Fall is in the air, which in my part of Florida means it only got up to the mid-80’s today. We spent the afternoon decorating our front porch for Halloween and I’m writing this as the Packers and Giants are going after each other on Sunday Night Football.

Enough about my day, let’s jump into the marketing news.

Ads in the App Store and other drama

Apple announced they’d start selling paid placement for search terms in the iOS App Store and started rolling out those paid ads this week. This is going to be a great thing for apps and consumers. The Verge has all the details and a screenshot if you haven’t seen this yet.

The other side of the Apple coin this week was the story surrounding the removal of Dash in the macOS App Store. Dash is built by Bogdan Popescu and when he tried to migrate his app from a personal to company account, Apple yanked Dash from the App Store. As the story unfolded Apple told Bogdan they pulled Dash because they saw review manipulation, which he denied. And that their decision was final.

It’s interesting to see the differences between the iOS and macOS App Stores continue to grow. Part of me wonders if the problems for the macOS store stem from the fact Apple doesn’t own the entire lifecycle like they do for iOS. There’s no way macOS would be any where near as powerful if I could only install apps from the App Store.

Penguin 4 update rolled out

Google rolled out an update to Penguin, a signal in their algorithm designed to detect spammy links. Until recently, this signal was collected slowly with results fed back into search results.

Google presented this as a small change in their blog post announcing this update, but MozCast tells a different story going back to September 23. MozCast is a tool built by Moz.com to provide a quick reference for changes to Google search results due to algorithm changes.

Over the last few weeks they’ve tracked quite a bit of volatility, so if you’ve seen your traffic from Google organic results go up and down during this time it’s due to these changes.

Rand Fishkin covered all the details about the real-time Penguin update in his latest Whiteboard Friday if you want to learn more.

Kit Kat + Chance the Rapper = Halloween ad gold

Like every self-respecting musical nerd, I stayed up to watch Lin-Manuel Miranda host SNL.

He did not disappoint.

As I was watching, I saw Chance the Rapper dressed up as a lion as I sped through commercials after watching the monologue again. Which stuck in my brain and made me want to see what this ad was about.

It was for Kit Kat, and it’s glorious.

Amazon boots paid review placement

Amazon reviews move product and early this week they announced they’d be banning reviews solicited with free or discounted product. This change doesn’t apply to books or reviews through Amazon’s Vine program. Vine is a review generation system managed by Amazon where they send customers items for review, some of which those reviewers get to keep.

Basically, they’re going after sellers who were giving away product for reviews. I expect to see this policy become standard for reviews across the Internet, and Amazon to eventually phase out their Vine program.

Oculus is getting a browser

Oculus Connect took place this week and served as a keynote for the platform covering hardware and software coming to the VR platform. The avatar demo got a lot of attention, but one piece of news not getting the same amount of attention is that Oculus is getting a browser.

Details are sparse about how this browser is going to work, but it’s worth keeping an eye on how this develops.

Display ads should be seen a minimum of 14 seconds

A new study from Sticky, InSkin Media, and Research Now used eye-tracking and an follow-up survey to find how long display ads need to be seen to be remembered. They found [most ads are only seen for an average of .7 seconds, with bigger ads getting a larger share of attention.

They also found an ad needs to be visible for 14 seconds to actually receive a view of 1 second.

It’s interesting by itself, but it’d be nice to see a follow up that looks at how well animated ads compare to static ads for clickthroughs.