Greetings, everyone. Today is the first day you can buy an Apple Vision Pro. It looks like an exceptionally cool piece of hardware, but we’ve been working on a way to let you guys fly around the world through your web browsers on the off chance that some of you aren’t yet prepared to pay four grand to strap iPads to your faces.
Our GeoGrids now offer a public link option that allows anyone to view their results from any angle they see fit. You can zoom way in to see the buildings or topography of the place where your GeoGrid searches take place. This one is a search for the London Eye, a giant Ferris wheel on the River Thames.
You can see us zipping around the search results for a roofing company in Auckland, New Zealand in the screen recording above this paragraph. We’re moving quickly because we’ve got a file size constraint to tangle with and we wanted to show off how you can pan, zoom, and swivel when you view one of the new public links. If you’re on a touchscreen device, zooming in/out or moving around the map works exactly like you’d expect. On a desktop computer, you can use the scroll wheel on your mouse to zoom in or out, click and hold your right mouse button (or click and hold a trackpad with two fingers) to swivel, or click, hold, and drag the left mouse button to pan around. You can play around with the controls by clicking either or both of the two links we’ve provided. The learning curve is close to nonexistent.
Local Viking and Local Brand Manager users can now view all GeoGrid search results this way. Click the “Public view” or “Copy public link” buttons at the top of any scheduled (that’s a Local Viking link; here’s the Local Brand Manager link) or live (LBM link) GeoGrid search result to see for yourselves. You can also send the links to clients or prospects. This view adds a lot of context that was missing from the still-amazing (and still available) way we previously displayed them. You’ll see.
Prime Video has always been terrible. It has mostly bad programming and it has been plagued by its management’s poor decisions. It’s a forgivable state of affairs because it was always just a perk to incentivize people to sign up for Amazon’s prepaid shipping scheme, Amazon Prime.
Prime Video just did something unprecedented. Rather than offer a less-expensive, ad-supported subscription tier like Netflix, Disney Plus, Peacock, Max, and Hulu now do, it started showing ads to its existing subscribers and informed them that they could return to commercial-free viewing for an extra $3 per month. This is something we ran into earlier this week when we flipped on a new episode of Reacher.
There’s a silver lining. As bad as the Prime Video experience is for viewers, you can buy ads there inexpensively. You can now sponsor channels, shows, or display advertisements on the home screen (what people see on the top half of their televisions as they search for something to watch). There are no rates listed on the Prime Video Ads page, but we’ve read that you can expect to pay 10-20% less per impression than you would on other ad-supported streaming platforms.
We’ll expand on this more next week, but we wanted to let everyone know that they’re not alone if they’re dealing with rankings that are slipping and/or not covering as wide an area as they did in December. This month has been brutal. Google is twisting every dial it can to get businesses to buy ads (very much at the expense of organic traffic). We read in Wednesday’s The Local Marketing Mixup (another newsletter) that Google is launching a new feature that allows people to search through local business events and promotions. We weren’t able to independently verify that, but we believe it– it’s a feature that seems ripe for monetization.
We’ve got some links to wrap things up with. Vox published an article yesterday about the “tyranny of the personal brand.” It’s called Everyone’s a sellout now and goes into many aspects of what goes into marketing yourself. Next, Monday’s Wall Street Journal has an article about “subscription fatigue” that fits perfectly with the things we’ve written about Prime Video. Many people view Amazon’s $3 price hike as a deal breaker. Third, Yesterday’s Hootsuite guide to Pinterest analytics may give you some value if you’re invested in that platform. Finally, if you’re the type of person who uses press releases as marketing vehicles, you should check out Hubspot’s newest template from yesterday.
Take care.