Google today announced in a blog post on its AdWords blog that it is rolling out new 360-degree video advertisements to help advertisers “engage their audience in an entirely new way.” The feature is currently supported in Chrome and on Android and iOS. Users can navigate through the 360-degree video by either dragging their mouse or tilting their phone up, down, left, and right. Google originally unveiled 360 video support earlier this year.
Image via <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/buy-button-coming-to-google-search-2015-7" target="_blank">Business Insider</a>
Google confirmed at a conference in May that a “buy” button was planned for products in its search results, and today the company elaborated on those plans at a press event in NYC. The new feature called “Purchases on Google” will allow consumers to purchase products directly from ads in Google Search results. Featuring a buy button in ads when searching for products should make purchasing those products more seamless for consumers and boost the value of ads for merchants. Expand Expanding Close
HTC is really struggling to sell its One M9 flagship, and personally, I don’t think that today’s new ads are going to help it very much. The company has released three new spots to show off some features of the One M9—selfies, sound, and speed—through “blind test” videos, comparing the handset to the iPhone 6 and the Samsung Galaxy S6. Of course, the M9 wins in all three tests… Expand Expanding Close
Google has a new update out to its Remarketing Lists for Search Ads product that will make it easier for marketers to use Analytics to target the right potential customers and in the process get a higher return on their advertising dollar investment. And while these terms might sound like complete gibberish to you, from a high-level it’s actually not too complicated.
Following similar actions by Amazon and eBay, Google today announced that it is removing all goods with Confederate flag symbols from its Shopping service and Ad network. The move comes following a tragic shooting in South Carolina last week that took the li
Well, the rumors are true: HTC has just announced that it has begun testing the “displaying of a limited number of promotions” to users of the BlinkFeed app in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Taiwan, and China. If results are good, the pilot will roll-out to more countries over time.
Google has been working with Adobe to improve battery life drain caused by Flash and today flipped the switch on a new Chrome feature that does exactly that. The new feature aims to detect Flash on a webpage that is actually important to the main content and “intelligently pause content” that isn’t as important. The result is to hopefully make the web experience with Flash more power efficient to improve battery life on your laptop. Here’s how it works: Expand Expanding Close
While Google’s ad business is definitely in a transition phase, largely due to the shift away from personal computers towards mobile handsets, Google’s Senior Vice President of Ads & Commerce Sridhar Ramaswamy says that the company is handling this move well. Selling ads to advertisers may be harder with more of those ads ending up on mobile devices with smaller screens than notebooks and desktops, meaning more difficulty for customers to complete purchases, but Google is definitely taking steps toward slowing the rapid decline in ad prices.
According to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, while Google is making several moves to make advertising more valuable, the market’s more recent move to larger-screened devices has helped significantly… Expand Expanding Close
“Adblockers,” browser tools which work to hide ads from the web browsing experience, are a controversial topic of discussion among those in the media industry. And for good reason, as the media industry as a whole is in the midst of a large shift from creating content for – and earning a vast majority of revenue from – the print and desktop mediums, where large boxy ads have long reigned king. But when we talk about adblockers, the one tool we’re all probably referring to, the one which has become synonymous with the term, is Adblock Plus (ABP), and the company behind it has released a dedicated browser for Android…
The Financial Times is reporting that European mobile carriers are planning to block Google and other web ads in order to reduce demands on their networks and break Google’s hold on advertising (via TNW).
According to the story, which cites anonymous sources, the carriers have installed software from Israeli ad-blocking firm Shine in their data centers to block advertising in Web pages and apps, but not social networks.
Many websites, 9to5Google among them, depend on ad revenue to deliver free content to their readers. Any move to block ads could have far-reaching consequences … Expand Expanding Close
The notorious leakster Upleaks has today posted a new image that appears to be an HTC training slide, outlining how the company plans to monetize the home screen of your HTC handset. Yes, you heard that right, HTC—if this rumor turns out to be true—is going to be placing ads and product promotions within its HTC Sense Home home screen… Expand Expanding Close
LG has uploaded a few LG G4 ads to its YouTube channel, showcasing some of the most important new features of the device. The first ad of course shows off the phone’s genuine leather backs (and it looks a lot like the Moto Selfie Stick April Fools’ video we saw a few weeks ago). Secondly, there’s a spot focused on the G4’s IPS Quantum display, and lastly there’s an ad showing off its F1.8 aperture lens.
The Knowledge Graph is a controversial—but now fundamental—part of using Google, and for most casual browsers of the web, it’s nothing but an added convenience. It already does a great job of figuring out which pieces of information are most important and accurate, and gives them to you directly within the Google search page—there’s no need to go digging through countless results to find what you want. I myself even find it useful very often, usually when I’m searching for specific facts. Something like “When was George Washington born?” is a great example.
But I’m also wary of how intelligent it has gotten in recent years, and how much more integral to the Google experience it is becoming. Not only is Google pulling content from crowd-sourced Wikipedia articles, it is now getting smart enough to pull some of the content I’ve written on this website. Knowledge Graph has been known to bring death to many pages hosting all kinds of content, with lyrics websites being the perfect example. But what happens when Knowledge Graph and its Quick Answer box are so smart that you don’t need to browse the web at all?
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…
The Wall Street Journal reports that Google is currently in talks to allow advertisers to target ads towards existing customers in search results. According to the report, Google has approached advertisers with the idea of them sharing customer information that Google would then use to target the ads.
Google today has announced that it is introducing a way to automatically convert Adobe Flash-based ads to HTML5. Google says that eligible Flash ad campaigns, both existing and new, will automatically be converted to HTML5 when uploaded through AdWords, AdWords Editor, and a variety of third-party tools.
Google has updated several online security features to help protect users from malicious sites and content. Chrome has gained new warnings about sites that attempt to fool users into downloading unwanted software, providing an option to go back to the previous page and avoid these types of sites.
Search has been updated to make it harder for those sites to show up in results, and Google has started disabling ads that link to them. All of these moves continue Google’s recent push to enhance security on its products. The company recently helped improve security by providing users an incentive to enable two-factor authentication.
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: Expand Expanding Close
Today, Winbeta noticed that the Scroogled website is no longer live, and instead redirects to a new “Why Microsoft” page. The Scroogled page had been live up until very recently, but without much publicity from Microsoft. The death of the Scroogled webpage also comes with no comment from Microsoft, who appears to want to act like it never happened in the first place.
Lightbox – the scalable multimedia ads that Google first introduced to the desktop back in 2012 and finally brought to mobile devices in September of this year – are now available to all AdWords advertisers globally.
The Lightbox format allows advertisers to quickly and easily combine existing video, images and maps in an HTML5 ad that will scale correctly for all standard ad sizes and devices. Hovering over the ad expands them to full-size no matter what the device … Expand Expanding Close
The Apple TV today received a brand new YouTube app, bringing it up to speed and largely mirroring the experience available on other set-top boxes, with new predictive search and recommendations. The previous app felt like something built by the Apple developers internally, whereas this new app seems to be predominantly designed by Google … with rich YouTube branding throughout.
Google has uploaded four new Android ads to its YouTube channel today, featuring more cute animated Android characters than you can probably handle. The ads span all of Google’s new Android products, including the new line of Nexus devices as well as Android Wear. The ads, named Scary Movie, Garage Band, Break Room, and Slightly Longer Road Trip, respectively, have hit YouTube on a day that we expect could be very big for Android. (Hint: Lollipop is probably going to start rolling out to some Nexus devices.)
Today, Google announced a new product search tool for its AdSense for Shopping platform that helps retailers monetize their websites. Walmart.com is among the early participants in the fairly new program, which displays sponsored ads across the discount mega-chain’s site that are relevant to a visitor’s product search results.
Android Wear is definitely getting a lot of attention over in Mountain View, and the company behind what has easily become the current top-dog smartwatch platform is now trying to make it even more clear why you need Android on your wrist. The LG G Watch and the Samsung Galaxy Gear are already out and making waves in the industry, and with the Moto 360 not far off—and presumably the competition as well–it seems as if Google is now ready to make sure you’re aware of all the great things Wear can do for you.
