A $5 first-person shooter called Hood Warfare 2 has gone from near-obscurity to one of Steam’s most talked-about releases in less than a week. Given the nature of the game, however, it’s also drawn scrutiny for its content, its anonymous developers, and the creators who’ve played it live on stream. Made by an anonymous dev…
Google Ads is introducing new controls that let advertisers prioritize channels and limit how much of their campaign budgets can be spent across Google-owned inventory and partner networks. The features, called Channel Prioritization and Budget Allocation, will roll out globally across Search, Shopping, Performance Max, and Demand Gen campaigns over the coming months. Advertisers will…
AI-generated images can now give celebrities entire social media moments they never took part in. For Mia Goth, that meant a supposed response to her divorce — right down to a T-shirt and breakup soundtrack. After news of the Pearl and MaXXXine actress’s divorce filing from Shia LaBeouf a few weeks ago, an Instagram post…
It’s a classic tale: You open Instagram for a break, and 20 minutes later, you’re caught up on three arguments, worried about something you hadn’t heard of til this morning, and wondering why you picked up your phone in the first place. Then a video of a puppy appears, and for a few seconds, things…
Testing is everywhere in SEO: Our industry started testing titles, then moved on to internal linking, content formats, templates, and now we are increasingly curious about the impact of AI-generated changes. But running a test and learning something useful from it aren’t necessarily the same thing. You can make a change, watch a metric move,…
A celebrity shopping complaint can become everyone’s business pretty quickly. This weekend, that customer was Kelly Clarkson. The purchase in question? A $15,000 singing bird. “Just drove all the way to Brooklyn to check out this store I thought looked really rad and had a few things in mind to buy and literally was looked…
Anthropic’s Thariq Shihipar, Member of the Technical Staff at Anthropic, explains why AI agents need more than user instructions and how Artifacts helps Claude achieve users’ goals. In a recent podcast interview, Shihipar makes the case that Artifacts, a feature introduced in 2024, is the way to clarify requirements, communicate preferences, and collaborate more effectively…
From the creator lounge at New York Comic Con, the view is hard to beat. Below, thousands of fans stream through the Javits Center’s main entrance, a colorful procession of elaborate cosplays, oversized props, and familiar characters brought to life. Towering banners celebrating everything from Tamagotchi and The Apothecary Diaries to YAGA and NYCC’s 20th…
Ahrefs checked Google’s U.S. results for the exact names of 100 global brands every week from July through September, and published the results Oct. 2. On July 1, five of 98 usable results had an AI Overview. By Sept. 30, 63 of the 100 brand-name queries did. For brand teams, this is the results page…
As a paid media marketer for regulated fields such as healthcare, financial, or legal industries, AI can raise flags for concern. Whether it’s the “black box” of automated bid strategies colliding with organizational concerns around targeting, or questions around AI usage to generate creative, I recommend knowing your company’s policies and industry guidelines is a…