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.

Highlights

• Google wants all website pages encrypted
• The Chrome browser will flag unsecure websites
• Facebook hiring 3,000 to monitor live video
• Why you should stop using public Wifi

 

Google flags website pages without encryption as “NOT SECURE” when they are visited using the Chrome browser and have a password or credit card field. Google announced Thursday that they will expand the program and call any unencrypted site that requires data to be entered as not secure. All sites visited in Chrome’s incognito mode will also be marked as not secure. Those two changes take effect in October. 

 

Google also began testing an option for consumers to send a text message to advertising home services businesses according to an article in The SEM Post. Their testing and ours showed that the service was not available on computers. That makes sense–you’ll text a business from your mobile device, not your computer.

We told you last week that digital advertising revenue will beat out television advertising revenue this year. We also said that the growth was due to Facebook and Google. An analysis in Recode two days later agreed that Facebook and Google are driving “nearly all growth” in global advertising. Recode includes a great chart by digital agency Zenith showing how the top 30 advertising companies now account for 44% of all ad revenue.

 

Facebook is using a lot of that advertising money to hire 3,000 new employees to monitor Facebook Live videos for violent content. Since making live video available to all users, Facebook has dealt with people streaming suicides, rapes, and murder. Our back of the envelope calculations put the cost of this initiative at an extra $200 million annually.

Organizations that use fake profiles to manage their online Facebook page may also run afoul of the company’s attempts to keep hoaxes and propaganda off the site. Facebook made its Information Operations handbook public this week and “fake profiles” are one of the company’s big targets. We’re big fans of Facebook’s Business Manager, which lets people use their personal logins without mixing their personal accounts with the organization account.

Of course, many on social media seemed to care more about a red swim suit this week than others. Sue explained it all to George who was flabbergasted that Sunny Co Clothing would would give EVERYONE a swim suit if they reposted a photo and tagged Sunny Co. Here’s the suit.

This sort of thing was a bad idea 10 years ago because people would simply repost the image for the free suit, then delete the image, and stop following the company. Given that Instagram now has 700 million members, the idea was terrible. But here’s the rest of the story via The Arizona Republic: the creative and execution were bad because the company is run by two University of Arizona seniors. They’re only honoring the first 50,000 reposts which could mean future problems for the startup. Giveaways, online contests, and sweepstakes are hard to do online if you don’t have training or support. 

We also learned about the data behind this week’s other social media viral piece: the video of talk show host Jimmy Kimmel telling the story of his baby’s birth and immediate heart emergency. Newsletter publisher Axios reported Wednesday that Kimmel’s Facebook post jumped from 1 million views to 14 million views, his Instagram posts doubled and his Twitter post was retweeted 26,000 times instead of the more typical “couple hundred”. Oh, and the video on YouTube was watched 7 million times in the first day. Your lesson here: no one–not even those who go viral more than once–has a secret recipe for going viral. You just ride the wave if you’re lucky enough to have it happen to you.

The best thing that we read all week–maybe in many weeks–is “Why You Really Need to Stop Using Public Wi-Fi” in the May 3 issue of the Harvard Business Review. It’s written for anyone to understand and is a four minute read.