Street Fight Daily: Google Puts Mobile First, Facebook Cuts Out Third-Party Data Brokers

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…

Google Search Takes Another Big Step Toward a Mobile-First World (Fortune)
Google said it has started steering its search algorithm towards the mobile versions of sites that “follow the best practices for mobile-first indexing.”

‘Ads.txt’: How a Little Bit of Code Is Putting a Big Dent in Ad Fraud (Street Fight)
Tom Grubisich: The ad fraud crisis finally is beginning to be addressed at least partly through an initiative from the Interactive Advertising Bureau bearing the nerdy name “ads.txt.”

Facebook Is Cutting Third-Party Data Providers Out of Ad Targeting (Recode)
Facebook is going to limit how much data it makes available to advertisers buying hyper-targeted ads on the social network.

4Cite’s Email Platform Helps Digital Brands Secure the Path to Purchase (Street Fight)
“Across the board with all of our retail clients, the most successful marketing campaign they have is their abandoned shopping cart email campaigns,” 4Cite CEO Bob Gaito said, referring to emails sent to remind customers that they have items left in their shopping carts.

Amazon Directly Hires Housekeepers to Conquer Local Services (Bloomberg)
Amazon is quietly hiring house cleaners in Seattle as direct employees. The online retailer is swapping the low cost of contract workers for the greater control of employing its own people.

28 Percent of Web Traffic Comes from Bots and Other Non-Human Signals (WSJ)
Web traffic is rife with bots and non-human traffic, making it difficult for ad and media businesses to understand who is visiting their sites and why, according to new findings from Adobe.

Local Newsrooms Have Always Had Trouble Keeping Local Journalists (Poynter)
What’s changed, though, is there are so many ways to participate in the news. Local stations and publications aren’t all there are now. And that means local newsrooms have more competition for journalists than ever before.

The Majority of Paid App Installs Are Fraudulent (Mobile Marketing Mag)
Gary Danks: While ad fraud as a whole might dominate headlines, there’s another strain which rarely gets talked about—app install fraud.