Issue 16: 15 Companies Have A Strangle Hold On Search Engine Results  June 7th 2016

The more research I did for this article and the more I realised certain brands were owned by the same company, the more I felt like I was watching Food Inc, the documentary that revealed the thousands of brands you see on supermarket shelves are really owned by just a handful of companies.

The Web is turning into a clickbait jungle. Smartphone manufacturers and software publishers, worried about worsening browsing experience, are uniting to fight online ads. Unless ad tech starts to pay attention to the consumer, its days are numbered.

Last June, Imgur began weaving paid posts within the site’s normal feed of images posted by users. The company’s four-person in-house ad team typically co-creates theses ads with marketers, designing them to embrace Imgur’s unique tone and language.

What was once the poster-child for earning potential online has now become a second class citizen. While most publishers today start by offering display placements to advertisers, savvy companies have begun offering more custom solutions to advertisers. The result? More income in publisher’s pockets.

FTC staffers observed that the push for such rules "stems from concerns about the lack of transparency regarding companies' data practices and the lack of meaningful consumer control over their data." According to the FTC, these "concerns permeate the IoT space, given the ubiquity of information collection, the broad range of uses that the IoT makes possible, the multitude of companies involved in collecting and using information, and the sensitivity of some of the data at issue."

While AMP has delivered on its promise to speed up the web, it’s not driving much traffic.

The new ad format allows for expanded text on the top line (headline) of over 30 extra characters, an extra “path” on the URL (line 2), and extra characters totaling 80 on the last line (description line).