Street Fight Daily: Why Amazon’s Pursuing Pharmacy (and Everything Else); Programmatic Hurdles Ahead

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

Amazon’s PillPack Deal Gives It Access to Sensitive Health Data (WSJ)
Amazon knows more about consumers’ online-shopping habits than any other retailer. Now it is about to get its hands on the most intimate of personal data: people’s health conditions. WSJ: Why Amazon needs to do everything

GateHouse Media Shows How Media Orgs Can Offer Value for SMB Advertisers (Street Fight)
“Most newspapers and Yellow Pages (and Yelp?) are basically ad-selling machines. GateHouse, in selling HR, IT, and financing services as well as digital services, understands that once you know how to sell one service, you can sell (or more likely upsell) any service. It’s critical for legacy organizations to bite the bullet and figure out services,” writes Mike Blumenthal.

The Programmatic Transparency Challenges That Still Must Be Solved (AdExchanger)
Many of the programmatic space’s recent transparency advances were made to instill trust in programmatic media and keep those investments flowing. But the industry has overlooked some transparency improvements that could go a long way in not just increasing confidence in programmatic, but also performance.

Flytedesk Empowers Advertisers to Reach Coveted Audience: College Students (Street Fight)
Millennials, college kids, 18–24’s—whatever advertisers may choose to call them, they are the most desirable demographic for companies large and small, according to Alex Kronman, founder and CEO of flytedesk, which aims to connect advertisers of all sizes with that coveted audience.

Google Shows Preference for Quicker-Loading Mobile Pages (MediaPost)
The speed at which pages load in browsers has begun to determine those that will serve up higher in mobile searches, according to data released this week. Pages using Google’s faster-loading system tied to Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) appear in the first search results page for around 61% of searches.

Here’s How Many Facebook Ads Some Publishers Are Running on Their Main Pages (Digiday)
Publishers don’t like to talk about if—or how—they buy traffic. But following transparency measures Facebook rolled out June 28, it’s now possible to see how publishers are spending money to increase their distribution on the social platform.

OpenPhone Lets You Get a Business Phone Number With an App (TechCrunch)
Meet OpenPhone, a startup in the current Y Combinator batch. The company has been working on an app to make it easier to get and use a business phone number. You don’t need a second phone, you don’t need to get an expensive solution designed for big teams.

Instagram Stories Is Now Twice As Big as Snapchat, With 400 Million Daily Users (Business Insider)
On Thursday, Instagram announced that it now has 400 million daily active users of its Stories feature. That’s more than twice the number of people that visit Snapchat every day.