Hello Digital Blog – Digital Marketing News & Editorial

Here we are in week 50. We join Google in looking back at the year in search, with the biggest trends from 2020 coming as a surprise to no one. We also look at European guidelines coming into place to regulate the transparency in search and digital marketplaces, the Australian bill to give crime agencies more powers to police the dark web, and a tiny, break-dancing robot.

We’re one step closer to 2021 and the end of what has been a massive (and deeply odd year). This week in digital has seen AI cracking a big biological mystery, Google Maps making the platform more “social”, Facebook UK having to pay news media outlets to license their news stories, and lab-grown chicken finally hitting the supermarket shelves (in Singapore).

From internet outages to France starting to tax big tech companies, it’s been a big week in digital news. Take a look at some of the highlights.

Social media is getting a big shake up from a French based start-up, hijackings of Google My Business listings are worryingly on the rise, Google Maps can now tell you how crowded your bus or train is in real-time, and African start-up Chipper Cash has got the support (and funding) of the world’s richest man. 

This past week we’ve seen a wide range of digital news, from Google announcing that Drive users could start having their files deleted, the significant drop Google Ad users are seeing in search term data, and the wane of Australian media groups. 

This week, we look back at some of the most important updates that were made to Google My Business this year, the rise of B2B eCommerce marketplaces, updates and changes in the world of social media and stock of tech giants Apple and Microsoft (among others) soaring during the craziness of the election. 

Here we are at the end of another week and almost in November. One skip, hop and a jump and it will be Christmas, and then 2021. In what has been a disastrous year for many, there have been plenty of industries that have been able to survive and even thrive in the pandemic. Lime scooters announced this week that they have reached 200 million rides, bouncing back quickly from a drop in riders, and Amazon tripled their net income last quarter. 

It’s been a rollercoaster of a week, with Tesla slowly rolling out new and improved Autopilot software for their vehicles (which will hopefully lead to less fatalities) Google finally resolving their indexing issues (well, 99% of them) and Quibi closing their doors after only 6 months. 

Google dominated the digital news this week, with plenty of changes and updates released. One of these was the official announcement of a new-look Google Analytics. Claiming to be smarter with more customer-centric measurement, it’s big news for analysts that rely on the platform. There were also further developments in investigation into the monopoly Google has over the market, with Moz finding that YouTube videos accounted for around 94% of video search results in 2020. But don’t worry, it’s not all negative on the Google front, they also announced ways that they’re doing more to design for and with people with disabilities. 

Search and social made the headlines a lot this past week, with Instagram marking its 10th anniversary and Bing releasing a fresh rebrand. There was also big news for the likes of Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook, with a damning Congressional report claiming that they are monopolistic ‘gatekeepers’ of the digital economy. Take a look at some of the top stories in digital from the past week.