Content Aware media news: August 24, 2023

Content Aware this week: Google's traffic roller coaster, malvertising, and whose recommended content is it anyway?

Published: 09:10, 25 August 2023

The Health Lottery bets on GPP
With a unique set of requirements to be met in a competitive market, The Health Lottery has selected Glide to power the needs of their ambitious plans - welcome to GPP!
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Core update drops from Google
Google's traffic roller coaster - which continues to pretend to be a search engine (we know, we're laying it on thick) - has had a core update. As ever, we await developments, of which there could be many, or none. As always, keeo an eye on your traffic stats and look for changes.
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Corbidge comments on... whose recommended content is it?
A good content recommendation strategy is something we all know has real value and effect. So did YouTube tweak something in order to popularise their Shorts content and leave long form video fans shortchanged? Our man in the know investigates.
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Events, dear Mark, events
Meta's truculent response to Canada's content payment legislation has become hostage to events in the natural world - what with all the wildfires and emergency evacuations and other pesky real-world matters that people might want to know about. It's hard not to look like a villain when you are behaving like a villain. Justin Trudeau is not amused.
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Adverts infiltrated by dangerous trash
With a less than buoyant advertising market, and a market already distorted by Big Tech control, it's not a surprise that the less-than-scrupulous are using "Malvertising" to deceive people.
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Chronologically yours
Social media giants will have to offer users content ordered chronologically under new European Union laws. Meta is apparently ready for it. It will be interesting to see how the EU's experiment in providing content free of an algorithm's interference will fly in the "real" world.
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End of FAQs and How-To - the effect
Google recently removed FAQ boxes from desktop and mobile search and How-To snippets from mobile. What have been the initial effects on site traffic?
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Pinterest looks to new advertising experience
Social media company Pinterest, a sort of Instagram for things, has quite a special proposition. They are now exploring how to improve the advertising experience for their users, and a recent patent filing shows they are working on "context-based advertisement prediction". While this is not a path unique to them, it's fascinating to see their thinking.
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Price of freedom = eternal vigilance
A new and well-funded policy group has been formed with the aim of influencing "future internet policy toward maintaining an open internet and an independent press".
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This headline must go
Not really. But over on X/Twitter/whatever, the headline will be a thing of the past. It looks like not-the-CEO Elon Musk wants to make shared content on his platform work a little harder for his platform. So X is behaving like every other platform then.
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NYT goes full bot block
After changing its Terms of Service to disallow content from being used for the training of AI systems, the NYT has now also blocked OpenAI's crawler from its sites. We await its mooted legal action over content use with interest.
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