Facebook: no change, business as usual

24.10.2019/11.49

I would have loved to have seen this go to trial, but Facebook and the plaintiffs—a group of advertising agencies alleging they had been swindled by the social network—settled. Excerpted from The Hollywood Reporter, ‘The suit accused Facebook of acknowledging miscalculations in metrics upon press reports, but still not taking responsibility for the breadth […]

How to lose readers: accuse them of something they don’t or wouldn’t do

11.06.2019/07.56

Here’s a sure-fire way to lose readers and cost you ad revenue. It seems Haymarket’s Autocar (which I have been reading in print since 1980) wasn’t pleased about people using online ad blockers, so it created a warning. The trouble is I don’t use ad blockers. In fact, you can see a massive […]

Why paywalls are getting more prevalent; and The Guardian Weekly rethought

10.11.2018/09.58

Megan McArdle’s excellent op–ed in The Washington Post, ‘A farewell to free journalism’, has been bookmarked on my phone for months. It’s a very good summary of where things are for digital media, and how the advent of Google and Facebook along with the democratization of the internet have reduced online advertising income to a […]

Cambridge Analytica is merely Facebook’s ‘smaller, less ambitious sibling’

14.04.2018/23.03

Beyond all that had gone on with AIQ and Cambridge Analytica, a lot more has come out about Facebook’s practices, things that I always suspected they do, for why else would they collect data on you even after you opted out? Now, Sam Biddle at The Intercept has written a piece that demonstrates that […]

YouTube under fire for child exploitation videos—with ‘three unpaid volunteers’ monitoring reports

28.11.2017/01.59

The Murdoch Press has rightly kept its pressure up on Google, with a cover story in The Times, ‘Adverts fund paedophile habits’ on November 24 (the online version, behind a paywall, is here). Say what you will about its proprietor, but Murdochs have been happy to go after the misdeeds of Google: the earlier […]

Online publishing: how the players we dealt with changed in 2016

12.01.2017/02.45

Above: Brave Bison’s predecessor, Rightster, left much to be desired in how it dealt with publishers, while investment commentators had concerns, too. Twenty-sixteen had some strange developments on the publishing front. First, we noticed Alexa rankings for a lot of sites changed. Facebook itself went from second to third, where it has stayed. […]

Facebook pages are broken

08.12.2013/11.11

While my personal Facebook page and profile continue to have good reach and engagement, the Lucire Facebook is down, especially compared with this time last year. We’ve increased fans and, on our site, readership, but it’s becoming more and more evident that traffic isn’t coming via the Facebook fan page. It makes you […]

Using Super Start on Firefox, after I got pop-ups while using Speed Dial

20.12.2011/04.09

PS.: I got two pop-ups today (December 21) of the same nature, this time while using Facebook. I think we can rule out Speed Dial as the reason.—JY For the Firefox bofﬁns out there, I began using Super Start, after having trialled Speed Dial and Fast Dial over the past year or so. These […]

The big and the small of it

29.11.2010/02.29

Spotted on the Lucire website today, an advertisement for Consumer magazine. It’s a Flash animation, suggesting that not all car insurance policies are perfect. The opening frame shows a car with oversized coins for wheels, and the wheels shrink to a more standard size at the end of the animation. The copy reads, […]

Explaining to Lucire readers about my political ads

23.09.2010/00.03

[Cross-posted at Lucire] New Zealand readers will be seeing a few advertisements around this site relating to the local body election in Wellington. And perhaps, thanks to programming not always being precise, a few more readers outside New Zealand will notice them, too, although we have targeted them for this country alone. I think it’s […]