SODP Dispatch - 25 July 2024

WEBINAR: Native Ads: Sustainable Revenue Stream or Buzzword?

🕑️ Starts in 1 hour: 2 PM ET | 11 AM PT

Discover how native ads can enhance user experience and boost revenue. Join Pawel Mazurek, CEO of Takeads, as he demystifies native advertising, offers practical strategies, and addresses ad-blocking challenges.

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6 Content Marketing Tips for Google AI Overviews

By Kelly Breland

Many content marketers fear AI will make content marketing much harder, if not obsolete. A lot of these fears are centered around Google’s AI Overviews. How can we create an AI Overviews content strategy, and how can this new feature change the future of search? This article will explain everything in much-needed detail.

💡What you will learn:

• What Google AI Overviews are

• How AI Overviews will impact content strategy

• What changes to content strategy publishers can implement in light of AI Overviews

How Blasting News Approached Optimizing Workflow Processes

By Vahe Arabian

Blasting News publishes around 16,000 news articles and videos each month, providing news to around 30 million monthly readers. This content is created by a network of 2,000 freelance writers and editors.

As a meritocratic organization, Blasting News shares ad money revenue with its independent contributors. In the last 10 years, they have distributed €39 million to contributors who are called “blasters.”

Read on to find out how Blasting News set up its editorial processes to make sure quality is not sacrificed for the sake of quantity.

By Vahe Arabian

➡️ Google reverses course on third-party cookies. What now?

Three delays later, Google said “Never mind!” and reversed its plan to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome.

Instead, Google promised to introduce a “new experience” in Chrome that will give users a choice on the level web browsing privacy. Though Google hasn’t revealed any timelines.

Every major and niche media outlet has reported on the news.

But the main question is: what does that mean for publishers?

My personal takeaway is that the big picture doesn’t really change.

Google merely came to the painful conclusion that there is no one single method to rule them all when it comes to killing off third-party tracking. The Privacy Sanbox method received widespread criticism. There is the Apple’s method of giving people the option on Safari to opt in or out of cookies tracking.

So while Google is pivoting its approach, the reality is that increasingly, the emphasis will be on first-party data. Whether through Google’s “new experience” or sandboxing or any other method, publishers’ revenue will be impacted. The decline might just be not quite as dramatic as we anticipated.

And in order to earn the audience, publishers will still need to re-evaluate their data strategy and identify best practices that will allow them to collect first-party data.

Additionally, Google’s reversal on cookies deprecation opens doors adtech and pubtech solutions providing more native integrations for Chrome, which, in turn, will lead to a more inclusive web that will help publishers provide a better user experience.

▶️ How to use internal linking for SEO

In this episode of Google Search Central’s SEO Made Easy, Search Relations Advocate, Martin Splitt, discusses 3 tips for helping your website visitors and Googlebot navigate your website.
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🔍️ Turn 1,000 keywords into neatly organized topics
Jonathan Boshoff explains a method for quick, easy, effortless SERP-based keyword clustering.
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Bing testing new generative search experience |  Search Engine Land

Bing is now testing its new generative search experience that combines the Bing search results and its language models to use AI to generate a different breed of search results, including an AI-generated search results pages.
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Google Says This Will Cancel Your “Linking Power” | Search Engine Journal

Google's John Mueller gives an eye-opening response about the impact of blocking Google on "linking power."
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‘Model collapse’: Scientists warn against letting AI eat its own tail | TechCrunch

Basically, if the models continue eating each other’s data, perhaps without even knowing it, they’ll progressively get weirder and dumber until they collapse. The researchers provide numerous examples and mitigation methods, but they go so far as to call model collapse “inevitable,” at least in theory.
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Why “Sorry, I don’t know” is sometimes the best answer: The Washington Post’s technology chief on its first AI chatbot | NiemanLab

Andrew Deck interviews The Washington Post’s chief technology officer, Vineet Khosla, to discuss the novel product and how it fits into the Post’s larger AI strategy.
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Google's Exclusive Reddit Access | 404 Media

Google is now the only search engine that can surface results from Reddit, making one of the web’s most valuable repositories of user generated content exclusive to the internet’s already dominant search engine.
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