Street Fight Daily: Twitter Courts Small Business, Apple Eyes Search
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…
Twitter Seeks To Prove Value For Smaller Advertisers (AdExchanger)
Twitter has developed ad products for big budgets, but it’s also trying to show small and midsize advertisers it’s got their interests in mind. Twitter on Wednesday rolled out “Quick Promote” to make it easy for business owners unfamiliar with ad tech to amplify top-performing tweets.
Marketers Know Even More About Offline Behavior Than You Think (Street Fight)
Steven Jacobs: An explosion of cloud-connected devices is spawning a new dataset of offline behaviors — what we called local data — that could help local marketers, sellers and economies better compete with the ecommerce industry.
Apple May Be About To Take On Google With Its Own Search Engine (Cult of Mac)
Apple may be about to turn the tables on its Mountain View rivals — by entering the search engine business. The iPhone maker is currently looking to hire an engineering project manager for something called Apple Search, which would “revolutionize how people use their computers and mobile devices.”
Marchex: Marketers Spent $4B on Mobile Search Ads To Drive Calls In 2014 (Street Fight)
Marchex, a call advertising firm, estimates that marketers spent over $4 billion on mobile search ads to drive calls last year alone. And yet, the company says marketers have had no way to know which keywords produced the calls.
Groupon in Talks to Sell Majority Stake in Ticket Monster (Wall Street Journal)
Groupon is in talks to sell a majority stake in South Korea’s second-largest mobile commerce company, potentially making four times its investment in just over a year. The deal could push investors to reassess the value of Groupon, whose shares have sagged by about 30% in the past year. (Subscription required)
LoopPay Could Be The Secret Weapon Inside Samsung’s Galaxy S6 (GigaOm)
Perhaps all that’s missing from Samsung’s forthcoming release is a way for the company to challenge Apple Pay. Or maybe that’s in there too with a combination of integrated fingerprint sensor and LoopPay. A new report validates rumors that Samsung is in talks to develop an Apple Pay competitor.
How The Sharing Economy Will Lead To The Growth Of Online Reviews (Search Engine Land)
Bill Trancer’s research shows that online reviews play an undeniable role in a consumer’s purchasing decisions, and that brands are missing out by not giving the channel more attention. “Failure to understand the channel has led to a huge inefficiency and untapped opportunity.”
Beacons & Mobile Payments for the Masses (MediaPost)
Chuck Martin: For mobile commerce technologies to really hit the masses, they need to be deployed where the masses are. Beacons in a store, or even 100 stores, have little chance of touching most mobile consumers.
Location Based Geo-Targeting Boosts Paid Search Ad Performance…Or Does It? (Search Engine Land)
Wesley Young: A common cited and well supported metric is that geo-targeted ads perform two times better than the industry average for non-targeted campaigns. But what if you cite this statistic to your advertiser and then the ads you place do not perform at that rate?
What Happens When Uber And Airbnb Become Their Own Regulators (Washington Post)
Companies like Airbnb and Uber are increasingly taking on some of the roles that have traditionally belonged to government. Airbnb plans to collect taxes on behalf of individual users on the platform, and it will lump all that money into a single big tax payment to local governments.
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