Highlights

• Google Chrome will start blocking intrusive ads
• Store employees delivering for Walmart
• Free newsletter gives you heads-up on Netflix streaming dates
• Amazon manufacturing more items

Google says that its Chrome browser will block intrusive ads starting in 2018.
 
About 15% of computer visits to websites are performed with ad blocking software installed. The software hasn’t caught on with mobile users yet, and the world’s largest online ad company is being proactive fast and filtering what it calls intrusive ads. Intrusive ads include those with audio or video that automatically plays or those that cover up the content.

Usability experts confirm that “autoplay” ads and any ad that forces a user to close it are among the least popular among users. Also high up on the list are ads within content and deceptive links.

Google updated its publisher guidelines this week to alert publishers which ads are at risk of being blocked. Industry watchers don’t expect Google ads to be blocked in the first version.

The Wall Street Journal in an unrelated development removed non-subscriber access to its content this week and has publicly complained that Google’s search engine has reduced its visibility. A best practice of search engine optimization is that all people should receive at least limited views of content indexed in a search engine.

Learn more fast: Google announcement, Nielsen Group on “most hated” ads, Vox coverage, Bloomberg on the WSJ changes

Households receiving US federal assistance such as the SNAP, TANF, and WIC programs can receive Amazon Prime services for $5.99 monthly instead of $10.99. Government funds can’t be used to pay for Prime but can be used for food and other covered items, which Amazon would then deliver in two days with no shipping charge.

Amazon has broadened its offerings and now sells its own branded items. Amazon now has 15% of online market share for sales of baby wipes and batteries. Amazon currently sells about as many of its batteries online as Duracell and Energizer combined according to analyst Mary Meeker in the report we covered last week.

Struggling to keep up with Amazon online, Walmart is testing deliveries made by store employees on their way home. Walmart is paying employees in three stores to take the items from the store and use a phone app to deliver them on their way home. The voluntary project is still in its earliest testing phases, but analysts are intrigued with Walmart’s 4,700 store locations within 10 miles of 90% of the country’s population.

Learn more fast: Amazon announcement, Recode on Amazon private label sales, CNBC on Walmart

How about having a spreadsheet make a chart of your data by simply typing a plain language command? That’s only one of several announcements Google recently made to improve its Sheets, Docs, and other office suite programs.

There is also a new SORTN function that automatically displays top values, as well as the ability to keep data in multiple documents automatically synchronized.

Get all the details in the Google announcement

One last fun item is a free subscription to our sister newsletter from Movie Rewind.

Sue runs that site in addition to her Silver Beacon work and has built it into an online giant that receives tens of thousands of visitors. More than 13,000 people also subscribe to the weekly newsletter featuring hand-curated Netflix streaming dates.

You can join them and get a fresh look every Thursday at new Netflix streaming data. Start receiving your newsletter at this link. 

Highlights

• The Facebook Files are leaked Facebook documents about extreme content there.
• Google disrupted retail, hotel, and photo sites at its annual conference.
• The FCC is threatening net neutrality protection. We explain because it’s important.

The Internet got a look at Facebook’s rules for addressing complaints about extreme sexual, violent, and hate-based content Sunday. The Guardian, an English newspaper that has an outsized online presence, published excerpts and photographs of internal Facebook documents that guide the company’s response to extreme content.

Many will complain about rules such as “Some photos of non-sexual physical abuse and bullying of children do not have to be deleted or “actioned” unless there is a sadistic or celebratory element” as quoted by the newspaper. Others will argue that soon-to-be 7,000 moderators of the site’s 2 billion users need explicit and consistent guidelines. 

We think that both positions are correct. It’s horrible to live in a world where murder, terrorism, and abuse are posted online for anyone to see. And the people who delete the worst content should have rules.

The main Facebook Files page has links to the various Facebook documents and some interactive content. If you go past that main page, you will see things that are disturbing or not safe for work, school, or public computers.

 

Imagine that you’re planning a trip.

Google wants to sell you those cute photo books that you can buy from websites like Snapfish and Shutterfly. And while they’re at it, you can see price trends for a hotel by day of week and week of the year. Find a good result in Google for anything you might need to buy and the Google search page might let you buy the item with a click.

These are all initiatives made public at Google I/O–an annual conference Google hosts for 7,000 developers. The plan is for those people to get excited about the new capabilities, go home and build services that use them.

Google announced more than 100 initiatives last week. Most aren’t this big. Some were announcements of technical achievements, such as Google voice recognition surpassing 95%. That’s up from 91% one year ago–a big leap.

There are countless changes that will happen in society when voice recognition reaches 99%. Consider people who can’t type or others who work as switchboard operators. 

VentureBeat has a great article about speech recognition improvements, SEL has the scoop on hotel pricing trends, and Google talks about its revamped Photos service. 

And that Buy button thing?  Only firms buying Google Shopping ads with automated product feeds should be considering applying for the beta test, but we’re pretty sure that Google would be happy to send future buyers directly to a website shopping cart.

Stay tuned, and don’t be surprised when you see the national retail chains try out the function. 

That’s the net neutrality symbol above.

The fancy phrase means that the company selling you Internet connectivity (Verizon FIOS, Comcast, AT&T, etc.) is required to treat all Internet traffic the same. Those companies are not allowed to favor their services or slow down competing services.

That’s what happened when AT&T started slowing down phone service for people using the Facetime video calling service. That’s just an example. There are plenty of other abuses throughout history. Suppose you watch too many Netflix movies for your provider’s profit margins? You might find that Netflix doesn’t stream smoothly anymore. That’s happened too.

The FCC finally established two years ago that the Internet is a communications service and subject to FCC regulation. Within weeks, service providers were required to treat all Internet traffic the same.

On Thursday, the FCC acting in conjunction with the White House, announced that it plans to stop regulating broadband carriers. The agency is taking comments until August 16th and then will schedule a final vote.

You will hear more about this. Pay attention to who is doing the reporting. Companies like Verizon, for example, own AOL, Yahoo, and their editorial properties like Huffington Post. Meanwhile, Comcast owns NBC, CNBC, and even The Weather Channel. Imagine if HBO streaming didn’t work well on Comcast connections while NBC worked fine. Or if Verizon FIOS customers couldn’t stream Netflix but had no trouble with the company’s pay-per-view offerings. 

If you’re reading this, you are personally affected as a consumer in many ways–most of which we can’t even project yet. 

To get more news about net neutrality, read this article at Ars Technica and this one at The Los Angeles Times.

 

Image of Google Photos courtesy Google. Net Neutrality logo treatment courtesy Gerald Altmann.

Highlights

• Wall Street Slams Snapchat Parent’s Stock
• Verified Local Reviews Showing on Google
• How Last Friday’s Cyberattack was Stopped… in English

 

Why would Silver Beacon keep touting Snapchat as a marketing channel when the news was full of the company missing estimates?

Ah, so glad that our newsletter friends asked. Financial markets always overhyped the company.  “Snapchat Stumbles” was the headline of its first-ever earnings call. The company missed its consensus user and revenue goalsduring Q1. But your organization should care because Snapchat has 166 million daily active users and 63% are younger than 35. Snapchat is making 90 cents per user. The company has been working on a self-serve ad platform this year. That service just launched, but this is not a place for neophytes. Advertising created by people who are unfamiliar with Snap-style will waste money on ads.

Facebook suffered a similar setback shortly after it went public in 2012. The company righted itself, however, and continues growing as the above chart shows. As Marketing Chart’s superb analysis points out, Facebook’s US ad revenue consistently expanded 10 times faster than its audience growth. Facebook’s revenue per user is $4.23 worldwide and pushed close to $20 per user in the US at the end of last year. 

The most impressive number is that Facebook controls 5% of global advertising spending.

We told you in March that Google’s Trusted Stores program was ending. In its place is Google’s Verified Customer Reviews program. You’ve undoubtedly already seen that Google reduces its liability because  this switch means that consumers, not Google, are the ones vouching for the business. The program’s terms call for 150 reviews before a badge can be earned. There is also a function to link your company’s reviews to your Google ads–a tactic that Google says can increase the click rate “up to 10%”.

Google is also testing a feature that shows how many businesses are advertising for specific home services businesses. The news comes via The SEM Post which also published screenshots of ads in California showing plumbing and locksmith services displays that include the notation “20+ [businesses] serving [city].”

This is a big test for Google because it can cause people to look at more ads. We know from analysis that overall ad revenue rises when more competitors enter a market, even if click costs per advertiser decrease. Google has always made its fortunes on nickels and dimes. This is potentially a scaled-up version of that idea.

You Should Know This:  The best article we’ve found about Friday’s cyberattack is “The massive, worldwide ransomware attack was stopped by a researcher ‘accidentally‘” published in Saturday’s Recode. It’s even written in English instead of tech. Reading time: a short 1 minute, 40 seconds.