9to5Google

Google has been fined $1.69 billion after EU regulators claimed that the tech company abused its own search system to essentially force third-party sites to use the AdSense network over other rival online ad serving companies.

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Google has announced today a couple of initiatives to make AdSense more transparent for publishers. Not only is Google announcing a new ‘Policy Center’ today that will serve as a “one-stop shop” for publishers to control policy actions on their site, but the company says that soon policy actions will happen on the page level by default, leaving ads on non-offending parts of a site alone…
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As election season comes to a close, many are still looking up information about the results. Earlier today those searches turned up some interesting results are Google surfaced fake election results at the top of the page, even putting those results front and center in Google Assistant. Now the company is making some changes to help prevent fake news from spreading.

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Despite its recent foray in the hardware business, Google is first and foremost a company that relies on advertising. And so, in turn, lots of people rely on the company’s own online monetization tool, AdSense, whose website just got a Material Design coat of paint…

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As the default browser on Samsung devices is their own ‘Internet’ app, many people never bother to switch often just end up using it. An update rolling out to the built-in browser will add support for third-party ad blockers, among other new things. While the feature is found in other Android browsers and is a common reason why people root their devices, Samsung’s scale may popularize it…

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It’s no secret that Google makes the majority of its money from advertising revenue, and has done for a very long time. So, when a product comes along to threaten that major revenue stream, it has to find ways to combat it. That’s seemingly what it’s done with AdBlock Plus, a relatively well-known Chrome extension used to block out ads across the internet. This includes the ads shown before and during video playback on YouTube…

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There might not be any topic more heated in today’s digital space than advertising. In most cases, no ads is better than any ads at all. The reality right now is, however, that no ads still also means no money to pay writers at sites like this one. With all that said, Google’s AdWords team has beautified its full-screen in-app ads (don’t worry, we don’t use these).

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You might notice that 9to5Google has changed. Indeed so has the whole network. Long before the page size/speed and advertising controversies, we knew that we needed to rethink how we presented ourselves.

While we were one of the lightest and fastest sites in our field, our feature creep and advertisers were adding complexity and page load times, which is especially crucial on mobile – an ever expanding percentage of our growing audience.

We decided to start over…
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The confluence of several different events – the great shift to mobile computing where there’s little screen real-estate, a spurning of display ads, to name just two – is causing content creators and consumers alike to rethink how today’s media gets funded. Sites like Patreon and Kickstarter remove the middle-man from the funding process for projects which require lots of upfront investment and see slow development times by allowing anyone to contribute any amount of money they want to a project’s development.

Google last year threw its own hat into the crowdfunding space with the soft launch of Contributor, a way through which consumers can pay a monthly recurring donation to fund the sites they visit while seeing less ads. Now anyone in the United States can actually use it starting today.
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Google announced today that it is updating its AdSense user consent policy to comply with requests from European Union data protection authorities. The updated user consent policy strengthens the requirement that publishes with audiences in the EU obtain permission from readers before collecting usage data and accessing cookies. Google says the updated user consent policy follows its own approach to comply with privacy laws. The company outlines the updated user consent policy for website and app publishers with EU readers and users:
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Amongst those who regularly publish content to YouTube, the video site is known for picking favorites and being a black box in terms of the communication it holds with the community when it comes to anyone other than the site’s biggest stars. The company has as of late been trying to change that perception, though, by using the YouTube Creators channel as an outlet to recognize and acknowledge the feedback and concerns of its users. Today it published a new video outlining changes and new features coming soon to the video platform.

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Few of us actively like ads, but most of us are smart enough to recognize that if we want free content, advertising is what pays the bills for the people providing it. But publishers face a growing threat from increasingly sophisticated ad-blockers that deprive them of revenue needed to remain in business. Even mobile networks and Apple are getting in on the action.

One former Google exec thinks he has the answer. Ben Barokas, former general manager of marketplace development at the search giant, is working on a new type of adblock-blocker that he thinks may not just help publishers, but also provide their readers with more choices … 
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Advertisers want to know that when they pay for a video ad on YouTube or elsewhere across the web, that the advertisement can actually be seen by viewers. A lot can effect an ad being seen, such as the viewer never scrolling to the part of the page where the ad is placed, or users simply scrolling past the ad too quickly to really catch a glimpse. Taking a look into these things, Google recently published the results of a study identifying the “5 factors of viewability,” or, in other words, the things that impact the chance of a video ad being seen.

Unsurprisingly, YouTube and Google’s video ad strategy seems to be strong compared to the rest of the web…

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Google has today started sending out a new round of invites for the “Contributor by Google” program it announced in November of last year. The service, which removes AdSense ads from your daily browsing for the price of a $2-10 monthly subscription, also saw some notable changes from when it was first shown to the world. Google has now detailed new tiers which will be available to those who have been invited to try out the expanded program…

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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVYtzF5SemU]

Google along with other tech companies including Amazon, Microsoft, and Taboola, have reportedly reached a deal with AdBlock Plus to prevent the service from blocking ads on their websites. Financial Times reports:
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Google has today launched a new platform that aims to reinvent how content creators on the Internet make money. It’s called Contributor, and it involves readers committing to a certain monthly payment of $1-3, which will in turn give visitors an ad-free browsing experience on some sites. This could potentially be a full-blown alternative to Google’s AdSense, giving publications like this one and others a new form of monetization.

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