Friday 18th August: Do we talk too much about Google?

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It’s been a bad few hours for Google. The SERPent* has been accused of allowing children to be tracked via its Performance Max tool, and also told that it is to undergo a more thorough examination of the practices that led to a pay-per-click advertiser claiming he had been overcharged.

“An analysis by The Times this month found that when a viewer who was not signed into YouTube clicked the ads on some of the children’s channels on the site, they were taken to brand websites that placed trackers — bits of code used for purposes like security, ad tracking or user profiling — from Amazon, Meta’s Facebook, Google, Microsoft and others — on users’ browsers”.

You could make a good claim that we talk too much about Google at Media Voices — but given that they are so dominant in the advertising space and the perennial frenemy of publishers you’ll forgive us here. This shows, if nothing else, that it requires constant scrutiny.

^{*mine! This is mine, I came up with this, mine}

This is how you do a headline (see the story after next). There are countless grants, bursaries, one-off philanthropic payments etc being made to journalistic projects, and while they get a lot of attention at the outset they tend to sink into obscurity soon after, subsumed by the mire of familiarity. This is a great look at what happens to those projects when the sheen fades.

Quelle surprise that Musk would be this petty. The only thing that shocks me about this is how quickly he seems to be speedrunning making Twitter irrelevant among the movers and shakers that made the platform influential — despite its relative dearth of traffic to publishers. What did this loser think he was buying?

This is a good argument let down by a laughable headline. Freelance journalism isn’t becoming unviable for people without familial wealth, it has been for about a decade. Fair play to Ralph Jones for bringing this up but the way it’s presented is terrible. I’ve been on-and-off freelance for close to seven years at this point and it was barely viable when I began - let alone for people who are trying to join the business now when rates haven’t improved.

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