embedded in them.
If you go back several years, there was celebration of the fact that the cost of doing a startup was so low. You didn't have to pay Oracle a million dollars for a server license any more. You didn't even have to rack your own hardware. Now you can just dial it up on Amazon. But there are now these gatekeepers and toll-takers. Back in 2004, you had the wide-open internet. - Jeremy Stoppelman
The Mobile Revolution
If you are an anti-social work at home webmaster who has dual monitors it is easy to dismiss cell phones as inefficient and chalk most mobile usage up to the following.
Russian man visited Chinese click farm.They make fake ratings for mobile apps and things like this.He said they have 10,000 more phones http://pic.twitter.com/qE96vgCCsi— English Russia (@EnglishRussia1) May 11, 2017
The reality is cell phones are more powerful than they seem if you are strictly consuming rather than working.
Deflationary impact of technology: everything in this Radio Shack flyer from 1991 adds up to $3,285.12 and can be done today on a smartphone http://pic.twitter.com/ONh3waWVgq— Jeffrey Kleintop (@JeffreyKleintop) June 23, 2017
And that is how the unstoppable quickly becomes the extinct!
Many people the world over are addicted to their cell phones to where viral game makers are self-regulating before regulators step in: "From Tuesday, users below 12 years of age will be limited to one hour of play time each day, while those aged between 12 years and 18 years will be limited to two hours a day, Tencent said."
In spite of all those restrictions, last year "Chinese consumers spent $5.5 trillion through mobile payment platforms, about 50 times more than their American counterparts." In the last quarter Baidu had ¥20.87 billion in revenues, with 72% of their revenues driven by mobile.
"We didn't have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people." ... "Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It's not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones." ... "Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy."
The web is becoming easier to get addicted to due to personalization algorithms that reinforce our worldviews even as they make us feel more isolated and left out. And the barrier to entry for consumers into one of the few central gatekeeper ecosystems is dropping like a rock due to the falling cost of mobile devices, coupled with with images & video displacing text making literacy optional. As we become more "connected" we feel more isolated:
"Social isolation, loneliness or living alone was each a significant factor contributing to premature death. And each one of these factors was a more significant risk factor for dying than obesity. ... No one knows precisely why loneliness is surging, threatening the lives of many millions of people, but it does seem that the burgeoning use of technology may have something to do with it. Personally, I would contend that technology may be the chief factor fueling it."
The primary role of the big data mining companies is leveraging surveillance for social engineering
Unsettling that according to Mark Zuckerberg purpose of Facebook is forced social engineering. From "World Without Mind" by Franklin Foer: http://pic.twitter.com/CHRnefg9m2— Murtaza Hussain (@MazMHussain) October 8, 2017
The reason those numbers can easily sound fake & mobile can seem overblown is how highly concentrated usage has become: "over 80 percent of consumer time on mobile devices is now spent on the apps, websites and properties" of just five companies: Facebook, Google, Apple, Yelp and Bing.
eMarketer stated Google will have more mobile ad revenue than desktop ad revenue in the US this year. They also predicted Google & Facebook will consume over 2/3 of US online ad spend within 2 years.
The central network operators not only maintain an outsized share of revenues, but also maintain an outsized share of profits. When the home team gets a 30% rake of any sale it is hard for anyone else to compete. Even after buying and gutting Motorola Google bought part of HTC for $1.1 billion. The game plan has never changed: commoditize the compliment to ensure user data & most of the profits flow to Google. Put up arbitrary roadblocks for competing services while launching free parallel offerings to drive lock-in.
For the last YEAR I've been battling App Store rejections - we made an app called Animoji with animated emojis...now I know why. https://t.co/jKJXfLMGj2— Ryan Jones (@rjonesy) September 9, 2017
it's intended to create a bizarre sense of panic among marketers - "OMG, we have to be present at every possible instant someone might be looking at their phone!" - which doesn't help them think strategically or make the best use of their marketing or ad spend.
The reality is that if you don't have a relationship with a person on their desktop computer they probably don't want your mobile app either.
If you have the relationship then mobile only increases profits.
Is iOS 11 specifically designed to make your older iPhones unusable and drain your battery so you have to upgrade to the newest phones?— Eric Jackson (@ericjackson) October 7, 2017
This year, in-app mobile ad spend will reach $45.3 billion, up $11 billion from last year, according to eMarketer. And apps are where the money is at for mobile advertising, comprising 80 percent of all U.S. media dollars spent on mobile.
But multi-tasking means doing almost everything else worse. The "always on" mode not only increases isolation, but also lowers our ability to focus:
"while our phones offer convenience and diversion, they also breed anxiety. Their extraordinary usefulness gives them an unprecedented hold on our attention and vast influence over our thinking and behavior. ... Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren't using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens. ... when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline. ... As the phone's proximity increased, brainpower decreased. ... Anticipating that information would be readily available in digital form seemed to reduce the mental effort that people made to remember it. ... people are all too quick to credit lies and half-truths spread through social media by Russian agents and other bad actors. If your phone has sapped your powers of discernment, you'll believe anything it tells you."
Desktop ad clicks convert to purchases. Mobile ad clicks convert to ad budget burned: "marketers are still seeing few shoppers purchasing on mobile. The 52% of share in traffic only has 26% share of revenue."
For traditional publishers mobile users drastically under-monetize desktop users due to
drastically lower conversion rates (true for almost everyone in ecommerce outside of Amazon perhaps)
limited cross-device tracking (how do you track people who don't even hit your site but hit a cached page hosted via Google AMP or Facebook Instant Articles?)
lower ad load allowed on publisher sites due to limited screen size
aggressive filtering of fat thumb ad clicks on partner sites from central ad networks
For the central network operators almost all the above are precisely the exact opposite.
higher ad CTR by making entire interface ads (& perhaps even disappearing the concept of non-ads in the result set)
great cross-device user tracking
higher ad load allowed by the small screen size pushing content below the fold
more lenient filtering of fat thumb accidental ad clicks
If you look at raw stats without understanding the underlying impact, it is easy to believe the ecosystem is healthy.
Assumption: Google's ads are more prominent, so organic must be dying.Reality: As of Oct. 2016, 20X more organic clicks than paid ones. http://pic.twitter.com/FaEBpBZWSw— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) July 1, 2017
However the huge number of "no click" results are demonetizing easy publisher revenues, which have traditionally helped to fund more in-depth investigative reporting. Further, much of the direct navigation which happened in the past is now being passed through brand-related search result pages. You can argue that is an increase in search traffic, or you can argue it is shifting the roll of the address bar from navigation to search.
The first page is nothing but ads
Yep, and here they are in Philly. Home service ads, then AdWords traditional ads, then the local pack (way down below). :) http://pic.twitter.com/VOVZPWWHsg— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) July 17, 2017
On mobile so is the second, and most of the third
Hey, only 2.5 screens before you get to the 10 blue links. A full 4 screens if you cannot crack the top 2 organics. http://pic.twitter.com/bbm1pz8hyF— Jeremy Bochenek (@J_Bochenek) July 17, 2017
If a search query has lots of easy to structure crap around it, a user might need 6 or 7 scrolls to get to an organic result
Then if third parties go "well Google does this, so I should too" they are considered a low quality user experience and get a penalty.
Emailed a client one month ago when I picked up ultra-aggressive ads (especially on mobile). They just received an ad experiences warning. http://pic.twitter.com/QLLZci1xKW— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 25, 2017
31% ad coverage on mobile website is excessive / spam / low quality user experience for a publisher, while 301% coverage is reasonable for the central network operators.
And when a user finally reaches the publisher's website (provided they scroll past the ads, the AMP listings, and all the other scrape-n-displace trash) then when they finally land on a publication Google will overlay other recommended articles from other sites.
That feature will eventually end up including ads in it, where publishers will get 0.00% of the revenue generated.
Remember how Google suggested publishers should make their websites faster, remove ads, remove clutter, etc. What was the point of all that? To create free real estate for Google to insert a spam unit into your website?
Continuing coverage of Google's new content recos. I'm sure Best Buy is thrilled to see Amazon show up while someone is on their page. Ouch. http://pic.twitter.com/qpDyGKPyYh— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 24, 2017
Even politically biased outlets that appear to be nearly perfectly optimized for a filter bubble that promotes identity politics struggle to make the numbers work: "As a result of continued decline in direct advertising, [Salon's] total revenue in the fiscal year 2017 decreased by 34% to $4.6 million. Following the market trend, 84% of our advertising revenue in fiscal year 2017 was generated by programmatic selling. ... [Monthly unique visitors to our website saw] a decrease of 23%. We attribute the decline primarily to the changes in the algorithms used by Facebook."
The above sorts of numbers are the logical outcome to this:
we've heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it's difficult to find the actual content, they aren't happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away. So sites that don't have much content"above-the-fold" can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn't have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site's initial screen real estate to ads, that's not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.
As you scroll through it, you are then given travel ads for flight options through Google Flight search, hotels through Google Hotel search and restaurants through Google Local results. Then towards the bottom of the knowledge graph card, all the way at the end in a small grayish font, you have a link to "see web results."
Bad news for TripAdvisor.
Google has squeezed out SEO for travel. PCLN/EXPE SEM $ spend and higher conversion is a massive competitive advantage. Bad news for TRIP. http://pic.twitter.com/39QkxuN780— modest proposal (@modestproposal1) April 17, 2017
As the entire ecosystem gets squeezed by middlemen and the market gets obfuscated with an incomplete selection it is ultimately consumers who lose: "Reservations made through Internet discount sites are almost always slated for our worst rooms."
"For six years, his company has been locked in a campaign on three continents to get antitrust regulators to punish Google, Yelp's larger, richer and more politically connected competitor. ... Yelp concluded that there was no better way to get Google's attention than to raise the specter of regulation. ... something [Mark Mahaney] calls the Death of Free Google. As the internet has migrated to mobile phones, Google has compensated for the smaller screen space by filling it with so many ads that users can have a hard time finding a result that hasn't been paid for."
People can literally switch their name to "Loop dee Loop"
and leave you terrible, fake reviews.
Google's lack of effort & investment to clean up trash in their local services department highlights that they don't feel they need to compete on quality. Pay for core search distribution, throw an inferior service front & center, and win by default placement.
As AI advancements make fake reviews look more legit Google's lack of investment in creating a quality ecosystem will increasingly harm both consumers and businesses. Many low margin businesses will go under simply because their Google reviews are full of inaccurate trash or a competitor decided to hijack their business listing or list their business as closed.
Yelp said it investigated and found that over one hour, Google pulled images from Yelp's servers nearly 386,000 times for business listings in Google Maps, which Google exempted from its promise to not scrape content. Yelp then searched Google for 150 of the businesses from those map listings and found that for 110 of them, Google used a Yelp photo as the lead image in the businesses' listings in search results.
Stealing content & wrapping it in fake reviews is NOT putting the user first.
The aggregate quality of mobile ad clicks is quite low. So as mobile becomes a much higher percent of total ad clicks, those who don't have scale and narrative control are reduced to taking whatever they can get. And mainstream media outlets are reduced to writing puff pieces so the brands they cover will pay to promote the stories on the main channels.
As programmatic advertising, ad blockers, unpatched Android-powered botnets & malwarespread each day gets a little uglier for everyone but the central market operators. It is so bad that some of the central market operators offer surveillance apps which claim to protect user privacy! Other app makers not connected to monopoly profit streams monetize any way they can.
I feel terrible for journalists who invest time and effort into doing a hard job well only to have it presented like this. http://pic.twitter.com/jIZxuJqVAq— Jeff Long (@banterability) October 5, 2017
As long as news websites make their own customer experience worse than what can be found as a cached copy on the monopoly platforms there is no reason to visit the end publisher website. That is why the proprietary formats promoted by the monopoly platforms are so dangerous. They force lighter monetization & offset the lack of revenue by given preferential placement:
click through rate from Google search went from 5.9% (Regular) to 10.3% (AMP), and average search position went from 5.9 (Regular) to 1.7 (AMP). Since then, we have deployed AMP across fifteen of our brands and we have been very pleased with the results. Today, AMP accounts for 79% of our mobile search traffic and 36% of our total mobile visits.
As long as almost nobody is using the new proprietary, ghetto lock-in format the math may work out there, but once many people adopt it then it becomes another recurring sunk cost with no actual benefit:
the only voices promoting AMP's performance benefits are coming from inside Google. ... given how AMP pages are privileged in Google's search results, the net effect of the team's hard, earnest work comes across as a corporate-backed attempt to rewrite HTML in Google's image.
Even if you get a slight uptick in traffic from AMP, it will lead to lower quality user engagement as users are browsing across websites rather than within websites. Getting a bit more traffic but 59% fewer leads is a fail.
"The only way publishers can address this inexorable threat is by banding together. If they open a unified front to negotiate with Google and Facebook-pushing for stronger intellectual-property protections, better support for subscription models and a fair share of revenue and data-they could build a more sustainable future for the news business. But antitrust laws make such coordination perilous. These laws, intended to prevent monopolies, are having the unintended effect of preserving and protecting Google and Facebook's dominant position."
Wait a minute.
Wasn't it the New York Times which claimed Yelp was holding an arbitrary grudge against Google?
newspapers that once delivered their journalism with their own trucks increasingly have to rely on these big online platforms to get their articles in front of people, fighting for attention alongside fake news, websites that lift their content, and cat videos.
Well maybe that is just smaller publications & not the gray lady herself
"the temperature is rising in terms of concern, and in some cases anger, about what seems like a very asymmetric, disadvantageous relationship between the publishers and the very big digital platforms." - NYT CEO Mark Thompson
Apparently Yelp does not qualify as a publisher in this instance.
Or does it?
The Times is backing the move for what is called an anticompetitive safe haven, in part, Mr. Thompson said, "because we care about the whole of journalism as well as about The New York Times."
In the fourth quarter, the reduction in marketing that occurred was almost all in the digital space. And what it reflected was a choice to cut spending from a digital standpoint where it was ineffective: where either we were serving bots as opposed to human beings, or where the placement of ads was not facilitating the equity of our brands.
The initiative, dubbed Reporters and Data and Robots (RADAR), will see a team of five journalists work with Natural Language Generation software to produce over 30,000 pieces of content for local media each month.
Hopefully editors catch the subtle errors the bots make, because most of them will not be this obvious & stupid.
In a show of strength last year, Microsoft used thousands of these chips at once to translate all of English Wikipedia into Spanish-3 billion words across five million articles-in less than a tenth of a second. Next Microsoft will let its cloud customers use these chips to speed up their own AI tasks.
If Google is subsidizing robotic journalism they are thus legitimizing robotic journalism. As big publishers employ the tactic, Google ranks it.
Checking some Heliograf articles (AI-written) reveals once again they do rank well. Google is in a tough position here. It's inevitable... http://pic.twitter.com/g0Etcx3rFj— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) September 16, 2017
It is almost impossible to compete economically with an entity that rewrites your work & has zero marginal cost of production.
YouTube has perhaps the worst comments on the web. Some mainstream news sites got rid of comments because they couldn't justify the cost of policing them. That in turn shifts the audience & attention stream to sites like Facebook & Twitter. Some news sites which are still leaving comments enabled rely on a Google filter, a technology Google can use on YouTube as they see fit.
Any plugins publishers use to lower their costs can later disappear. It looked like FindTheBest was doing well financially, but when it was acquired many news sites quickly found out the cost of free as they now have thousands of broken articles in their archives: "Last month, Graphiq announced that features for news publishers would no longer be available after Friday."
Driving costs toward zero by piling on external dependencies is no way to build a sustainable business. Especially when the central network operators are eating the playing field:
"Between fast-loading AMP articles from major news brands hosted in its domain, full pages of information scraped from outside sites that don't require you to visit them, basic shopping functions built into ads, YouTube, and a host of other features, the Google-verse is more of a digital walled garden than ever. ... If Google continues to choke these sites out, what incentive will there be for new ones to come along?"
Unprofitable partners which were buying growth with artificially cheap pricing eventually find out investors want profits more than growth & either reprice or go away. The longer you use something & the more locked in you are to it the more aggressively it can afford to reprice. Symbiotic relationships devolve into abusive ones:
"for every pound an advertiser spends programmatically on the Guardian only 30 pence actually goes to the publisher." - Mediatel
"Google wants to cut out the middlemen, which it turns out, are URLs." - MobileMoxie
"[AMP is] a way for Google to obfuscate your website, usurp your content & remove any personal credibility from the web" - TheRegister
"Though the stated initiative of ads.txt is to stop inventory resale, it achieves this by establishing 'preferred' channels, which naturally favors the industry's most influential companies" - Ad Exchanger
Those who think the central network operators are naive to the power structure being promoted by the faux solutions are either chasing short-term goals or are incredibly masochistic.
Arbitraging brand is the core business model of the attention merchant monopoly.
we've found out that 98% of our business was coming from 22 words. So, wait, we're buying 3,200 words and 98% of the business is coming from 22 words. What are the 22 words? And they said, well, it's the word Restoration Hardware and the 21 ways to spell it wrong, okay?
They can hard-code any data type or feature, price it at free to de-fund adjacent businesses, consolidate market power, then increase rents after they have a monopoly position in the adjacent market.
Why not make hosting free, get people to publish into a proprietary format & try to shift news reading onto the Google app. With enough attention & market coverage they can further extort publishers into accepting perpetually worse deals. And free analytics & business plugins which are widely adopted can have key features get pushed into the paid version. Just look at Google Analytics - its free or $150,000+/yr.
"It's important that we be transparent about the training data that we are using, and are looking for hidden biases in it, otherwise we are building biased systems," Giannandrea added. "If someone is trying to sell you a black box system for medical decision support, and you don't know how it works or what data was used to train it, then I wouldn't trust it."
And how does Google justify their AI investments? Through driving incremental ad clicks: "The DeepMind founders understand that their power within [Alphabet], and their ability to get their way with [Alphabet CEO] Larry Page, depends on how many eyeballs and clicks and ad dollars they can claim to be driving"
No bias at all there!
Truth: Google killed publishing in 2015. What you're reading now is detritus + new junk posted by crazies walking around empty offices— 11 (@searchsleuth998) August 1, 2017
Looking at 2015 vs 2017 data for all keywords ranking organically on the first page, we’ve seen a dramatic change in CTR. Below we’ve normalized our actual CTR on a 1–10 scale, representing a total drop of 25% of click share on desktop and 55% on mobile.
SEOs who were overly reliant on the search channel were the first to notice all the above sorts of change, as it is their job to be hyper-aware of ecosystem shifts. But publishers far removed from SEO who never focused on SEO are now writing about the trends SEOs were writing about nearly a decade ago. Josh Marshall recently covered Google's awesome monopoly powers.
few publishers really want to talk about the depths or mechanics of Google's role in news publishing. Some of this is secrecy about proprietary information; most of it is that Google could destroy or profoundly damage most publications if it wanted to. So why rock the boat? ... Google's monopoly control is almost comically great. It's a monopoly at every conceivable turn and consistently uses that market power to deepen its hold and increase its profits. Just the interplay between DoubleClick and Adexchange is textbook anti-competitive practices. ... Is your favorite website laying off staff or 'pivoting to video'. In most cases, the root cause is not entirely but to a significant degree driven by the platform monopolies
His article details how Google owns many points of the supply chain
So let's go down the list: 1) The system for running ads, 2) the top purchaser of ads, 3) the most pervasive audience data service, 4) all search, 5) our email. ... But wait, there's more! Google also owns Chrome, the most used browser for visiting TPM.
He also covers the price dumping technique that is used to maintain control
In many cases, alternatives don't exist because no business can get a footing with a product Google lets people use for free.
And he shared an example of Google algorithms gone astray crippling his business, even though it was not related to search & unintentional:
Because we were forwarding to ourselves spam that other people sent to us, Google decided that the owner of the TPM url was a major spammer and blocked emails from TPM from being sent to anyone.
