Google Assistant will soon be capable of delivering a personalized audio news feed after users say “OK Google, play the news.” This new feature is a collaborative effort with publishers around the world, which brings the artificial intelligence of Google News to the voice context of Assistant. [Source: Search Engine Journal]
Instagram users in India could shop for products within the app itself from next year, beginning with an affiliate model. Initially, tapping the “buy” button next to an image will take the user to the merchant’s web page to complete the purchase. Later, users will be able to make the purchase within Instagram itself. [Source: Mint]
Professional networking giant, LinkedIn has come up with a new change in privacy settings that is sure to cause a ripple among marketers and lead generation experts. Under this change, it now prevents others from exporting your email address from the site. [Source: Logicserve Digital]
Google continues to roll out its responsive search ads (RSA) and add new features. This week, Google said it will be rolling out four reporting and feedback tools for RSAs. The company has also made RSAs available in ten additional languages. [Source: Search Engine Land]
In a strategic about-face last week, YouTube announced it will drop the paywall from its Originals programming and make the shows available on the free ad-supported platform with 2 billion users. [Source: Marketing Land]
Adobe is fine-tuning its data management platform (DMP) Audience Manager with two new features. One is the ability to subtract a common trait when creating a lookalike user model. The other new feature is the ability to automatically report on ad impressions by user segment. [Source: MARTECH TODAY]
Google has rolled out a couple of interesting updates to its search page. If you have recently accessed the search engine results page you must have seen that the search bar doesn’t disappear even when you have scrolled from the top of the page to the next fold. [Source: Logicserve Digital]
There’s a quick ‘Facebook survey’ option on comment quality, which helps provide the platform with more feedback into what users like and don’t like within discussion threads. The feedback option adds another way to help Facebook clean up its comments and prompt more engagement [Source: Social Media Today]
Programmatic adoption is poised to grow to 52% in the next 24 months, according to research by Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) and GroupM. The report titled ‘Mobile Ecosystem and ad-Sizing Report’ 2018 further highlights that the propensity for programmatic guaranteed is increasing in India and the penetration is set to grow from 6% to 17% by 2020. [Source: The Drum]
Google announced it now supports better discovery of livestreams in Google Search and Google Assistant. These live streams can show up in the search results in a carousel and have a live label like the older live blog posts feature Google had back in 2015. [Source: Search Engine Land]
