Snapchat takes its secrecy seriously. Very, very seriously. Take the case of one former Snapchat employee. On his first day, he was forced to sit through an ominous orientation in which he was threatened with termination if he so much as breathed a word of what he was...
Inside China's phony 'click farm': Tiny office uses 10,000 handsets to send fake ratings and 'likes' for boosting clients' online popularity Footage has emerged of a giant 'click farm' in which thousands of phones are used to boost product ratings with phony 'likes'....
‘The question is not whether this can be done. It is whether Facebook should apply a moral filter to these decisions.’ By Antonio Garcia-Martinez For two years I was charged with turning Facebook data into money, by any legal means. If you browse the internet...
by Wolf Richter • Apr 26, 2017 The big shift to mobile advertising. It’s not all careening downhill, at least not for everyone – or at least not for the biggest two: Google and Facebook. More on our two heroes in a moment. Internet advertising revenues in the US...
Does the thought of haggling over your monthly bills make you break out in a cold sweat? You’re not alone, because most people don’t like trying to talk their way into a lower price. A 2013 Consumer Reports survey found that less than half of consumers had tried...
Violent, enraged Internet trolls lurk everywhere, and have remade what seemed like an open space. Can we stop them? By Sara Scribner A young poet, enough of a rising star to be profiled in the New York Times Magazine, posts a poem called “The Rape Joke.” It begins,...
By Adrienne Lafrance, The Atlantic Catching a glimpse of the puppet masters who play with the data trails we leave online is always disorienting. And yet there's something new-level creepy about a recent study that shows Facebook manipulated what users saw when they...
By Nicholas Carlson A couple years ago, I learned the best way to keep my email account near inbox zero. The secret is to not look at my iPhone or open Gmail unless I can do something right then and there with every unread email. What this means in practice is that...
By Andrew Leonard Here’s a new term you’ve probably heard recently: “The sharing economy.” In the “sharing economy,” cheap access to resources that would otherwise go unused (a spare bedroom, a car, a weed whacker) is just one click away. And for many consumers of...
If you’ve been venturing a bit in the online marketing world like me, I’m sure you’ve heard the term “marketing funnel” before. To be frank, it was never something that appealed to me. It always seemed like just a way to optimize how many people are giving you...