New Leaders of Search, LLM, and Energy Drinks - digital surfer wave 199

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CONTENT CREATORS

Create and Thrive by Adsense

Google Adsense created a video series to allow creators to reveal their strategies for building profitable and sustainable online businesses. Learn how to enhance your content, connect with your audience, and tap into new growth opportunities. There are a couple of videos already from Coco Mocoe and Vivian Tu (Your Rich BFF).

My Take: This isn’t Google’s first attempt at trying to help creators. They’ve been doing it for years now, just not that successfully imo. Their past attempts were stopped in 2022/2023 - not surprising since that’s the year the Product Reviews Update and Helpful Content Update started (Reviews technically Dec. 2021). 2022 was when many sites started to decline. After Google’s latest meeting with Brandon Saltaamacchia, I started drafting a post covering that. I’ll get it out soon as one of my first mid-week emails.

Content Creators Are Going Nowhere in the AI Era, but Their Roles Are About to Change

Cameron Adams explores the future of content creators in the AI era. While AI is transforming the landscape, it doesn't spell doom for human creativity. Instead, it presents new opportunities and roles for content creators to evolve. Here are the key takeaways:

• Compensation for Creators: Creators should receive royalties for their contributions to AI platforms, ensuring sustainable income.

• Leveraging AI for Efficiency: Content creators should use AI tools to enhance their productivity and creativity, rather than seeing them as a threat.

• Multifaceted Roles: Creators must adapt to roles that combine creation and editing, becoming essential in managing AI-generated content.

• Expanding Opportunities: Developing AI skills opens new career paths and management roles, making creators indispensable in the evolving job market.

SEO

Introducing Bing Generative Search

Bing has unveiled a new generative search feature that combines AI and large language models (LLMs) to create dynamic, tailored responses to user queries (it’s Google’s AI Overview on steroids). The feature currently serves a small percentage of user queries, with plans to expand gradually based on user feedback. The system integrates traditional search results with AI-generated content, ensuring users get comprehensive answers and sources for deeper exploration.

My Take: For this “what is a spaghetti western” query, AI summaries basically takes over the full page with different visual formats, but with many links and previews of sources right below them. The ‘blue links’ are pushed to the right sidebar. When I tried some other queries, I couldn’t get the full-page experience. The one good thing is Bing’s AI does not recommend eating rocks when I ask if rocks are good to eat.

For those who prefer simple, clean designs, Bing’s SERPs will give you a headache 😂 

Reddit is now blocking major search engines and AI bots — except the ones that pay

Reddit is blocking major search engines from accessing its recent posts and comments—unless they pay. Emma Roth of The Verge reports that Google is the only mainstream search engine allowed to show recent Reddit results, thanks to a $60 million deal. This move aims to protect Reddit's data from unauthorized AI training and generate revenue from its content. Reddit's updated robots.txt file signals search engines without agreements to stay away, impacting Bing, DuckDuckGo, and others.

SEO Ripples

• Google’s Martin Splitt explains internal linking in the latest episode of SEO Made Easy. He emphasizes the role internal links play in both user navigation and SEO. He sheds light on how well-structured internal links not only enhance user experience but also help Googlebot understand and index your site better. The main thing he talks about is to use helpful, descriptive anchor text.

• On Google’s Search Off the Record podcast, Lizzi, Gary and Martin talk about all things internationalization, hreflang and what's making managing international, multi-language websites easier. Transcript here.

AI

SearchGPT Prototype

OpenAI shares a preview of their SearchGPT prototype that combines AI with real-time web information to deliver fast, clear, and relevant answers to your queries. SearchGPT will give direct responses with up-to-date information and prominent links to sources. Allows conversational follow-up questions for deeper understanding. I’m sure we can expect many of their sources to come from the various publishing partners they’ve announced.

But not is all rainbows as the demo was found to have mistakes already 😅 

Meet Meta’s Llama 3.1

Meta unveiled Llama 3.1, their most advanced open-source AI model yet with its expanded 128K context length and 3 versions: 8B, 70B and 405B. 405B is getting all the love now because it’s the flagship model that’s supposedly better than GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet in a number of areas.

Google Gemini Adds Related Content & Verification Links

Google Gemini (formerly Bard) introduces more links to related content and verification links directly in Gemini's responses. This update aims to reduce hallucinations and make it easier for users to explore relevant websites. You can now click on chips at the end of paragraphs in Gemini to dive deeper into topics, and the double-check feature uses Google Search to verify information.

Elon Musk Is Now Using Your Tweets to Train His Weird AI. Here's How to Turn It Off

Noor Al-Sibai dives into a surprising move by Elon Musk's X platform, formerly known as Twitter. Users were auto-opted into sharing their tweets with Grok, the AI chatbot, without prior notice.

Click here for the Grok settings page to opt out. Or find it under the “Privacy and safety > Grok” menu settings.

AI Ripples

• Britney Muller dives into the practical side of AI in this episode of Whiteboard Friday. She breaks down how AI can be an assistant in your workflow and emphasizes its role as a support tool rather than a complete solution. She shares tips on getting started with AI, ensuring you use it effectively without overreaching its capabilities. Her approach encourages a human-centered method to integrate AI, keeping in mind both its strengths and limitations.

• With Llama 3.1 405B, Meta AI users also get the Imagine Yourself model that gives a fun way to create generative selfies with prompts like "Imagine me on a beach vacation."

• Melissa Heikkilä explores "copyright traps," a clever method developed by Imperial College London to help content creators detect if their work has been used to train AI models without consent. She details the intricacies of these traps, their implementation, and their potential impact on the ongoing battle between AI developers and content creators.

• Neal Schaffer's shares how to detect AI-generated content. From checking for a lack of originality to employing detection tools, Neal provides a guide to ensure your content remains high-quality and human.

MARKETING

Google Scraps Plans to Kill Third-Party Cookies in Chrome

Announced in a Privacy Sandbox blog post, Google has decided not to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome, a plan that has been in the works for 4.5 years. Instead, they are introducing a new experience that gives users more control over their browsing privacy. Delay after delay, they couldn’t get a better or similar solution.

This Ad Exchanger link is a good summary of what’s to come and some of the revenue tests with turning off cookies and turning on Privacy Sandbox.

My Take: Enough people complain about something, things change. In this case, advertisers. In the case of AI Overviews and drop of how often they show - everyone.

Social Media Advertising Guide to Help You Get Started

Rochi Zalani dives into social media advertising with a guide to help you navigate this ever-evolving landscape. She breaks down everything from basic terminologies to advanced techniques. The guide provides actionable steps to kickstart and optimize your social media advertising efforts.

A Guide To Keyword Prioritization & The Newest Query Matching Controls In Google Ads

Ginny Marvin dives into the intricacies of keyword prioritization in Google Ads and understanding how Google selects keywords. She explains the prioritization framework that helps advertisers manage their keyword lists and align their strategies with the recent changes in AI technology.

CONTENT

23 Types of Content Matrix

Great matrix from Jake Ward showing different types of content and where they chart based on their focus and creation difficulty.

What Is Content Repurposing

Ross Simmonds shares a guide on the power of content repurposing. He emphasizes transforming your existing content into various formats to reach a broader audience and boost your marketing efforts. Ross's approach involves turning blog posts into videos, infographics, podcasts, and more, ensuring your content stays relevant and engaging across different platforms. By doing so, you can significantly increase your ROI, enhance brand consistency, and improve SEO.

How to Combine SEO and Content Marketing (The Ahrefs’ Way)

Si Quan Ong shares strategies on combining SEO and content marketing to drive search traffic. Even though the title is the “Ahrefs' Way,” it’s more than applicable to anyone who has a business or client and is creating content / doing keyword research.

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

Zap: AI in a Can

Zapier brings the first and only digital energy drink that bestows the power of AI automation to your computer, so you can be unstoppable. All you need to do is open up a can of Zap and pour it on your computer (not really).

Stripe Acquires Lemon Squeezy

The acquisition promises to enhance Lemon Squeezy's offerings with Stripe's expertise, ensuring a seamless experience for users. More updates will be coming to see how things end up.

WordPress Releases 6.6.1 To Fix Fatal Errors In 6.6

Update your sites to WordPress 6.6.1 because it fixes some major issues found in version 6.6, including two fatal errors causing website crashes and several other bugs. Make sure to update your WordPress to avoid any disruptions and false security warnings.

CASE STUDY

2024 Salary and Career Survey: How Much Search Marketers Make

Danny Goodwin dives into the latest salary and career survey by Search Engine Land, revealing that search marketers' salaries range from $85,000 to nearly $200,000 annually. This comprehensive report breaks down average compensation by role and how various factors like company size, experience, and education impact earnings. For example, Executive salaries average $198,182, while staff salaries increased to $85,572. Directors and senior directors saw a jump to $156,221 from $122,760 last year.

My Take: Time to join an agency? 😁 

EDUCATION

Programmatic SEO With Zapier’s Former Lead SEO

Ross Hudgens talks to Matt Bowers, formerly of Zapier and Zillow, about programmatic SEO, which Zapier does a lot of. Lots of interesting insights here if you’re into pSEO.

NEWS

Reality of Google Earnings Q2 2024

Here are some of their numbers against their estimates:

• Earnings: $1.89 a share vs. $1.84 per share expected

• Revenue: $84.74 billion vs. $84.19 billion expected

• YouTube advertising revenue: $8.66 billion vs. $8.93 billion (missed)

• Google Cloud revenue: $10.35 billion vs. $10.20 billion

All looks good, so why did Google’s stock go down ~5% the next day and during the earnings call? Could be their higher expenses that will continue, especially in AI, but not sure when returns will be seen from those investments. Potential lower margins in Q3. The caginess from the CEO around AI, like AI Overviews, sure doesn’t help. Still lots of question marks.

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