What we are thinking about.
Notes from running 8 publications and building tools for them. Restaurant SEO, local marketing, the boring parts that move the needle.
IndexNow? More Like IndexNope: Why Microsoft's Push Fails Real Publishers
Microsoft launched IndexNow in 2021 to speed up URL indexing, but adoption outside Bing remains negligible and results unimpressive.
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IndexNow? More Like IndexNope: Why Microsoft's Push Fails Real Publishers
Microsoft launched IndexNow in 2021 to speed up URL indexing, but adoption outside Bing remains negligible and results unimpressive.
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Yoast’s AI SEO Features in 2026 Are Still Garbage—Stop Wasting Time on Their Lazy Hype
Yoast launched AI-powered SEO tools in early 2026, but their output remains generic fluff with zero impact on rankings or user engagement.
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Brand Health Metrics: The Marketing Industry’s Latest Magic Trick to Mask Falling ROI
Marketers are fleeing hard performance data for brand health metrics, propped up by AI tools that promise more than they deliver. It's a retreat from real accountability.
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Why Yahoo and Dow Jones Are Making the Sports Business Beat Their Next Cash Cow
Yahoo and Dow Jones are doubling down on sports business coverage, targeting high-value audiences and advertisers with specialized verticals that go beyond generic game recaps.
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Yahoo’s DSP Dream: Kochava Collab Is Just Another Agentic Buzzword Play
Yahoo’s new partnership with Kochava promises ‘agentic DSP workflows’ but delivers little more than jargon-drenched repackaging of old interoperability myths.
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Retailers’ AI App Gold Rush Is a Feature Fetish, Not a Shopper Magnet
Retailers are rushing to build AI apps, but with little evidence shoppers actually want them, these features risk becoming expensive digital window dressing.
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Micro-Influencers Dump Paychecks for Equity, Shaking Up Brand Sponsorships
Micro-influencers are ditching short-term sponsorship paychecks for equity in brands, exposing the broken influencer marketing model and forcing a reckoning.
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Anchor Butter Ditches Pastoral Clichés for Gritty Realness in a Saturated Market
Anchor Butter throws out the tired cow-in-a-field trope in favor of bold, attention-grabbing campaigns that challenge the dairy category’s stale marketing norms.
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Omnicom’s Duncan Painter Out, Christine Gambino Steps Up in Leadership Shuffle
Omnicom shakes up its top deck as Duncan Painter exits and Christine Gambino, the COO behind its digital platform push, takes the CEO helm. This is no routine shuffle—it's a sign of the times.
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Spirit Airlines’ Low-Cost Branding: How Cheap Gimmicks Blew Up Its Business
Spirit Airlines’ fixation on ultra-low base fares and endless add-on fees turned its brand into a customer turnoff, paving the way for competitors to steal its market. This is how cheap gimmicks crash a business.
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Generative AI in the Creator Economy: More Hype Than Help, But The Hustle Isn’t Dead
Generative AI in the creator economy is mostly a productivity tool, not the creative revolution it’s hyped up to be. The real winners know where to draw the line.
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TikTok’s Billboard Ads Are Not Just Resized Videos — They’re Rebuilt From Scratch, Thanks to Vistar
TikTok is ditching lazy repurposing and rebuilding their ads from scratch for billboards through a strategic partnership with Vistar, demanding better creative control and execution.
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Programmatic Media’s Civil War: New Trade Bodies Expose Industry’s Turf Wars and Stalled Innovation
New rival trade bodies battling over programmatic media’s future expose an industry stuck between legacy turf wars and the desperate need for real disruption.
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AI Data Brokers: The New Middlemen Who Swipe 100% of Publishers’ Content—and Profits
Publishers are facing a new breed of middlemen: AI data brokers who scrape 100% of their content without paying a dime, far worse than the old ad tech tax.
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Stuck in the Grind: Why Marketers Are Trapped in Career Limbo and Who’s to Blame
Most marketers are stuck in career limbo, crushed by lazy agencies and hollow metrics. The industry’s obsession with fluff over real impact is soul destroying.
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Fox Sports’ World Cup Promo Is a Celebrity Circus, Not a Strategy
Fox Sports’ new World Cup promo is less about strategy and more about star-studded spectacle—a celebrity circus masking a lack of digital savvy.
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Fox News Still Tops April 2026 Cable Ratings Despite Viewer Slide—The Rest of Cable News Is Still Chasing Shadows
Fox News still leads cable ratings in April 2026 despite ongoing viewer losses, while CNN and MSNBC flounder without growth or innovation.
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