SODP Dispatch - 29 September 2023

^MONETIZATION
WHAT IS AD REVENUE? THE COMPLETE GUIDE FOR PUBLISHERS

BookTok is one of the most interesting innovations from the digital readership space. BookTok is a trend and hashtag on TikTok with such impact it won the FutureBook Person of the Year Award at the FutureBook conference in 2022.

The hashtag has rapidly eclipsed its predecessors — Instagram’s Bookgram and YouTube’s BookTube. It’s so impactful that the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s largest book trade fair, dedicated an entire stage to it in 2022, giving BookTokers the chance to film themselves at the BookTok Creation Corner. The book fair will feature a BookTok award in 2023.

BookTok has attracted more than 85 billion views so far, without any sign of slowing down. Books becoming viral through BookTok have seen an up to ninefold increase in sales. At the beginning of 2022, BookTok contributed to a 30% growth in print book sales for the Young Adult (YA) genre in the US, part of a 9% uptick in overall print book sales.

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^SEARCH
SEARCH CENTRAL LIVE: SODP TEAM’S INSIGHTS

Last week, our team members Mahendra Choudhary and Swapnil Pate attended Google’s Search Central Live 2023 in Bengaluru. Here are a few insights:

• Search: The central focus lies on Google's concerted efforts to enhance result quality significantly.

• GSC (Google Search Console): Anticipate a forthcoming transformation in the Page Experience Report within GSC.

• GSC: Notably, the Mobile-Friendly Test option is slated for retirement, making room for a more prominent role for Light House in the toolkit.

• Bard and SGE remain in the initial stages, and Google plans to incorporate citations into the snippet.

• AI: Amid the debate over AI-generated content, Google's team expressed reservations about relying solely on AI for content creation. They emphasized that AI lacks the real-world experience that human writers bring.

• The Helpful Content Update assesses the quality of your website's content as a whole, rather than on a page-by-page basis. Authority is a significant factor in this evaluation.

• Websites featuring authentic, user-focused content will prevail, especially impacting affiliate sites that publish untested product reviews. These sites could face significant challenges in upcoming updates.

• Incorporating video into content has a substantial impact on engagement and reach.

• Google's crawl budget for a website is largely influenced by the site's linking structure and the capacity for Google to crawl multiple pages without overloading server bandwidth.

• Once a domain expires, Google resets all pre-existing authority and link equity, rendering the expired domain unbeneficial.

• Google does not differentiate between subdomains and subdirectories, although some industry professionals have observed otherwise.

• For better ranking in specific countries, Google favors country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs).

• There's generally no need to worry about spam links affecting your site as Google is capable of ignoring such links. The Disavow tool should only be used in extreme cases.

• Google has no plans to reintroduce the FAQ Schema feature in the near future; it is officially retired.

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

"Do you have a template for an ad sales agreement?" Kenny Katzgrau, CEO of Broadstreet, gets asked this question by new publishers a lot. So he shared the template he uses. Learn more

Understand your users with live “People Also Asked” data and intent clustering by Google. Learn more