The Near Memo

Send us a textThe consumer review paradox.More than three-fourths (77%) of consumers now "always" or "regularly" read local business reviews, according to a recent BrightLocal survey. That's up from 60% in 2020.  At the same time, more of them (62%) believe they've encountered fake reviews. Where will this lead?Despite surprise, Amazon’s closure of non-grocery businesses indicates they are getting serious.  Is Amazon groceries really just an expensive hobby? Or is it the still developing the unique value (logistics & tech) add that Amazon needs to make a dent in the grocery world. Nextdoor has never developed into the alternative local social network & their numbers show it.  After 12 years, there is still only $59m in quarterly revenue. While that represents a significant 47.9% increase, losses are up 100%. Their 36m weekly active users doesn’t bode well for their success as a social alternative or ad platform either.  The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.Near Memo Ep 54Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textYelp Elite reviews for saleAccording to a local NBC affiliate investigation, brokers are paying a subset of Yelp elites to post fake reviews: "one former Yelp Elite told us he was part of an invitation-only online chat that included a few thousand Yelp Elite members who are paid $25 to $50 per fake review." It would appear that despite Yelp’s claim of better reviews, their is mischief afoot and that Yelp review averages reflect low cost filtering rather than a better review corpusCore Web Vitals: No impact on Local ranking, Google offering SEO training,An interesting and large scale study from Tomas Acuna of whitespark looked at 4500 local listings across 15 verticals and 15 meteor areas to determine that, in fact, Google’s web core vitals have virtually no impact in the local search algo. Is this due to local sites not being well done or does it just reflect the fact that the local algo is so biased towards location and relevance that it just doesn’t have much impact? Where will Google search be in 10 years?A Reddit thread about increasingly poor search results, led an informal Near Media twitter survey about the future of search. While it is difficult to predict there are current efforts to fundamentally change how and where we search. Regardless of changing search paradigms, Google is likely to remain a domineering tech companyThe Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.Near Memo Ep 53Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textSegment 1: Will Google’s Increasingly good ability to summarize  with AI make SEO superfluous? Marie Haynes highlighted a new Google Docs feature that summarizes your document using Google’s AI/ML. This ability may provide SEO's with insight into how Google "understands" your page and helps content writes create better copy. Google’s capabilities in this arena and their ability to “understand” the web May portend a time when SEO will offer less value. Segment 2: Google’s recent Android Privacy Sandbox announcement: Something real or is it just more Google PR?Google’s plan is to create a plan and rollout out a beta for Android privacy in 2 years. They promise to be much more sensitive to social networks’ need to snoop than Apple was. How much of this is really about privacy and how much is about convincing the public and the governments of the world that they “care” about privacy?Segment 3: Wix reported their Q4 & 2021 earnings. What to make of their 123 million small business websites in the US? Wix, while not yet profitable, reported sales of just under $1.3 billion. What is most interesting is their report of having over 220 million small business websites with over 50% of those in the US. It raises the question of exactly how big is the addressable SMB market in the US.Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textObviously feeling nervous, Google is intensifying its anti-antitrust campaign, lobbying SMBs to "take action" and automating their emails to their representatives in the House and the Senate. Amazon disclosed the value of its ad business for the first time. The company made $9.7 billion in ad revenue in Q4 and $31.2 billion in 2021. As GeekWire points out, "Amazon’s advertising arm is eight times as large as Snapchat’s entire business, and nearly seven times as large as Twitter."Apple, leveraging a purchase that they made in 2020, will be rolling out the ability of more recent iPhones to process credit card payments without any additional hardware. Stripe will integrate the tool for businesses first, including Shopify's Point of Sale app this Spring, and other payment platforms will adopt it later this yearThe Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.Near Memo Ep 51Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textWe discuss the reasons behind Meta’s terrible 4th quarter and stock fall. Was it really Apple’s fault? Will people in the universe buy into their universe?Yelp and Google both try to establish their review narrative with virtue signaling while the FTC sends letter to 10 companies that skirt the review guidelinesThe Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.Near Memo Ep 50Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textAfter a brief discussion of Google My Business losing control of their previous FB page, we cover how Google, in formally abandoning their FLOC replacement for cookies. is attempting to implement a new API, Topics, that provides websites with 3 weeks of user interests for targeting advertising. Clearly the world is moving toward contextual advertising and away from behavioral targeting but whether Google can get this effort off the ground is another matter In a high profile case, the FTC fined Fashion Nova for hiding hundreds of thousands of Studies show that gating actually impedes review volume speaking to the benefit of review transparency and doesn’t prevent negative reviews. The new guidelines will not change small business behavior but the review platforms will have to comply with the guidance.  The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.Near Memo Ep 49 s2e3Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textThis bill, largely in response to the growing sentiment that large digital companies are spying on every day Americans for profit, is unlikely to pass but is indicative of growing discontent with the impact of current ad tech. It foreshadows the likely move away from personal targeting towards contextual advertising.96% of respondents had implemented new tools in the past year. But the number of tools that businesses were using was small. 60% said they were only using one to three different tools to run their business. Email was preferred communication channel by businesses  three to one over textingNiantic is building out a development platform to make AR experiences more widely available while providing a successful sponsorship model within Pokemon Go. The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.Near Memo Ep 48Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textVendasta, which provides an app store for agencies, has acquired PPC pioneer MatchCraft. The acquisition will fill out Vendasta core marketing offerings with paid ad campaigns and allow more traditional media companies to transition more easily from an ad model to a full service digital marketing model. Despite Supreme Court refusal to require businesses to vaccinate their employees, those companies that are requiring vaccination are seeing success despite Omichron. Case in point is United Airlines which has 3000 of their 47,000 employees out with Covid has seen no hospitalizations or deaths since requiring the vaccine. Previously one employee a week was dying from Covid. Airlines though are the perfect business to require vaccinations and doing so will increase those willing to fly. The TLDR Act, which stands for "Terms-of-service Labeling, Design, and Readability Act," would require any website/app – SMBs are explicitly exempted – to offer an easy to understand summary of key terms. And it would have to appear at the top of TOS pages. While a step forward it is unlikely to change user behaviors as the companies will still hold the power. The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.Near Memo Ep 47Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textUsing a traditional golf course model with an NFT twist, over $10 million was raised in 48 hours. The project got lots of media coverage even though no golf course has yet been purchased or even identified. However this type of activity might point the way towards crowdfunding other start up ventures. Google, by degrading the user experience and being unwilling to get into the nitty gritty of real world retail has lost the battle for high value intent driven product searches. Can they regain this market? What would it take?In this recent Washington Post poll only Amazon garnered trust amongst more than 50% of US consumers. The rest all were trusted by less than half of the population and some significantly less. Yet the numbers indicate that despite this mistrust we continue to use these services and products. The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.Near Memo Ep 46Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us a textLast week, Google released a new, more horizontal Local Map Pack with more white space, a bigger, squarer map and bigger images. How will this impact ads and ranking?New Yelp consumer survey indicates that over 90% prefer written reviews over just ratings. This survey is ostensibly aimed at Google and their lower review and rating standards but in some ways might also be targeted to their partner Apple that might be considering dropping Yelp. Interestingly the reviews that Yelp says consumers prefer are not the reviews that they typically highlight. Go figureNew research from SOCI that looked at  1.1 million business locations across the US and analyzed 169 million reviews associated with them. The research found that over 60% of all reviews are written by Local Guides and that those reviews tend to be shorter than reviews written by regular users. Is this due to gamification of the fact that non Local Guide reviewers are the more emotional reviewers?The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Commerce: What happened, why it matters, and the implications for local businesses and national brands.Near Memo Ep 45Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/