“You’ve got mail!” While America Online, better known as AOL, is nowhere near its heights during the late 90s and early Aughts, when the dial-up service had more than 20 million paying subscribers, millions of people still hear that infamous catchphrase to this day when logging into their email account on America Online, better known…
Author: vccserv
Google Chrome will enable “Always Use Secure Connections” by default with the release of Chrome 154 in October 2026, the company announced. The change means Chrome will ask for user permission before loading any public website that doesn’t use HTTPS encryption. Users will see a bypassable warning explaining the security risks of unencrypted connections. Google…
Polymarket. Kalshi. Truth Social? It looks like Donald Trump’s social network is getting into the prediction market space. On Monday, Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media and Technology Group Corp., announced that the social media platform would be the first such site to launch its own prediction market. The prediction market will be called “Truth…
This is all based on the Google leak and tallies up with my experience of content that does well in Discover over time. I have pulled out what I think are the most prominent Discover proxies and grouped them into what seems like the appropriate workflow. Like a disgraced BBC employee, thoughts are my own.…
Local SEO includes several specific tasks geared to establishing the relevance and authority of a business within a targeted geographic area. Search engines and large language models (LLMs) like Google Gemini and ChatGPT reference many different data points to determine who will be surfaced in their respective result sets, which include AI Overviews and AI…
What does it say about the economics of content when the most visible site on the web loses significant traffic? A status report by Wikipedia shows a significant decline in human page views over the last few months as a result of generative AI, “especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers” [1]. Image Credit:…
Xbox can’t seem to stay out of the news lately, with the announcement that Halo: Combat Evolved is coming to PlayStation next year and, in response, a detente called in the console wars. Things took a darker turn on Sunday night when President Trump launched into an AI slop meme war with GameStop that has…
When it comes to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the winners aren’t just the brands that rack up sales; they’re the ones that capture attention, drive conversation, and leave a lasting impression. In 2024, Pixability’s YouTube Insights revealed how shoppers used video to plan and validate purchases throughout the season. Meanwhile, YouGov’s BrandIndex tracked which…
If you manage PPC campaigns, you’ve seen it. Platforms are making more decisions without asking you first. Campaign types keep consolidating into AI-first formats like Performance Max and Demand Gen. The granular controls you used to rely on keep disappearing or moving behind automation. A year ago, Performance Max still felt experimental. Now it’s often…
Good news! Elon Musk’s X has heard the cries of third-party developers looking to access the platform with their apps and has introduced a new pay-per-use self-serve model instead of a one-time flat-fee subscription. The bad news? Somehow, it seems more expensive than the previous one-time flat-fee subscription model. On Monday, X’s Developers account officially…









