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If people are seeing stories from these papers on Google+, they either don't like them or they aren't bothering to tell Google. The New York Times, with over 360,000 followers, receives an average of 26,665 +1s per week. That's fewer than one +1d article a week for every 10 followers. The Times only posts to Google+ a few times per week, and it's not always posting links to NYTimes.com pages. But few of its Google+ posts have more than 50 +1s, and they theoretically reach 360,000 people.

What's even weirder is that The Washington Post, with 5% of the followers The New York Times has, gets more +1s than any other newspaper. With 33,206 +1s per week on average, the Post is the only major U.S. paper (with more than 200 followers) that gets a significant multiple of weekly +1s per follower. It gets 1.7 +1s per person encircling it, and the rest of the leaders get a small fraction of their follower count.

But so does WSJ.com, the #2 U.S newspaper in terms of Google+ followers, and its +1s are still a small fraction of its number of followers. All these papers have about the same level of activity on their Google+ pages, and their +1 activity on those posts is about the same.

Google Now aggregates the information Google already collects about you on a daily basis: accessing your email, your calendar, your contacts, your text messages, your location, your shopping habits, your payment history, as well as your choices in music, movies and books. It can even scan your photos and automatically identify them based on their subject, not just the file name

Google already knows where you live, for example, and constantly plots out the time it will take to return home. Google even knows your favorite routes to work and can suggest alternatives based on congestion. And it will figure out your favorite sports teams by the number of times you ask about them, without you ever having to explicitly identify them. Google’s recommendation engine, meanwhile, uses the information to suggest new content to purchase.

Google Now tries to proactively provide information via “cards,” or vertical tabs, that present information it thinks you might want. For example, if you’ve entered a home location via Google Maps, a card will constantly update with the estimated time to drive home.

Google+ is catching up on a lot of fronts to Facebook, but it's still lagging in one key metric: Time spent.

The average visitor to the social network spent 6 minutes 47 seconds on Google+'s site in March vs. 6 hours, 44 minutes on Facebook.com according to figures Nielsen supplied to Mashable. However, that number is down for Facebook. In March 2012, the average was 7 hours, 9 minutes per person. For Google, the figures are a substantial jump over the 3.3 minutes visitors spent on average on the site in February 2012, according to comScore. The figures do not include traffic via apps.

Nielsen reports that 20 million unique visitors in the U.S. used Google+'s Android and iPhone apps, a 238% rise over March 2012. On desktop, G+'s monthly uniques jumped 63% vs. the year before to 28 million.

a recent study by Shareaholic found that post-click engagement with Facebook posts trailed far behind the results delivered by YouTube, and also lagged behind Google Plus, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Shareaholic examined six months’ worth of data from more than 200,000 websites reaching more than 250 million unique monthly visitors

YouTube drives the most engaged traffic. These referrals have the lowest average bounce rate (43.19 percent), the highest pages per visit (2.99), and the longest visit duration (227.82 seconds).

video watchers are especially receptive to links within video descriptions that complement the audio and visual content they just consumed.

Search traffic to publishers has taken a dive in the last eight months, with traffic from Google dropping more than 30% from August 2012 through March 2013, according to research done by BuzzFeed. While Google makes up the bulk of search traffic to publishers, traffic from all search engines has dropped by 20% in the same period.

Of the three major search engines — Google, Yahoo and Bing — only Yahoo saw growth in this period. While Yahoo grew search traffic in this period, it sent 21M referrals to publishers in March, less than half of the 48M referrals sent by Google. Traffic from Bing dropped 12%.

In the past, we've reported how referrals from social platforms like Facebook to the BuzzFeed Network were growing, and at times sending more traffic than search. While that difference was at times marginal — 5 to 10M referrals — its now sustained and significant. In March, Facebook sent 1.5x more traffic than Google, the greatest difference we've ever measured between the platforms. At the same time, we've watched traffic from other social platforms — Twitter and Pinterest -—continue to grow an audience and drive traffic traffic to publishers. "Dark social," that netherland of direct traffic, is also accelerating on the network, growing referral traffic to publishers by 52% over the past twelve months. By comparison, referrals from social platforms, i.e. the Facebooks, Twitters, Pinterests and Reddits of the world, grew by 25%. It begs the question, could direct traffic be taking the place of search?

For Google, social media and author authentication help them measure the influence (and trustworthiness) of content and links and, ideally, serve better results. If results have been authenticated with authorship — they’re “owned” by personal and company brands — searchers get better results and advertisers spend more knowing they’re getting more bang for their buck.

Now, page owners can link their sites in a few steps: 1) Visit your Google+ page, open its profile, and click ‘Edit profile’ 2) On the About tab, save your website URL, then click the new button, ‘Link website’ 3) Follow the instructions for adding a short line of code to your website’s homepage, then click ‘Test website’

Overall desktop ad spending set to decline in 2014 while mobile grows 83.0% Desktop search in the US is poised for a significant decline this year as paid clicks on Google shift toward mobile devices, according to new figures from eMarketer. US mobile search ad spending grew 120.8% in 2013, contributing to an overall gain of 122.0% for all mobile ads. Meanwhile, overall desktop ad spending increased just 2.3% last year, according to eMarketer.

desktop search ad spending will drop $1.4 billion this year, a decrease of 9.4% from 2013, while mobile search will increase 82.3% year over year. Mobile search will total $9.02 billion, compared with $13.57 billion for desktop search. Overall, US spending on advertising served to desktops and laptops will decline 2.4% in 2014 to $32.39 billion, down from $33.18 billion in 2013. Google will have a notable influence on the overall shift from desktop to mobile search spending. In 2013, 76.4% of the company’s search ad revenues came from desktop. However, that share will fall to 66.3% in 2014 due to a $770 million decrease in desktop search ad revenues year over year, eMarketer estimates. At the same time, the company’s mobile search revenues will increase $1.76 billion, totaling approximately one-third of Google’s total search revenues.

Up from 19.4% in 2013, mobile search will comprise an estimated 26.7% of the company’s total ad revenues this year. Desktop search declined to 63.0% of Google’s ad revenues in 2013, having already fallen from 72.7% in 2012.

More formal and professional than Facebook; Hashtags have major search value

et up Google Authorship to have your Google+ profile follow your content from across the Web in search results. More than any particular feature of Google+, users are enticed by integration with Google’s other products.

audience skews female by 4:1

In 2013, 19 percent of Google’s ad revenue came from mobile search ads, and it’s expected to rise to 30 percent over the next 3 years, according to eMarketer.

the company projects that mobile devices will account for 50 percent of all paid search clicks on Google in the United States by December 2015. Last year in the US, the share of paid search clicks from mobile devices rose from 21.8 percent in January to 34.2 percent in December. Paid search clicks from smartphones almost doubled throughout 2013.

In the US, conversion rates on tablets rose above desktop for the first time. Smartphone conversion rate still lags at 4.4% compared to 5.3 percent on desktop and 5.5 percent on tablets.

Study after study after study shows that more people are using the internet to consume video. In April 2012, ComScore reported that the average viewer watched nearly 22 hours of video in a single month. Most likely, those 22 hours were broken into many short-form videos, each being watched for just a few minutes at a time. The market is moving more toward catering to the Facebook generation's attention span--quick videos that are aimed to inspire, provoke, or excite. Likewise, the viewing experience on tablets devices such as the iPad make short-form content even more enjoyable.

Market-research outfit eMarketer projected that Facebook will account for 21.7 percent of the global mobile ad market in 2014, up from 17.5 percent in 2013 and just 5.4 percent in 2012. Google still commands the lion’s share of the sector, with eMarketer pegging it for a 46.8 percent share in 2014, and attributing its drop from nearly 50 percent in 2013 to the social network’s growth. eMarketer also predicted a modest gain for Twitter, to 2.6 percent in 2014, from 2.4 percent in 2013 and 1.5 percent in 2012. For the sector as a whole, eMarketer projected that mobile advertising will jump 75.1 percent in 2014, to $31.45 billion, accounting for nearly one-quarter of total worldwide digital ad spending.

In 2012, only 11 percent of Facebook’s net ad revenues worldwide came from mobile, and last year, that figure jumped to 45.1 percent. In 2014, eMarketer estimates that mobile will account for 63.4 percent of Facebook’s net digital ad revenues. Mobile accounted for 23.1 percent of Google’s net ad revenues worldwide in 2013, and eMarketer estimates this share will increase to 33.8 percent this year.

To Schmidt, today’s smartphones are pocket-size supercomputers. And their core is Android.

1.3 million Android devices come online every day. Nearly 70,000 of them are tablets, an area that Schmidt admitted Android fell behind in relation to the competition (Apple’s iPad, which he did not mention by name). The installed base of Android devices is pushing 500 million, with 480 million active Androids in circulation. It is an ecosystem, Schmidt said, that went beyond anything Google had ever imagined. 

In a post-Penguin environment, building natural backlinks should be a primary objective for webmasters.

Digital marketing today needs to be “natural.” Ideally, instead of building manufactured backlinks (as was a primary focus of past SEO best practices), your site should acquire links in a natural way—as it would if you did absolutely no promotional work whatsoever.

The key to building natural backlinks is to publish high-quality content that people will be inclined to share naturally on social media networks. After all, if you produce mediocre content, there’s no incentive for readers to link back to or share your website, making it even harder to get the backlinks needed to rank well in the new natural search results.

Google on Thursday updated its Gmail service so that you'll never have to click that pesky “Display images below” link again. Gmail will now automatically display images in email, the catch being that Google will host those images on its own servers. Prior to the change, most emailed images would be loaded from third-party servers—often enough, those of marketers.

But by filtering these photos through its own servers, however, Google may have shut out the use of Web bugs or beacons—bits of code that lets an advertiser know that an email has been opened. Marketers use images as beacons because, at least until now, services like Gmail would upload such images from an advertiser’s own web server. Any image can be a beacon, even an invisible one no more than a pixel wide.

the following likely consequences for his audience: Marketers won't be able to tell whether you've opened an email for the second or subsequent time Web bugs won't report reliable geolocations for opened emails, as they'll pick up the IP addresses of Gmail servers, not recipients Countdown clocks sent as animated images won't show the right time if email is opened a second or subsequent time Analytics will only track the first time an email is opened Marketers won't be able to update or change images once they're sent out

Alisa Leonard, director of strategy and planning at iCrossing, expressed doubt that people on Google Contacts were as influential as Facebook friends. “In Facebook, my social graph is highly qualified and much more intimate,” she says. “On Google, my contacts may be less intimate and less qualified.”

Defining Skeuomorphism This obscure word describes the way designs often borrow a particular feature from the past, even when the functional need for it is gone. Examples include pre-recorded shutter noises on smartphones to remind us of film cameras, or calendar apps that feature torn paper and metal rings. Or, as Wikipedia tells us [1]: A skeuomorph is a physical ornament or design on an object copied from a form of the object when made from another material or by other techniques.

the digital world has seen skeuomorphism popularized in the past couple years mainly thanks to the recent iOS-inspired trend of rich textures and life-like controls.

By opposition, the other side of the coin would be the newly popular "flat style", of which Microsoft's Metro UI is probably the main example. Flat Style embraces visual minimalism, eschewing textures and lighting effects for simple shapes and flat colors.

According data from comScore, the amount of video watched via the Internet continues to climb. In June, 33 billion videos were viewed online.

Where are people getting all of this video content? Google Sites (primarily YouTube) is leading the pack. In June, Google attracted 154, 507 million unique users that viewed an impressive 1,238.1 minutes per video.

comScore shows Google led the market for video ads in June by serving up 1.41 billion ads that reached almost 25 percent of the total US population.