14 Feb 2024
- 11 Jan 2016
- 4 Min read
Industry round-up: Character limits and ad-light experiences
Our first industry round-up of 2016 will give you the low-down on the latest developments in digital marketing, including changes on Twitter and Forbes which could have a big impact on the future of the industry.
Twitter raises its character limit
While the 140-character limit has long been Twitter’s defining characteristic, if rumours are true, the social media platform will soon be ditching the restriction. According to Re/code, Twitter is currently testing a version of a product known internally as ‘Beyond 140’, which will increase the character-limit on tweets to a massive 10,000 words. This change is rumoured not to affect the way that the platform fundamentally functions, as tweets will stay 140 characters long in your timeline, but you will be able to expand them to their full length by clicking on them.
As their growth continues to stall, the fact Twitter is doing something to freshen up their service comes as no surprise. However, many users have been taken aback by this complete U-turn on what makes the platform unique, and the initial reaction to the news has been largely negative.
However, in his article on Slate, Will Oremus states that the majority of this backlash has missed the point. The main impact of this change, he says, is that external links to media outlets will be replaced by the full article being viewed on Twitter itself, keeping users on-site rather than elsewhere on the web.
Oremus said: “What’s really changing here, then, is not the length of the tweet. It’s where that link at the bottom takes you when you click on it—or, rather, where it doesn’t take you. Instead of funnelling traffic to blogs, news sites, and other sites around the Web, the ‘read more’ button will keep you playing in Twitter’s own garden.”
With ‘Beyond 140’, Twitter is making a similar move to the one that Facebook has with its ‘Instant Articles’ feature. We’ve written about the impact this latest Facebook update could have on your website here, and if these rumours are to be believed, the same applies to this Twitter update.
Forbes cracks down on ad block users
Another potentially huge move in the world of digital marketing is Forbes’s new attitude to ad block users. Any user with an in-browser ad-blocking app will be denied access to the publisher’s content, while disabling their ad blocker will give them access to an “ad-light experience”. Forbes tested this development between 17 December 2015 and 3 January 2016, reports Adweek, and found that 903,000 in a sample of 2.1m readers (42.2%) turned off their ad blockers in exchange for access to the content with fewer ads.
If Forbes’s experiment is a success, don’t be surprised to find more sites following their lead as media companies seek to work out how best to monetise the content they publish on the web.
SEO gets 37 months in jail for extortion
An American SEO consultant has been imprisoned for 37 months and ordered to pay $174,888 in restitution to a dozen victims for what a jury has deemed “extortive conduct”, the US department of Justice has announced. This behaviour included blackmailing his clients under the threat that he would damage their search engine ranking through illegitimate SEO work, as well as by posting fraudulent negative reviews and comments about their business online.
The Justice Department clarified that “a legitimate SEO business engages in standard practices such as optimizing the underlying HTML code on a website for certain keywords that a search engine indexer, (e.g., a web crawler for Google, Bing, etc.) would associate with a given search query.” They define “an illegitimate SEO business” as engaging in “deceptive tactics to affect search engine rankings and the volume of results. Such deceptive tactics include creating fraudulent reviews (good or bad), creating fictitious websites, or hiding text on websites.”
You’ll be glad to know that unless you’re “posting fraudulent comments and creating negative reviews online” in order to blackmail your clients, you have no need to worry that your work as an SEO could land you in jail.
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