A Totally Human-Achievable Number

In This Issue of Tod Maffin’s Today in Digital Marketing:

• Meta ad performance is sucking. Why? And what can you do?
• TikTok and Google partner on a test of search integration
• Bing Webmaster Tools plans to remove Disavow Links tool
• X to discontinue its Circle feature in October
• Threads adds faster profile switching on mobile app
• Snapchat+ grows to 5 million paid subscribers
• Meta launches animated avatar stickers in WhatsApp
• Amazon sets three-book daily limit due to AI-generated content

Google’s “If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em” Strategy

Something weird is happening in the TikTok app.

When some people go to search for something, they’re seeing prompts to search in Google.

It’s not a bug. And it’s not an ad.

It is, according to TikTok, a test of a future partnership.

The integration looks like an ad unit. It’s like nothing we’ve seen in the app before. It takes what the user has searched for and turns it into a call-to-action to search for that phrase on Google.

The whole thing is a little weird to me.

• Weird that Google would try to get on more platforms, while it’s being sued in the U.S. for allegedly trying to lock competitors out
• Weird that TikTok would create a partnership which takes someone out of their app and onto someone else’s app or site. And, with those redirected eyeballs, ad revenue

If, indeed, TikTok is capturing 40% of young people’s searches — a number which came from Google, by the way — then the Google move begins to make sense. Put themselves right in those search results, and hopefully steal some eyeballs back.

If it’s not about money, what is it about?

Google wouldn’t answer media questions about whether there was a financial arrangement between the two companies.

And maybe there isn’t.

Maybe the benefit for TikTok, as opposed to charging Google for this option, is actually via improved discovery, with Google indexing more of its content, and showing more TikTok results in search.

That could also be stepping on the toes of YouTube Shorts, Google’s own short-form video offering, but maybe, given TikTok’s emergence as a discovery threat, it’s a “best of both worlds” option for the Big G.

Marketing Dive

Either way, an interesting development in an always fast-moving space.

Bing Disavows the Disavow

Microsoft’s Bing search engine will soon no longer let you disavow links.

Hold up, what is disavowing?

Disavowing is the process of telling a search engine that you don’t want your web site to be associated with another site that’s linking to your site.

For instance: Let’s say I set up a really spammy web page full of links I sell, then slap your site on it. A search engine might think you paid for that, which is against its terms, and would penalize your site’s ranking.

By disavowing, you tell the search engine “Hey, I have nothing to do with that spammy page. Please don’t consider it when you rank us.”

Disavowing links has been part of an SEO professional’s job for more than a decade.

Bing’s existing disavow function

But now, Microsoft says it will be "removing the disavow links feature and associated API." And it’s happening soon: Next month.

What’s the reason? Why, AI of course!

A Bing rep said they believe their AI is so good now, so adept at spotting bad sites, that it can figure it out on its own.

[Bing has] invested heavily in developing and improving our artificial intelligence capabilities, which enables us to better understand the context and intent of links, as well as the trustworthiness and authority of their sources.
We can now differentiate between natural and unnatural links, and we can ignore or discount the latter without affecting the former.
Fabrice Canel, Microsoft

For its part, Google has said for years that manually disavowing links you think are bad for your SEO doesn’t need to be done — and, in fact, can hurt your ranking. They recommend only disavowing links when Google penalizes you — something known as a “manual action.”

But Google still has a disavow functionality. At least for now.

X Dumps Another Feature

Twitter Circles — or I guess “X Circles” now? — is being shut down.

The feature was a kind of knock-off of Instagram’s close friends functionality, which let you create a sub-group of people and tweet privately only to them.

Some people used it for family and friends, some to silo their interests, and so on.

It had actually only been around since August of last year, launched right in the middle of the messy acquisition battle.

This wasn’t really a tool that marketers used. You could only have one circle, and it could only have 150 people in it, so it wasn’t really good as a VIP club or anything like that.

And it was buggy. This past Spring, some of those private tweets meant only for people in a Circle were posted publicly.

It’s possible this is meant to push people toward paid subscriptions

…where users can post privately to a group of paying users — X, of course, pocketing 3% of that (unless you’ve made more than $50k, then X’s cut jumps to 20%).

But more than likely, they’re just choosing to have what few engineers remain there spend less time on buggy software that not many people used.

Circles will disappear at the end of next month.

Threads Adds Easy Account Switching

Meanwhile X’s arch-nemesis Threads is adding a couple of new tweaks, one which will be especially welcome news for social media managers.

Many marketers juggle multiple Instagram accounts on their phone — one for themselves, maybe a finsta, and one or more for the brand they work for. On Instagram, you don’t need to manually log out of one account and into another to manage them; it has a quick-switcher, where you tap and hold the profile icon, and you can quickly switch to another account.

That functionality is now in Threads.

The company didn’t specify if there was a limit on the number of accounts you could quick-switch with.

This was announced yesterday, the same day Facebook said they’d permit people to create multiple fake profiles and use them on the site — a peculiar shift from their policy on authentic identity, a policy the company claims is still somehow in effect, despite giving the official nod to inauthentic identities.

So certainly welcome news for people who switch accounts often. Hopefully next up on marketers’ wish list: Hashtag discovery and an API.

In Brief:

Snapchat says its premium subscription now has 5 million users — that’s up 20% since just this past June, and is about five times as many as Twitter’s premium subscription has. read more

Meta has introduced animated avatar stickers to WhatsApp. Users can now add moving versions of their digital selves in chats. This is part of Meta's ongoing effort to integrate avatars everywhere across its platforms. read more

And finally…

No doubt you’ve heard about Amazon’s problem with auto-generated, low-effort books being sold on its platform. The stories are endless — travel guides recommending you visit places that don’t exist; cooking books that give you recipes which include highly toxic mushrooms.

Enterprising shisters are having ChatGPT write terrible books, then upload them to Amazon — hundreds of them at a time.

They are, of course, a mix of nonsense and regurgitated blog posts — some of which, I’m sure, themselves written by AI.

To combat this, Amazon says it will limit the number of books an author can upload in a specific time period. Which is a great idea, really. Even the fastest author can only churn out a decent book — what, once every week (if it’s a really small book)?

A totally human number amirite?

Amazon’s new book upload limit: Three books…. A day.

Because that’s a totally human-achievable number of books you could write?

More than anything, the new limit signals Amazon’s acceptance of AI-generated books. The reason why should be obvious — they make money money on them.

Amazon still hasn’t really figured any of this out.

Just last week, they said authors must disclose to Amazon when AI was used to write a book, but there wasn’t anything about enforcement or disclosure to consumers. On the other hand, they pulled down some books that had been written by AI after media reports about the trend surfaced.

Credit to Tod Maffin and the Today In Digital Marketing podcast, Produced by engageQ.com

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