Everyone Loses With Increase in Ad-Blocking Use
Ad blockers are growing in popularity, and that could be a big problem for any business that relies on online advertising to pay the bills. A study published last week by Adobe and the software company PageFair revealed that 45 million active users in the United States use ad-blocking software — an increase of 48 percent in one year as of June. That’s about 15 percent of U.S. Internet users. In other countries, such as Poland, the...
Study: Google’s Search Favors Its Own Products
When you go to Google for anything, be it a weather report or a phone number or an explanation of string theory, you assume that the top results will always be the very best. Those are, at least, the only ones you click: Studies suggest it’s a rare, rare Googler who bothers scrolling past search result No. 5. But according to a highly critical new paper out from legal scholar Tim Wu, Harvard Business School professor Michael Luca and...
How to Avoid Scam Hotel Bookings
Pay attention or pay the price. That’s the bottom line on an online hotel-booking scam that’s recently caught the attention of a U.S. senator who has asked the Federal Trade Commission to look into these insidious schemes. This isn’t a new hoax, but it has recently come to the attention of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who has expressed his concerns in a letter to the FTC. In it, he noted that duplicitous third-party booking sites,...
