Similar to how the shift from desktop to mobile required different monetization strategies and ads, the rise of virtual reality content will require another rethink. Google, which is still primarily driven by advertising, is already experimenting with ad designs for the new format.
Game advertisements are one of the more common ads we see on mobile devices, and sometimes, they do actually work. But for the most part, we just don’t want to stop what we’re doing, go download or even buy an app, then eventually get back to what we were doing. Now, Google wants to fix that with “Playables.”
Following big Google Cloud announcements at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show earlier this week, the company is announcing a new ad platform to monetize and personalize video content, as well as that live TV listings are coming to Search results.
Google has published a blog post revealing just how many bad ads it removed from the web in 2015. Spoiler: they removed a lot.
There can be all kinds of bad ads, whether they’re ads which falsely claim to help weight loss, or phishing sites that trick unassuming web users to submit personal information. Thanks to a team of some 1,000 employees, and some clever computer algorithms, the company was able to remove a ton of ads and ban a huge number of misbehaving advertisers…
Google today has announced several new services that will enhance the advertising capabilities of YouTube. First off, the company has announced Shopping ads for YouTube. These ads will allow advertisers to show a click-to-buy ad within partner videos on YouTube. Advertisers only pay when a user clicks on the ad, similar to Shopping ads on Google.
Through this big shift we’re in the middle of to a mobile world where native apps reign king, Google has held strong in its devotion to improving the user experience of the web. Today another example of that is a shift it’s making to penalize those sites which display app install interstitials that hide a significant amount of content.
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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).
AdSense, Google’s publisher ad network used by millions of websites across the web, has just seen its Android app brought up to the company’s Material design language standards.
The app itself is mostly read-only, meaning you can quickly see data on your performance like how much money you’ve made from your ad placements over different time periods, but you cannot create new ads to place on your site from within the app. That would be cumbersome from a mobile device, though, as it requires copying and pasting HTML code into your site’s backend.
AdSense 3.0 also brings with it a new logo the company unveiled back in June. It looks like this:
And for the curious, here’s what the app looked like before today’s update:
The update hasn’t propagated completely in Google Play yet, but it’s available as a direct download through APKMirror right now.
Many of us are visual learners, and by visualizing data you may be able to notice trends that you otherwise wouldn’t have by just looking at the numbers written out. Google understands this, and is making it possible to quickly visualize data from its AdWords online advertising service through a simple drag-and-drop tool available soon from directly within AdWords itself — yes, no more needing to download your data and explore it elsewhere.
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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Google AdWords, the online advertising service that allows marketers to purchase advertising across multiple platforms and formats (i.e. images, video), has a neat new addition which recognizes that more people are connecting to the Internet from more devices.
Estimated Total Conversions, a larger tool which tracks ad clicks that lead to a conversion (i.e. a sale), can now track the number of display advertisement clicks that occur in a browser and end as a sale in an app, or vice versa. This also works cross-device when the converting customer has at any point logged into their Google account from both devices.
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In a world where we’re increasingly reliant on our phones to navigate the world, online reviews can make or break local businesses. Lawsuits regarding negative reviews show up in the news at least a couple times every year, and these review pages are increasingly becoming the battleground where individuals protest against businesses partaking in practices they disagree with. On the other hand, however, a good rating online can entrench and create a moat around a business for years to come. That’s why Google now allows advertisers to include their Google reviews in their AdWords ads.
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Facebook is on a warpath to take over the digital advertising space, capturing 10% of the total $50 billion digital ad spend in 2014 with 50% year-over-year growth at the time, and today it’s making it easier for advertisers large and small to manage, track, and launch campaigns straight from their Android phones with a new app.
The app, simply called Facebook Ads Manager, launched initially as an iOS-only product back in February with the company saying at the time that an Android app would be coming later in the year. At the time of writing, Facebook hasn’t publicly announced the launch of this Android version – we noticed it show up on APKMirror. There isn’t too much crazy going on here, though, and it’s nearly identical to the iOS version.
The full feature line-up includes the ability to edit ads, get notifications when campaigns are about to end or run out of funds and how they’re performing, keep track of spending and update both payment methods and spending limits as needed, and create new ads or sponsored page posts.
As more than 50% of Facebook’s total advertising revenue now comes from mobile advertisements, and more attention moves to mobile in general, it only makes sense that the tools to make such ads are making their way to mobile screens. By making its ads products accessible on Android, Facebook is reducing the friction to spending money on its platform of 1.2 billion monthly visitors just that much easier.
Google’s AdWords team has highlighted three important changes to how users can interact with mobile ads and in-app interstitial ads. The changes are part of an effort to reduce the chance that a user may accidentally click an ad when browsing the web or trying to dismiss the ad.
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Vessel, the monthly subscription service that provides early-access to content from some of the biggest channels on YouTube, has today released its app for Android under the “beta” moniker.
For the uninitiated, Vessel is part of a trend recently of online content creators seeking out new ways to monetize their content and make money beyond the traditional display and pre-roll video advertisements that you see around videos and other web content. Vessel charges $2.99 per month and in return gives you access to videos from popular YouTube talent including Rhett & Link and Marcus Butler, among others, several days before the videos go live on YouTube. There’s also a free version, but it doesn’t provide these exclusives and there are ads so it’s essentially the same thing as just watching them on YouTube.
The company claims to have over 130 creators uploading to the platform so far, and hopes that releasing an app for Android will expand its subscriber base greatly. Since the app is in beta, the company is hoping users will submit feedback and feature suggestions. It’s available in the Play Store, so no Google+ communities trick necessary here.
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…
Mother’s Day is quickly approaching and Samsung has chosen to separate itself from advertisers going for your heartstrings with a much lighter advertisement titled “#TextsFromMom,” featuring the Galaxy S6 Edge.
The one-minute spot, as the title suggests, takes a look at how your mother probably uses (read: misuses) text messaging, and does so in a funny yet gentle manner. Anyone with a mother who took it upon herself to learn to text can sympathize and see their own mom in one or many of these messages. It ends with a reminder that you should call Mom this Sunday, not text her.
[protected-iframe id=”d603a218f395e450061ea4a5f0e213ee-22427743-41205376″ info=”https://www.youtube.com/embed/e7D5KvoXwRg” width=”560″ height=”315″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen=””]
What’s more, if you dial the phone numbers visible in the spot you get to hear what the moms had to say in their voicemail messages. You can also enter to win a Galaxy S6 Edge by sharing your mom’s funniest texts to Twitter with the hashtag #TextsFromMom. Nice job, Samsung.
As part of the Game Developers Conference taking place this week in San Francisco, Google is hosting its own Developer Day and updating its AdMob platform and introducing a new Nearby Connections API for developers.
Using the Nearby Connections API, developers will be able to build a connection between Android phones or tablets and Android TV into games. The Android phone or tablet will display on-screen controls, and game playback will be displayed on Android TV creating a console-like experience without a separate controller.
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After announcing its first dev con last December, Yahoo today kicked off its mobile developer conference in San Francisco where it unveiled five new products for mobile app makers. As suspected, Yahoo revealed the latest tools from Flurry, the mobile ad and analytics firm it acquired last July.
This includes Flurry Analytics Explorer, a new dashboard for the Flurry Analytics system which it says enables developers to discover more insights with than before, and Flurry Pulse, which lets app builders “share app signals with partners using their existing Flurry SDK implementations and the click of a button.”
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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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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUsLPPuJhZc]
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 …
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Yahoo announced today that it will be hosting its first ever developer conference, The Yahoo Mobile Developer Conference, early next year in February. Yahoo confirmed it plans to use the event to unveil a new suite of developer tools for mobile apps that will “help developers better understand their users and improve, grow and monetize their apps.”
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