jowifi writes: NVIDIA officially launched its GeForce NOW earlier this week, making the streaming gaming service available to all with no waitlisting. It is advertising a free tier which allows 1-hour of game play at a session, and a premium tier that allows 6-hour sessions and preferred access to the streaming servers. The premium tier is being offered for a limited-time discounted price of $4.99 for 2020 with the first three months free. The service does not include any games, but provides access to games in your digital library (e.g. Steam) and free-to-play games like Fortnite. It supports Windows, MacOS, Android, and NVIDIA Shield (no mention of Linux).

In Google's recent end-of-the-year 2019 financial report, the company for the first time disclosed the revenues for YouTube and its Google Cloud unit. However, as Tom Foremski writes via ZDNet, "Google removed key metrics that have been included for more than 15 years: How much money it makes per click (Cost-per-Click (CPC)) and the growth of paid clicks." From the report: These monetization metrics are typically found on the second page of every quarterly earnings release from Google -- which underscores their importance in a 10-page document. Yet they are missing from the latest Google 2019 Q4 report with no explanation. Clicks are at the heart of Google's business, so why are these metrics no longer viable? And why hasn't this change been noticed widely? Why didn't the Wall Street analysts ask about these missing numbers in the financial call the same day as the report was released? What is Google hiding?

Google has a rapidly deflating advertising product, sometimes 29% less revenue per click, every quarter, year-on-year, year after year. Take a look at this chart: As long as Google can keep growing the blue line -- growth of paid clicks faster than the red line its ad click deflation -- then it is golden. Every three months Google has to find faster ways of expanding the total number of paid clicks by as much as 66%. How is this a sustainable business model? There is an upper limit to how much more expansion in paid links can be found especially with the shift to mobile platforms and the constraints of the display. And what does this say about the effectiveness of Google's ads? They aren't very good and their value is declining at an astounding and unstoppable pace.

Justice Department officials will meet on Tuesday with representatives of state attorneys general to discuss their investigations of Google and whether the company broke antitrust law. "The probes focus on search bias, advertising and management of Google's Android operating system," adds Reuters. From the report: The meeting is in the afternoon, according to one source, and will include officials from six or seven states, including Texas, according to a second source familiar with the matter. Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple are all the focus of federal, state and congressional investigations following complaints that the four tech giants abused their clout in dealings with smaller companies. The probes are being carried out by the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission, state attorneys general and the House Judiciary Committee. U.S. Attorney General William Barr has said he would like to see them wrapped up this year.

CaptainDork spotted CNN's update about best-selling author Stephen King: "I'm quitting Facebook," the author said on Twitter Friday. "Not comfortable with the flood of false information that's allowed in its political advertising, nor am I confident in its ability to protect its users' privacy...."

His Facebook profile has since been deleted. King encouraged his fans to follow him on Twitter. But meanwhile... Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Sunday slammed Twitter and Google for the rise in trolling networks and scams via fake bots on both the platforms.... "The crypto scam level on Twitter is reaching new levels. This is not cool," Musk reacted to a follower's tweet. "Report as soon as you see it. Troll/bot networks on Twitter are a *dire* problem for adversely affecting public discourse and ripping people off," he continued.

He also criticised Google for allowing scammers to flourish. "Trolls/bots just need to be deemphasized relative to probable real people who aren't being paid to push an agenda or scam. Google still shows bs/scam pages, they're just several clicks away," Musk stressed.
And elsewhere, criticisms of Facebook and Google continued: in a new interview, venture capitalist and tech critic Roger McNamee specifically singled out Facebook and Google for their roles in spreading disinformation... "[T]hey're the reason we can't fix climate change," McNamee, author of the book "Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe," said this week on the [Yahoo Finance show] Final Round. "They're the reason why we have an epidemic of measles due to the anti-vaxers. They're the reason why white supremacy and gun violence are on the rise because they empower the most disaffected people in society, and they give them a disproportionate political voice....

"If we want to do something about climate change or gun violence or white supremacy or anti-vaxers, we're going to have to fix Facebook and Google."

20 years ago, 11 different startups spent millions of dollars to run 30-second ads during the Super Bowl, reports the Hustle. Within one year 8 of the 11 companies "had either gone bankrupt or been sold in fire sales."
The how-to platform Computer.com spent $3m of its $5.8m in seed funding on an ad featuring its 2 founders holding a poster board sign. The site hadn't even launched yet. Not all the ads were quite as homespun. Another startup, Pets.com, spared no expense...to produce its 30-second ad for pet products that featured... a homemade sock puppet...

The 11 startups that bought ads for 2000's Big Game were hoping to replicate the success of 2 tech companies that came before them. HotJobs.com and Monster.com paid for ads in the 1999 Super Bowl, and both reported surges in web traffic during the game... [But in 2000] many advertisers' websites proved poorly equipped to handle the increased traffic... One startup's site slowed from 8 to 53 seconds; another's altogether crashed. "Everything was held together with glue and rubber bands," Hanlon, of LifeMinders, said...

Pets.com, whose $17m in marketing resulted in just $8.8m in revenue, declared bankruptcy less than 10 months after the game. Several months later, Pets.com sold off the branding rights to its celebrity sock puppet for $125k. LifeMinders.com, which had once been valued at $2.3B, had to sell for $68.1m in cash and stock. Computers.com also sold for an undisclosed amount...

[I]n this year's game, there aren't expected to be any startups advertising... According to the professors, modern startups are right not to focus on Super Bowl ads these days: For all but a few, it wouldn't be worth it.... The marketing professors looked back at Super Bowl XXXIV's defunct startups and saw something else: A lot of startups that fell victim to their own egos.
Although when it was all over, the Pets.com sock puppet ended up being interviewed on CNNfn.

JustAnotherOldGuy writes: Facebook issued a disappointing quarterly report, sending its stock price down by 6%, reports CNBC. In the report, Facebook reported a 51% rise in expenses and "warned of advertising headwinds related to privacy and regulatory changes on the horizon, leading to slowing growth in the U.S. Facebook said privacy improvements on Apple's iPhones and Google's Android software could hurt its ability to target advertising." Here are the key numbers from Facebook's fourth-quarter earnings report, per CNBC:

Earnings (EPS): $2.56 vs. $2.53 per share forecast by Refinitiv.
Revenue: $21.08 billion vs. $20.89 billion forecast by Refinitiv.
Daily active users (DAUs): 1.66 billion vs. 1.65 billion forecast by FactSet.
Monthly active users (DAUs): 2.5 billion vs. 2.5 billion forecast by FactSet.
Average revenue per user (ARPU): $8.52 vs. $8.38 forecast by FactSet.

Mark Zuckerberg sent a message to the public on Wednesday: Facebook is fine doing things that are unpopular, as long as people understand why. From a report: Facebook has come under scrutiny over its political advertising policies, as fellow social media platform Twitter decided to ban political ads. "One critique of our approach for much of the last decade was that because we wanted to be liked, we didn't always communicate our views as clearly because we were worried about offending people," Zuckerberg said on a call with analysts. He said his goal for the next decade "isn't to be liked, but to be understood." That's because in order to be trusted, "people need to know where you stand," Zuckerberg said.

"During its Q4 earnings call, Netflix shot down the idea of an ad-supported option for its service," writes Slashdot reader saccade.com. TechCrunch reports: "Google and Facebook and Amazon are tremendously powerful at online advertising because they're integrating so much data from so many sources. There's a business cost to that, but that makes the advertising more targeted and effective. So I think those three are going to get most of the online advertising business," Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said. To grow a $5 billion to $10 billion advertising business, you'd need to "rip that away" from the existing providers [such as Facebook, Amazon Google], he continued. And stealing online advertising business from [them] is "quite challenging," Hastings added, saying "there's not easy money there."

"We've got a much simpler business model, which is just focused on streaming and customer pleasure," he said. The CEO also noted that Netflix's strategic decision to not enter the ad business has its upsides, in terms of the controversies that surround companies that collect personal data on their users. To compete, Netflix would have to track more data on its subscribers, including things like their location -- that's not something it's interested in doing, he said, calling it "exploiting users." "We don't collect anything. We're really focused on just making our members happy," Hastings stated. "We think with our model that we'll actually get to larger revenue, larger profits, larger market cap because we don't have the exposure to something that we're strategically disadvantaged at -- which is online advertising against those big three," he said. TechCrunch points out that Netflix does track viewership data, overall viewing trends, and users' own interactions with its service. It also recently introduced a new "chose to watch" viewership metric.

"However, none of this viewership tracking is on the scale of big tech's data collection practices, which is what Hastings meant by his comment," the report says.

BetaNews: Over the years Microsoft has taken numerous controversial decisions with Windows 10, including installing sponsored apps, using the Start menu to advertise apps it thinks you might be interested in, and -- of course -- the various forms of data-collecting telemetry. Now it has been discovered that more ads could be on their way. A Windows researcher has uncovered ads in WordPad encouraging people to try out Word, Excel and PowerPoint online. News of the ads was shared on Twitter by Rafael Rivera, and it was met with a mixture of indignation and reluctant acceptance. Reaction was mixed because while some people saw little wrong with Microsoft advertising a free service rather than trying to encourage people to part with money, there was still a widespread feeling that it was an invasive move.

Facebook "will no longer push through with its plans to sell ads on WhatsApp," writes Engadget, citing a report in the Wall Street Journal which says WhatsApp still "plans at some point to introduce ads to Status."

Newsweek reports: WhatsApp is the only app in Facebook's suite of products free from ads, which make up a vast amount of the parent company's revenue, bringing in the majority of its $17.65 billion during Q3 last year. Like rival apps Snapchat or TikTok, advertising features prominently in Messenger and Instagram. But what does it mean for Facebook? The impact of a delayed WhatsApp ad roll-out will not only mean a financial hit, but may also disrupt how much ad data Facebook can possibly extract from users of the app's desktop and web versions.

Currently, Facebook does not charge people for access to its products. Instead, it monetizes personal information by selling details about user preferences to companies for use in targeted ads. And there is clearly money to be made via mobile-based ads, which brought in about 94 percent of Facebook's total ad revenue during the third quarter of last year... "My assessment of this is it will be a delayed introduction of ads," social media consultant and commentator Matt Navarra told Newsweek today... "With the current climate of unrest surrounding data privacy and Facebook's plans to integrate its messaging apps backend, as well as the many legal battles they are facing, I suspect they are being cautious with yet more activity that could ruffle feathers at this time," Navarra told Newsweek. "But it's a case of when they do launch ads in WhatsApp, not if," he predicted.

The ad strategy sparked clashes between Facebook executives and WhatsApp founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton, and became a factor in their departures from the firm. Koum and Acton, pro-privacy technologists, reportedly feared the app's encryption could be put at risk.

Comcast's NBCUniversal is launching a new streaming service in April called Peacock. With three pricing tiers from free to $10 per month, Comcast wants Peacock "to be an ad delivery system to destroy all others in its path," writes Ryan Waniata via Digital Trends. From the report: In a shockingly long investor call, NBC revealed its big new strategy for delivering its many intellectual property spoils online, which will be offered in a multi-tiered plan (with both ad-based and ad-free versions) rolling up a content hodge-podge, including NBCUniversal TV classics and films on-demand, a handful of new exclusive shows, and live content, from NBC News to the Tokyo Olympics. Peacock's ad-based service -- which rolls out first to the company's Xfinity and Flex cable customers from within their cable box -- will arrive in at least some form for zero dollars per month. A $5 monthly charge will get you more content (but still carry ads), while a $10 fee will get you ad-free viewing and the whole kit-and-caboodle. But here's the thing: The execs at Comcast don't even want you to buy that service. It's an also-ran. A red herring.

NBCUniversal Chairman of Advertising & Partnerships Linda Yaccarino spoke vociferously to the crowd of investors, saying, "Peacock will define the future of advertising. The future of free." To hook viewers into their ad-loaded trap, NBC execs have leveraged Peacock to offer "the lightest ad load in the industry," with just 5 minutes of ads per hour. To be fair, that ad-to-content ratio would be quite light these days in TV talk. But, Yaccarino continued, these would be revolutionary new ad innovations for Peacock, including ads that won't be as repeated over and over. Ads that will look "as good as the content" they accompany (whatever that means). Solo ads where "brands become the hero" and offer a TV show brought to you by a single advertiser. Ads. Ads. And more ads.

Google parent-company Alphabet has hit $1 trillion in market capitalization, making it the fourth U.S. company to hit the milestone. CNBC reports: Apple was the first to hit the market cap milestone in 2018. Then, Microsoft and Amazon followed. Apple and Microsoft are still valued at more than a trillion dollars while Amazon has since fallen below the mark. Analysts are bullish on the company's newly appointed CEO, Sundar Pichai. In a surprise announcement in December 2019, Alphabet founder Larry Page announced plans to step down as CEO, along with co-founder and president Sergey Brin.

Pichai had already been the CEO of Google, which includes all the company's core businesses -- including search, advertising, YouTube and Android -- and generates substantially all its revenue and profits. But he reported to Page, who also oversaw other businesses making long-term bets on experimental technology like self-driving cars and package delivery drones. Now, he's in charge of the whole conglomerate, although Page and Brin still have control over most of the company's voting shares, giving them significant influence in major decisions. "Optimism also comes from the company's growth in its Cloud business, which -- while still far behind the leader Amazon and runner-up Microsoft -- doubled its revenue run rate from $1 billion to $2 billion per quarter between Feb. 2018 and July 2019," adds CNBC.

An anonymous reader shares a report: When an ad runs on a YouTube video, the video creator generally keeps 55 percent of the ad revenue, with YouTube getting the other 45 percent. This system's designed to compensate content creators for their work. But when those videos contain false information -- say, about climate change -- it's essentially encouraging the creation of more misinformation content. Meanwhile, the brands advertising on YouTube often have no idea where their ads are running. In a new report published today, the social-activism nonprofit Avaaz calculates the degree to which YouTube recommends videos with false information about climate change.

After collecting more than 5,000 videos, Avaaz found that 16 percent of the top 100 related videos surfaced by the search term "global warming" contained misinformation. Results were a little better on searches for "climate change" (9 percent) and worse for the more explicitly misinfo-seeking "climate manipulation" (21 percent). Those videos with misinformation had more views and more likes than other videos returned for the same search terms -- by an average of 20 and 90 percent, depending on the search. Avaaz identified 108 different brands running ads on the videos with climate misinformation; ironically enough, about one in five of those ads was from "a green or ethical brand" like Greenpeace or World Wildlife Fund. Many of those and other brands told Avaaz that they were unaware that their ads were running on climate misinformation videos.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Verizon Media, the media and digital offshoot of telecommunications giant Verizon, has launched a "privacy-focused" search engine called OneSearch. With OneSearch, Verizon promises there will be no cookie tracking, no ad personalization, no profiling, no data-storing, and no data-sharing with advertisers.

With its default dark mode, OneSearch lets you know that Advanced Privacy Mode is activated. You can manually toggle this mode to the "off" position which returns a brighter interface, but with this setting deactivated you won't have access to privacy features such as search-term encryption. With Advanced Privacy Mode on, links to search results will only be shareable for an hour, after which time they will "self-destruct" and return an error to anyone who clicks on it. More broadly, the OneSearch interface is clean and fairly familiar to anyone who has used a search engine before. But at its core, it promises to show the same search results to everyone given that it's not tailored to the individual. In the OneSearch privacy policy, Verizon says it it will store a user's IP address, search query, and user agent on different servers so that it can't draw correlations between a user's specific location and the query that they've made.

"Verizon said that it will monetize its new search engine through advertising; however, the advertising won't be based on browsing history or data that personally identifies the individual -- it will only serve contextual advertisements based on each individual search," reports VentureBeat. OneSearch is currently available on desktop and mobile web, with mobile apps coming later this month.

The Norwegian Consumer Council published an analysis of how popular apps are sharing user data with the behavioral ad industry. TechCrunch reports the findings: A majority of the apps that were tested for the report were found to transmit data to "unexpected third parties" -- with users not being clearly informed about who was getting their information and what they were doing with it. Most of the apps also did not provide any meaningful options or on-board settings for users to prevent or reduce the sharing of data with third parties. "The evidence keeps mounting against the commercial surveillance systems at the heart of online advertising," the Council writes, dubbing the current situation "completely out of control, harming consumers, societies, and businesses," and calling for curbs to prevalent practices in which app users' personal data is broadcast and spread "with few restraints."

In the report, app users' data is documented being shared with tech giants such as Facebook, Google and Twitter -- which operate their own mobile ad platforms and/or other key infrastructure related to the collection and sharing of smartphone users' data for ad targeting purposes -- but also with scores of other faceless entities that the average consumer is unlikely to have heard of. [...] Among the findings are a makeup filter app sharing the precise GPS coordinates of its users; ovulation, period and mood-tracking apps sharing users' intimate personal data with Facebook and Google (among others); dating apps exchanging user data with each other, and also sharing with third parties sensitive user info like individuals' sexual preferences (and real-time device specific tells such as sensor data from the gyroscope...); and a games app for young children that was found to contain 25 embedded SDKs and which shared the Android Advertising ID of a test device with eight third parties. The 10 apps whose data flows were analyzed for the report are the dating apps Grindr, Happn, OkCupid, and Tinder; fertility/period tracker apps Clue and MyDays; makeup app Perfect365; religious app Muslim: Qibla Finder; children's app My Talking Tom 2; and the keyboard app Wave Keyboard.

Google has announced plans to limit the ability of other companies to track people across the internet and collect information about them, a significant change that has widespread ramifications for online privacy as well as the digital economy. From a report: The company said Tuesday that it plans to phase out the use of digital tools known as tracking cookies, which other companies use to identify people online and learn more about them. The move is meant to offer users greater control over their digital footprints and enhance user privacy, according to Google. But the move could also provide Google with even greater control over the online advertising market, which the company already dominates. Google said the change will come to its Chrome web browser and be rolled out over two years. Google did not announce any changes to its own data collection methods.

Google also said that a previously announced change to make third-party cookies more secure and precise in their abilities will be rolled out in February. Justin Schuh, director of engineering for trust and safety for Google's Chrome, said the search giant needs time to enact changes because it is working with advertisers and publishers to address the need for cookies to remember sign-ins, embed third-party services such as weather widgets and deliver targeted advertising. But he did not downplay the significance of Google's announcement. "We want to change the way the web works," he said in an interview.

Apple's initiatives to minimize tracking by marketers is continuing to make life harder for the advertising industry, forcing advertisers to use inefficient data sources to pinpoint users. AppleInsider reports: Over the years, Apple has enhanced how it protects the privacy of its users online, typically by limiting what data can be seen by advertisers tracking different data points. Initiatives such as Intelligent Tracking Protection in Safari has helped secure more privacy by making it harder to track individual users, which advertising executives in December admitted has been "stunningly effective." While ITP and other improvements have helped to minimize the tracking of users, marketers are also being affected by another element of iOS 13, one where users are regularly notified of apps that are capturing their location in the background. The warning gives options for users to allow an app to continue to track all the time or to do so when it is open, with users often selecting the latter.

According to data from verification firm Location Sciences seen by DigiDay, approximately seven in ten iPhone users tracked by the company downloaded iOS 13 in its first six weeks of availability. Of those tracked users who installed the update, around 80% of them stopped all background tracking by apps. Ad tracking company Teemo suggests the opt-in rates to share data with apps when not in use are often below 50%, whereas three years ago, the same rates were close to 100%. The higher rates were due to it being a time when users were largely unaware there were options to disable tracking in the first place.

Through its partnerships with health care providers, Google can view tens of millions of patient records in at least three-quarters of states, the Wall Street Journal reports. From a report: Some of these partnerships allow Google to access identifiable information about patients without their or their doctors' knowledge, raising fears about how this data may be used. Google is developing a new search tool -- designed to be used by doctors, nurses and potentially patients -- that stores and analyzes patient information on its servers. The company and some health systems say argue that data-sharing can improve patient outcomes. Google says its health endeavors aren't connected with its advertising business.

Slashdot reader Tekla Perry found some interesting quotes in IEEE Spectrum's "View From the Valley" blog: Apple, Facebook, and Proctor & Gamble executives faced some tough questions about privacy during a CES panel, and pushback from U.S. FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter.

In one exchanged, Facebook's representative argued that Apple's model of adding noise to data to keep it anonymous and avoiding sending too much data to the cloud wouldn't work for Facebook. "If you come to Facebook, you want to share," she said, continuing: "I take issue with the idea that the advertising we serve involves surveilling people.

"We don't do surveillance capitalism, that by definition is surreptitious; we work hard to be transparent."
The Facebook representative argued later that "we provide real value to people in terms of the advertising we deliver and we do it in a privacy protected way."

But Apple's senior director of global privacy had already said "I don't think we can ever say we are doing enough." Despite the fact that Apple has "teams" of privacy lawyers as well as privacy engineers who consider every product, "We always have to be pushing the envelope, and figure out how to put the consumer in control of their data."

"Everything that she said about Apple holds for Facebook," replied the Facebook representative. "But the question is what do people expect..."

And at one point, Proctor & Gamble's representative even said "We collect the data to serve people."

Facebook said on Thursday that it would not make any major changes to its political advertising policies, which allow lies in ads, despite pressure from lawmakers who say the company is abdicating responsibility for what appears on its platform. The New York Times: The decision, which company executives had telegraphed in recent months, is likely to harden criticism of Facebook's political ad practices heading into this year's presidential election. The company also said it would not end so-called microtargeting for political ads, which lets campaigns home in on a sliver of Facebook's users -- a tactic that critics say is ideal for spreading divisive or misleading information. Political advertising cuts to the heart of Facebook's outsize role in society, and the company has found itself squeezed between liberal critics who want it to do a better job of policing its various social media platforms and conservatives who say their views are being unfairly muzzled.

The issue has raised important questions regarding how heavy a hand technology companies like Facebook -- which also owns Instagram and the messaging app WhatsApp -- and Google should exert when deciding what types of political content they will and will not permit. By maintaining a status quo, Facebook executives are essentially saying they are doing the best they can without government guidance and see little benefit to the company or the public in changing.