It’s episode 82 of the Future Tribe podcast AND the final show for the year! We’re taking an early Christmas break and will be back better than ever next year.
What we talk about
- We're hiring! Head to futuretheory.co/careers for more info
- More on YouTube's dislike button
- Instagram introduces 'badges' to support creators
- GoDaddy acquires Pagely
- Top 100 products this holiday season according to Google
- Racket, the 99 second audio feed similar to TikTok
- Google is rolling out a core update
- Google is showing translated search results
- Sydney Film Festival's 2021 Identity
Links from this episode
- https://futuretheory.co/careers - We're hiring!
- https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-67nUuAq85Y0VE0ai6lrKmwwN_9TABoi/view - Google's top 100 products for the holiday season
- https://facebook.com/groups/joinfuturetribe - Join the Facebook group
- https://www.instagram.com/futuretri.be/ - Follow us on Instagram
- https://futuretheory.co/podcast/ - Future Tribe Website
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/germainemuller/ - Germaine on LinkedIn
- https://www.instagram.com/germa_ne/ - Germaine on Instagram
- https://futuretheory.co/ - Futuretheory Website
- https://ftstudio.com.au/ - Check out FT Studio
Transcript
Disclaimer: This transcript was generated automatically and as such, may contain various spelling and syntax errors
Germaine: [00:00:00] Hello, Future Tribe. Welcome to a, another episode of this podcast. The last episode for 2021 I’m joined with Kelsey, of course. And we’ve got a bunch of news to talk about a bit of, a bit of variety today though a bit of a lot more involvement by Google, which makes sense. I would say within the lead up to the holiday period Obviously they’re the biggest search engine in the world.
So there’s a lot, that’s come out from them about what we need to look out for for this Christmas period. We’ll revisit the YouTube dislike button, disliked count sort of conversation from last week. I think it was. There’s, there’s been a few more things that I’ve learned about, and I wanted to sort of have a bit more of a conversation about that.
Instagram again, introducing more features. That’s just features pouring out from Instagram and Met a GoDaddy acquiring another company. There’s a list of the top 100 products from Google or according to [00:01:00] Google. So some handy objects and items there for us to look at. Kelsey, what else we got?
Kelsey: Yeah, we’re also going to be talking about racket, which is a 99 second audio feed, similar to Tik TOK. And what they’re doing Google is rolling out a core update. Google is also going to be showing translated search. And we’ll also be discussing the Sydney film festival 2021 brand identity that’s just been released.
Germaine: Yeah. So a bit of variety this week, a lot of talking about the Christmas period. Let’s roll the intro and.
so I want to kick off this episode by mentioning that we actually mentioned it last week as well, that we’re hiring that Futuretheory is hiring at the moment. Go check out the [00:02:00] website futuretheory.co/careers if you go to slash jobs, you’ll be redirected to careers as well. So either one will work.
We are looking for a WordPress developer, a marketing digital communications coordinator and a graphic designer slash web front-end designer. Yeah, we’re just, I’m very excited to, I guess, grow the team. We’ve got the space here. We’ve moved into a new office, and now it’s just about getting the word out.
We are only hiring for staff to work from the office in Canberra. But hopefully you know, we’ll be able to find, team members locally. I think if we can’t, we’re going to have to look elsewhere and reach a bit further out. But we, we work with a lot of Canberra clients, so it’s pretty important for us that you can face to face, sort of have a conversation with the Canberra clients and yeah, we’ve got clients from interstate state, but it’s. They, they find their way to Canberra [00:03:00] at some point or we find our way to Melbourne or Sydney most often. So it’ll be good to sort of hire someone locally, but if you know, anyone let, let them know that we’re looking to hire we’re going to make it a pretty rapid sort of process once we hear from you, if we like what we see, we’ll reach out we’ll book, a meeting or whatever else makes sense as the next step.
Pretty, pretty quickly. So we didn’t have to wait till the application closed states, which is next Friday. Anyway. So only, only a week away. But just wanted to get the word out, share it. We’re going to be obviously doing some advertising. You’re going to be involved with helping us take things to the next level.
We’ve got a lot of ongoing work, but we’ve got, you know, Ft studio where I am at the moment that needs marketing. We’ve got our own sort of content marketing needs and channels, and a lot of design, a lot of work for clients. A lot of. Work ranging from member organizations to, for profit organizations and not-for-profit [00:04:00] organizations.
So nice sort of variety of work. Would you, would you agree, Kelsey?
Kelsey: Yeah, for sure. I think there’s not too many clients that are identical or similar, so you’re always got lots of different work to be doing. It’s a lot of fun.
Germaine: Yeah. It’s it’s yeah. Can be, can be a bit all over the face sometimes in a, in a nice way.
Yeah.
Kelsey: All part of the joys of working in an agency
Germaine: that’s right. Not, not, not every day is the same. It’s just I mean, I would say even every hour is very different from, from the next so all right, enough about that. Let’s talk about the YouTube dislike button. So I think we chatted about the fact that we won’t miss it last week.
Well, not so much in the dislike button, the disliked count. Funny enough. The anti removal has continued. People have been very much against it, oppose to it. And I think I’ve changed my stance as well. I think, I think what’s come out is. [00:05:00] The way, I think the way we the position that we were in was a result of the, or our stance was a result of the fact that we consumed a YouTube in a certain way.
I think I’m speaking for myself. I have sort of trusted YouTubers watch and listen to I don’t really treat YouTube like a search engine where a lot of a lot of people do. I mean, YouTube is considered the second, most popular search engine in the world. Second to Google, which owns YouTube.
Yeah. So naturally there are a lot of YouTube videos that are surfaced by Google around things. And, you know, electrical work or health th there’s I guess, factual information that surfaced by, by YouTube or on YouTube and the dislike count has helped people historically sort of understand, is this content, you know, close to correct?
Or if, if the dislike count is really, really high The fact [00:06:00] that, you know, maybe, maybe it isn’t accurate or maybe generally the general consensus is that it isn’t avoid sort of 50, 50 it’s it’s close to being correct, but it’s not, it’s not as cause it’s not in a lot of areas. It’s not like we’re trying to, we’re struggling to find.
Content about the specific thing, right? Like there’s heaps of content out there. So this really just helps us iron it, pick out the good ones from the bad. One thing that I heard some people comment on though, is that, you know, suggestions of like surely YouTube could have sort of added more complexity to it so that they pulled out the people who were just spamming dislikes.
Versus the people who are genuinely disliking it because of the content, like, you know, watch for how long they watched the video for before they disliked, for example, which, which is fair comment, but it just comes back to, I think we’ve had this conversation about Facebook and news on Facebook [00:07:00] as well in the past about how much work should, should Google or YouTube as a platform or any other platform put into.
Make into sort of surfacing information. Like the way I see it from a business point of view, YouTube might as well just remove the disliked count. Like it’s so much easier than how. Set up a system where they watch. Okay. How long did Kelsey watch this video before she disliked it? And then what impact does that have?
Do they, do they then sort of say, okay. So that is definitely a genuine dislike. And then you can just get bots to do that. You can just get bots to watch videos for a long period of time, then dislike it. The thing is all, this has such an impact on, on people. Lives in, in, in both senses as a consumer, if you get incorrect information, that can be detrimental, but as a content producer, if, if you, you know, try and get, if someone else tries to cancel you and their community [00:08:00] just comes and really attacks you bombards you, especially when you’re a small creator, I think it can have a real serious impact.
I just wonder whether. Ultimately, if there is even a right answer. Yeah.
Kelsey: I’m still of the stance that I think it’s good that they have removed the count, but I guess if people were after more transparency and things like that, I don’t know. I go back to a review sites and review sites. When you have one style writing, let’s say most of the time.
They asked you to have a comment. So then you can go through the comments of the one-star reviews and see why the one-star reviews. And a lot of the time it’s just people being like, I didn’t actually order this. I just don’t like it. Or you can sort of pick out the ones that are genuine one-star reviews and the ones that are just idiots that don’t really understand how the review system works.
I saw
Germaine: a bad review the other day for a product on Bunnings and I sort of thought all interesting because there was one, two star review and it [00:09:00] said that. They didn’t get a notification when it was ready to collect. And that was why they gave it a two star reviews. Obviously it’s not the product’s fault.
And I guess that’s an example of what you’re talking. Yeah, exactly.
Kelsey: And I sort of, I feel like if you were to do a similar thing on YouTube, that would probably work. So then you can actually get qualified dislikes or qualified, you know, reviews, whatever you want to call them. Maybe that’s a solution to it.
Yeah, I just, I still stand by the fact that it’s good, that they’ve removed the dislike, but if people are not happy about it, maybe more of a review system with qualified reviews is a better way to do it.
Germaine: That’s true. Because at the moment we’re treating videos that are on an entertainment site, as videos on an educational site almost.
And yeah, but yeah, it’s a tough one because then it puts the question around. Maybe, maybe they just have to flag and mark, you know, [00:10:00] certain types of videos to be able to be reviewed, quote unquote reviewed, because like, we’re thinking about doing a tour of our office and offices spaces we would necessarily want that to be reviewed like that, that would be a weird thing because, but it does because it’s.
Piece of information, there’s no right or wrong there. It’s just, this is what it is. And that’s not a weird. Sort of do anyway, because you already see that on Google, there are, you know search results that are surfaced that are reviews. So you can see us star rating even before you click into the search results.
And then there are just general information there’s news articles. So there’s a lot more. There’s a lot of precedent there to treat YouTube, almost like a video version of Google which if people are using it like that, I mean, I certainly learn a lot from YouTube because I treat it like a, like a Google, but in video slash audio form I would say most of the time, I’m not actually watching YouTube, I’m listening to YouTube.
So maybe that’s the direction that they [00:11:00] need to head in, but Yeah. I just wanted to chat about it for, for a little while, but we can move on from that. I think we’ll just have to wait and see what happens. There’s a huge outcry. One of the co-founders of YouTube is very anti what’s happening around the dislike count, being hidden such to make clear the dislike button isn’t going anywhere.
It’s just hiding that count to the public. So. I don’t think it’s over yet. Though Google might just choose to say, you know what? You can cry all you want. You can be against it all you want, all of you chip can turn against it. You know,
Kelsey: it happens a lot. Yeah. In the tech space, they’ll just happens with Instagram when they changed from chronological, for example, timeline.
And they just go look, you’re just going to have to get used to it. And then people do, and then you don’t hear
Germaine: about it. Yeah. Yeah. It’s the end of the day. These platforms have more power than, than the individuals I would say. So. And, and what, what are these YouTube creators? Who’ve built businesses who are almost [00:12:00] solely reliant on each of these platforms.
What are they going to do? They’re not going to just be able to jump ship. There’s not even really a second best platform versus YouTube. So yeah. What are they going to do? Moving on, talking about Instagram. Instagram, introducing badges to support creators. Tell me more about that. Yeah.
Kelsey: So we discussed in a previous episode about Tik TOK, introducing.
This is essentially a similar kind of feature that Instagram is introducing. So it’s called badges. It’s basically a way for viewers to pay and support creators on Instagram live, and it kind of gives each person a ranking. I suppose you get one, two or three stars next to your name, depending on the tier.
I think it’s like a dollar 99 on a 99 cents. A dollar 99. Maybe four 90 nines. And depending on which one you put on, you’ll get your one, two or three stars, and then you’ll have more likelihood to shop in the comments to the creator during the live. So it’s almost like a pay to be seen kind of feature pay to be seen by the creator that’s live.
And [00:13:00] it’s an interesting concept and interesting way to do the tipping and to do that sort of support your favorite people will kind of function. But I also find it. I dunno, it’s just a bit weird because it’s, I guess it’s the same kind of thing where you can pay for backstage passes or meet and greets with your favorite singers, that sort of thing.
But it’s just in a digital space, but it just has a weird feeling about it, of like pay to be seen. I don’t know. I can’t really articulate. What’s frustrating me about it, but it just seems weird.
Germaine: Well, I’m already doing. So there is precedent around this. And I think we were just talking about, you know, who, who is the second best video platform.
And Instagram is trying to do, do that to be the second best platform because Facebook doesn’t really have a competitor to, or for YouTube, like you should have just alone by itself. There is Vimeo, but Vimeo has never really been a YouTube competitor. It’s a more of an [00:14:00] enterprise solution. So this one’s interesting because.
They’re not going to take a cut of revenue on till 2023. So basically we’ve got 12 months where they’re gonna try and get all these creators used to it, but then at some point they’re going to start taking a 30% cut or a 15% cut. Or
Kelsey: do you know when you’re talking about a dollar 99?
Germaine: Yeah. Yeah. But then I guess Instagram Instagram’s point is going to be like, we, I know.
This for you. So either pay up or go to a different platform because there are other alternatives. The feature is rolling out in the U S not everyone will get this feature. Eligible creators need to reside in the U S at the time. Be over 18 and to have a creator or business account on the platform with at least 10,000 followers.
So again, not something unlocked just for anyone and everyone. Though I don’t see why they would restrict that in the future. At some point, I think they would just enable [00:15:00] anyone to have it. There’s, you know, various policies that you’ve got to be in compliance with. And, but I think there’s there’s still not a consistent.
Application of these policies anyway, so that has the whole policy side of things has has not as much of an impact, but not surprising to see all of these platforms start sort of monetizing. Not that, not that Instagram needs to make more money, they’ve got advertising, but it’s interesting.
Cause the, you sort of mentioned that backstage pass sort of concept, Kelsey. This is obviously a lower ticket item, but allows many more people to be involved in, in this way or, you know, support their, their favorite creators. And it also allows a lot more people. I think the freedom to monetize themselves and monetize their businesses without relying on all these other individuals and companies and parties being involved.
So. Yeah, a certain, certain shift is happening. That, that hasn’t been happening [00:16:00] for a little while. And this is just more of, of that in that direction. So I think ultimately good to see, because never hurts to enable people to earn an income for themselves and, and minimize those barriers to entry though.
You know, we’ve been having an issue with Facebook which is all part of the same company where. For whatever reason, we’ve had one of our accounts advertising accounts restricted, though, that restriction stops us from connecting to new client accounts that we manage. It doesn’t stop us from advertising on the platform.
So it’s a bit of a. Not just a bit, it’s very much like, I think it’s ironic because we can, we can’t connect one of our client accounts, one of our client, Facebook pages to our business, Facebook page to manage it. But I got a notification this morning that we spent $9 overnight to reach over a thousand people.
So yeah, it’s very much double standards of they’re trying to protect Facebook users. Hmm, while [00:17:00] simultaneously leading as advertised to a thousand of them overnight, what’s going on. But maybe, you know, maybe, maybe the smart thing to do for a lot of these creatives, I think is to treat this as a supplementary source of income and try and get.
The follower base to go to their own websites, their own platforms, where they can really monetize and sort of maintain control over all this. I’ve heard of people having second and third and fourth Facebook accounts in the past. And I always thought that was a bit weird. But now that we’ve been restricted, I can see why I’d want to do that
Kelsey: contingency plan.
Germaine: Yeah. Because. Which is reliant on these guys when it comes to managing a Facebook page. We can’t manage a Facebook page in any other way. So what can we do? What can we do on, from one big company to, to the next GoDaddy who I’m not the biggest fan of has acquired Pagely. They use Hosting provider page these just acquired them.
There’s no mention, I don’t think about a [00:18:00] price, but they acquired Pagely which is an 18 year old company. They offer hosting solutions for businesses and enterprises at the higher end of the hosting market. This is just more consolidation in this space. I think. Australia’s got a number of their own hosting companies, Australian hosting companies that are independent.
I’m just a huge fan of it because it just sort of diversifies controls so that we don’t have one big company or a few big companies who can control everything and sort of call the shots. I don’t think that’s a good thing. There’s no, it’s not a good thing for innovation and competition. Yeah. I just hope that, you know, some of these companies aren’t thinking of don’t get acquired by any of these big, big conglomerates.
It’s just, yeah. News for anyone who’s on Pagely who knows it might, it might be a good thing. We talked about Crello being acquired by Vista print or the company who owns Vista print, which is a Vista. And that’s been a good thing in that. I haven’t really used to Vista create what Crello is rebranded to, but [00:19:00] It’s from, from all accounts on all accounts has been a good thing because they’ve been smart and sort of offered even more features and functionality for previous users.
Yeah.
Kelsey: Yeah. I think stock images is one of them. Cause obviously Vista print has its own sort of stock image collection. So that’s the only difference I’ve noticed in my use of it so far.
Germaine: Yeah, there’s, it’s just rare that it’s good news for, for users, but we just have to wait and see moving on to Google shopping’s it’s a Google, Google essentially has released, they do this every year.
They call it the Google shopping holiday, 100 showing product searches that are predicted to trend the most on Google, in the U S during the holiday season. And they’re organized by categories including gaming health and beauty, fragrances, kitchen gear, sport, and fitness toys and games and tech.
Not not a lot of surprising sort of results in that list. If any, will include, obviously [00:20:00] link a link to this because there is a hundred, or there are a hundred different items. We are not going to go through that whole list. What did stand out to me though, was like in the gaming space Nintendo 64 Sony PSP, original game, boy, those are trending.
Quite a retro mix there. When it comes to the health and beauty sector not a lot of sort of surprises there for me. There are, there are, you know, L’Oreal Clinique Dyson sort of expected names though. They don’t, they’re not dominating that space, which is a good thing to see. Fragrances or just you know, basically everyone from Chanel to Amani, to Ariana Grande’s perfume, not surprising their kitchen gear, not surprising either just the, just the classics.
A lot of KitchenAid and DeLongi there. But as we go down, like we get into the tech space I think what. Can be useful. And the reason I wanted to bring this up was that it gives you an idea of like, if you’re in a [00:21:00] similar space, what you could potentially be up against and how, like you could, you could use this to do some competitor analysis.
I would say like if you’re in the kitchen gear space or thinking about having a product that goes into that space, to me, this is just a fantastic way to try and, you know, cause this is like the top one. Google saying, this is the 100 products that if everyone could have what they wanted, these are a hundred that, that would basically be requested by everyone in the world.
So it’s a cheat sheet. It’s a cheat list of what is trending, what is good. And if you’re in one of these spaces, I would just, yeah. Jump right in. Take a look at the characteristics look at how these companies are selling that product as well. You know, how they retailing it, where they’re each telling you to.
There are websites that you can use to look at like, are they, are these competitors or are these companies running Facebook ads, Google ads? What [00:22:00] are they running? That sort of thing as well? Are they sending just through Amazon? So there’s a lot of reverse engineering that you can do, even if.
Smaller. Even if you’re in, you know, say the local, like the Australian market, rather than the American market, there’s just a lot that you can take away from all of this.
Kelsey: Can I just say, I find it so funny that this is on a Google doc? Like I know that it’s Google’s product, but it just looks so amateur and it’s got its little like clipart image at the top as well.
Germaine: Yeah. It’s not even a Google doc. It’s a. It’s just like shared from a Google drive. I think it’s a Google doc shared via Google drive.
Kelsey: I saw you put this in the run sheet and I saw drive.google. I know. When has he put the wrong link in like, surely he’s messed up something here, but it’s literally just from Google and a Google drive, which makes sense.
Like it’s their product, but it just, I don’t know. I just find it
Germaine: funny. Yeah. A hundred percent. I mean, you go to the tech section and the Google pixel six is obviously in there, which. [00:23:00] It doesn’t surprise me. It is a very popular product, but at the same time you know, how much of, how much of it is true.
I always wonder this, like on Google, you’re just going to show you all their, all their competing solutions at the top of the Google search list. But obviously there’s, there’s things in place to make sure that that doesn’t happen. But even looking at. Gaming and the top games or if you’re doing a giveaway, this is another sort of nice cheat sheet list in the lead up to this holiday period.
If you want to, you know, your chance to win X, Y, Z there’s a bit of a cheat sheet of, okay, what product should I pick? Which product should I give away? Because they’re extremely popular. And I think you will find that while this Based out of the U S I think you will find that it is true or it is accurate for most of the world.
Yeah. Yeah, like Forza horizon as like gaming, for example, like, there’s, there’s a lot of these options here. If you’re making cakes, if you’re making birthday cakes, this is a [00:24:00] list of potentially what, like have a Spiderman cake, have a Forza cake, have a battlefield cake because. Yeah, they’re very popular.
Whether it’s kids or adults, they’re going to be buying these. So yeah. No surprise there we’ll link to it. We’ll if you see a Google drive link that’s directly to what Google’s yep. It’s legit. We haven’t stuffed up. I love it. Just keep, why not use their own products? Might as well. Yeah, I’m on two racket, which is a nine to nine second audio social app really?
That’s similar to tick tock.
Kelsey: So I came across this the other day and I just thought it was an interesting thing to bring up because it’s sort of a new platform. It’s out on iOS. I think, I don’t think it’s on Android yet, but the idea behind it is basically tick-tock ESC scrolling sort of feed, but just with audio.
And I thought it was interesting, cause I think in the audio space at the moment, you’ve obviously got music, which is the classic thing and that sort of Spotify dominated, I guess. And [00:25:00] then you’ve obviously got the podcast side of it, which is usually much longer. You know, at least 10 minutes to an hour plus kind of thing.
So this is exploring an avenue that I don’t think from my knowledge has been explored very much yet because it is that 99 second
Germaine: limit. You’ve got to remember there is clubhouse but again, a different product
Kelsey: I’m not familiar with club has to be honest. So,
Germaine: Well it’s just audio rooms, so it’s well, it’s not even longer.
It’s just like however long it could be. It’s like an Instagram. But in audio. So yeah, this is more like a tick-tock audio of,
Kelsey: yeah. And I just think it’ll be interesting to keep tabs on how this app sort of evolves and how creators will begin to use it. If they’ll begin to use it. You know, what sort of content they’ll be creating?
Cause obviously if you looked at Tik TOK at the start of when it came out, there was probably a lot of skepticism about. Being able to do things within the space of, you know, 30 seconds a minute and how much content people could actually create that was engaging [00:26:00] enough. And obviously it’s taken off like crazy.
So that’ll be interesting to see if. You know, 99 seconds snippets also take off. If people are happy to sit there and just listen to their various little segments going through and through. And I thought it sort of seemed similar to listening to the radio because each segment on the radio is maybe a couple of minutes, but really you’re talking for a very short amount of time.
And you’re just switching between topics between songs as you know, the breaks. So it’s almost a similar concept to that. One is the music side of it. Kind of a funny take on it, but just think it’d be interesting to keep an eye on this one
Germaine: and looking at their website, the easy interface is very reminiscent of tick-tock.
I, that was my knee going to be my next sort of thought of like, how is it gonna look like, because audio is obviously not very visual. The answer is. Quite a boring. You just see, you just see that display pig with some sort of background.
Kelsey: Yeah. I mean, similar to [00:27:00] Spotify, I suppose. Cause Spotify, you just get, obviously a music controls, play pause and all of that.
And then the album art or sometimes the little video if people put
Germaine: that on there. And the only difference there though, is that at least with Spotify, you’re listening to a few minutes of music or you’re listening to a playlist. I don’t like, yeah. I don’t know. Like TikTok is a lot more involving than something like Spotify, right?
Spotify is quite passive. YouTube can be quite passive. Like to me, this is like, how do you find relevant content? How do you, I don’t know where it’s going to be. It’s going to be interesting to see how it, how it does because it’s. Yeah, I don’t, I don’t know how, how do you find relevant content? Like it’s it’s
Kelsey: yeah, but I mean, it’s the same with tick-tock.
How do you find relevant content? You’ve got your, for for you page, which is just randomly generated based on previous things [00:28:00] you’ve engaged with. And it ends up finding the right content because of all the algorithms and it, I guess it would be the same with audio. The ones that you listen to, or the creators that you listened to more frequently, I think there’ll be able to analyze what kinds of things they’re talking about.
Sure. Well, make you listened to that audio. Yeah. Yeah. You’re not looking at any. Yeah.
Germaine: Yeah. So that’s going to be the interesting part. Like how do you pick, if you’re at least with the tick tock, you can see a visual preview of what you’re about to click into. Music has never been like that audio hasn’t ever been.
Like okay. You have a thumbnail, but that’s about it. But I think it’s still very much worth mentioning and it’s, it’s early days for this platform and it’s a good opportunity. I think if you’re, if you’ve sort of thought about maybe dabbling in Tik TOK, but doing content that is useful. In audio as much as like, you know, or you can remove video and still have have useful content.
It’s a good time to get on, get on a [00:29:00] platform like this at the, at the start, because if it takes off look at most established mediums, it’s the players who’ve been around for a while that have been able to build out sort of a consistent opportunity and a consistent platform on that platform.
So yeah, good opportunity there, but sorry, you were gonna say.
Kelsey: I was just going to say there was a comment in this article where they basically talked about the premise behind racket, and they’ve basically just talked about trying to lower barriers of entry. So previously with podcasts and I think we might’ve discussed it.
I’m not sure if it was on the podcast or just in the office about getting into the audio space. You need to have all this equipment or you need to have X, Y, and Zed to do things. So the whole point of. Racket app is to reduce those barriers. So you don’t have to have the fancy equipment. You don’t have to have high production.
It’s just really nice and simple, quick and easy to get out. And I think that that’s really important. And I think somewhere in the article as well, they did mention sort of the amount of people that are engaged with video content and the amount of people engaged with audio content. And audio has such a lower amount of [00:30:00] engagement or in terms of users, I guess.
And they sort of mentioned that, that. Showing the audio is such a young, medium, which sounds kind of weird to think about it in that space, but it’s as if audio really hasn’t been explored that much. And when you do look at we’ve only got music and podcasts, really in that space, there is so much more that could be explored.
So I think, yeah, this is going to be exciting to keep an eye on and exciting to see where it ends up if it ends up somewhere.
Germaine: Yeah. And certainly, like I was saying an opportunity there as well for you. If you’re. If you’ve got, you know, content that can be shared in sort of bite-sized audio form it’s it’s early days, like the platform itself was only launched in 2019 or the team’s been together since 2019.
So very early days a good opportunity for you to sort of jump into it and try and create a bit of a carve out a bit of a, a niche there for yourself. Moving on with more Google news. So there’s, Google’s announced that today that they’re [00:31:00] releasing, I think it was today on the 18th of November that they’re going to push out the November 20, 21 core update.
For those of you who don’t know probably Kelsey’s in that list as well. A core update, essentially. It’s just Google Doing a big update to how they look at search results and how they rank websites. It happens, you know, a handful of times a year, so it’s not a weird thing for it to happen.
But it’s more of a heads up for anyone who’s looking at SEO. Who’s, who’s got a website just keep an eye out. These, these core updates are big enough that, you know, in our, in our ranking tools. Yeah. Demarcate when when core update has been rolled out because it can have all sorts of impacts.
Generally we would see people’s rankings drop. But that does mean that, you know, when people’s rankings drop, there has to be people who, who win as well, because that’s sort of how it works. But yeah, the, the. November [00:32:00] updates comes after the last one in July, and then there was one in June before that.
So those have been sort of the, this is the third update for the year. It is a bit of weird timing because it’s just before the holidays. And it’ll probably happen over, you know, probably be complete across all the geographies by sort of early December. But. That’s going to also mean that it’s happening over like a key selling period around black Friday and the lead up to Christmas, which.
That’s a bit of volatility, right? Like if you’ve got an established channel, a marketing channel through, through Google, that’s going to be a little, little effected potentially. Yeah. That’ll
Kelsey: be a little bit of a rationale from some marketing teams to the senior execs to explain why this, and we had steps in that.
Germaine: Yeah. And you can never predict how one of these core updates will go. So I think it’ll be interesting to see that as well, whether it’s. Good overall or [00:33:00] bad overall we’ve seen historically like these core updates affect a certain market segment or have them have more of a waiting on, let’s say, you know, health related content.
So you might find that when a core update rolled and you have a health based site and you’re not, not a doctor like a medical doctor that you may have taken a hit and suddenly find that. Websites by clinics doing better. So that’s where Google’s obviously weighing up or at least boosting the dominance and the, and the authority around content from like a medical organization or a medical individual, medically qualified individual.
And the same thing can happen across a huge number of industries as well. But. It’s a heads up. Keep an eye out over the next fortnight. I’m sure we’re going to have, we are going to be seeing some interesting results as well. Just the other day, actually one of our clients dropped from third place to eighth place in search results, and I clicked [00:34:00] into see why.
And I’ve worked out that we actually hadn’t lost. Search rankings to any other, anyone else’s rankings. But what had happened was that Google had started displaying different types of information in between. So we got demoted from third to eighth, but all the content in the middle where, you know, questions asked by other searches it was a blurb on about the company, you know, Term for a product and the Google that slotted in, you know, about future theory, let’s say as one of the search results.
So ultimately it had, we lost all those places, but in reality, we hadn’t lost it per se
Kelsey: Googled.
Germaine: Exactly. But that’s a reminder there that, you know, all Google has to do, I think is on certain, certain results is to decide that they only want to show like one main result before they pull in the Google based information.
It could be latest news [00:35:00] around that topic. It could be you know, movie times, or it could be all sorts of things that could then push your, your search ranking further down, which puts a lot of importance on being a number one on that particular search term. But it also varies from, from searching up search term.
Which is like a nut. It’s a nice segue because Google’s also talked about showing translated search results, which I don’t I get where they’re doing it. Basically, what they’re trying to do is when a search results seems to be a bit thin on content, they’re going to translate better available results and show that.
But. That relies heavily on the quality of Google translate, which is quite good, but yeah, but there’s risks. Great. I mean, I tried to look into it. There’s not it’s, it’s only gonna affect six languages for the moment and it ordered translates the titles and snippets between languages. And then when you [00:36:00] click through it’ll translate the whole, whole pages content.
Now that’s going to have an impact when you’re talking. Anything technical where you can’t just translate it over. There’s also the risk. I wonder if surely they’re going to want to manually review it, but I just, I just don’t see Google putting in that like financial investment into many or reviewing it at the same time.
I dunno. What, what, what are your thoughts on both these things that we’ve been talking about? Kelsey? Yeah, I
Kelsey: mean the translated stuff, I think we’ll be good long-term but I think there’s still some issues with the translation quality and I mean, it’s only going to get better by implementing it and having it, you know, independent people come in and review things or have feedback from users or whatever that looks like.
But I think there’s definitely going to be some risk at first when it comes to some of that technical information or even just not technical things, but [00:37:00] search results that require a lot of I don’t know what the word is, but a lot of nuance in what sort of being said. Cause a lot of the times, obviously there’s translation.
You can have one saying that just doesn’t translate well, or it’s really, you’ve got to understand the context that’s happening. And I think there’s only so much. Automatic translation can do with that, but it’s, I mean, it’s just going to be a case of time though. And having those services set up so that they can continue improving.
Cause you’ve got to start somewhere,
Germaine: so yeah, it’s got to happen, but it’s, it’s good. I’m happy to see that Google’s only going to do this where the results are a bit thin. Because otherwise it means that you’ve now got a. With who are writing in different languages, which, which really compromises the integrity of search results in my opinion, because you would think that no matter what, no matter how good the autotransplant is, it cannot, it shouldn’t be able to match like every other search.
Like it shouldn’t be able to match natively [00:38:00] written salts like, especially where, like you were saying. You know, one sentence relies on the next and the next and the next to sort of build out a bigger picture. How, how translate would work. Like we’ll just have to wait and see. It’ll be at the moment, it’ll only be limited to Indonesian him, the Kannada K A N N A D A.
I’ve never heard of that language. Harlem. And tell her you’re so very much sort of Asian focus at the moment. And it kind of makes sense potentially because there might be limited information about everything in those native languages within that region. Whereas, you know, we might find that in Europe, a lot of the locals speak and write content.
Their native tongue, where in parts of Asia, they just write it in English instead of writing it in their native language. So when you’re and this also, I guess, [00:39:00] increases the likelihood of older generations getting on and being able to make sense of the content that they’re reading. So it’s, it’s not a negative thing and that the Google’s enabling Users and website owners to say, just do not translate this content.
So that’s a good thing. But yeah, I wonder how also, if you’ve got advertising on your website, has that going to work because you can’t, you know, would they just translate or are you just going to be showing ads to someone who’s not going to understand?
Kelsey: Yeah. I mean, isn’t advertising geographic based a lot of the time.
So if even if it’s translating, surely would still just show ads from your local area. So it wouldn’t really matter if we’re looking at it,
Germaine: but then the language would matter, right. Still you would think like, well,
Kelsey: if you’re, if you’re looking at a site written and I Mandarin, wasn’t wanting to, but let’s say Mandarin.
Yeah. That’s translated the agile saying you should surely [00:40:00] still be Australian ads because it’s geography based targeting.
Germaine: True.
Kelsey: You wouldn’t be shown Mandarin ads because you’re not in China
Germaine: are. Yes. But what if your looking at what have you in China seeing ads in Mandarin, but you’re reading in English say that translating Mandarin content into English.
Kelsey: Yeah. But you’re saying that they would be speaking Mandarin or, and they’re just writing
Germaine: in English.
Yeah. So you’re in a, you’re in a region where your native tongue is different to the region’s native town? No, I feel
Kelsey: like you’re going to have that issue everywhere anyway, aren’t you, it’s going to be a broader issue than just ads,
Germaine: but, but that’s what we’re talking about here. Right? So it’s like Google then showing you content translated into English so that you can understand it, but then every other facet of it is not something you understand.
So you’re essentially. Wasting those advertisers money, which is fine for Google, [00:41:00] but it’s not good for, it’s not good for you. Like it’s not good for the advertiser. Yeah.
Kelsey: But that would be happening anyway. Wouldn’t it? I mean, like it’s sort of an issue anyway. At least you’ve got X you’re accessible to the content.
Now it’s just the ads aren’t quite there. Yeah. Potentially
Germaine: it could be, it could get messy. That’s all I’m saying. All right. From that into a design topic the Sydney film festival branding let me share my screen, bear with me. For anyone watching, we haven’t had a lot of content recently to share but it’s nice to have this one here.
So this is as always from brand new they seem to sort of have everything and sort of get a jump on you information. I, I don’t know, to start with all I’m going to say is that I think the work’s really nice. But. [00:42:00] It’s a lot going on and I don’t see the relationship between a film festival and the branding here.
I’m saying that I’m not the demographic, not the target demographic, never been to the significant festival. Not sure I will ever go. What are your thoughts?
Kelsey: Yeah, I have had a few mixed thoughts about. My first thought is that it feels like something like a design language that I’ve seen before in terms of the bright colors and things popping out and that sort of 2d, 3d effect.
I don’t know how to describe it. Just that sort of drop shadow without it being a shadow. And I like it, it just kind of feels like something I’ve seen before, maybe in like a cartoon network or something. Sort of scenario,
Germaine: Sort of like a, maybe even like a comic sort of
Kelsey: yeah, yeah. But I do like it and then my other thoughts are that I [00:43:00] like the fact that, I mean, I’m also not in the demographic of film festivals, but I sort of have this idea around film festivals that they’re a bit sort of stuck up.
Yeah. The identity that they would usually use is trying to be all fancy and sort of pretentious and stuff like that. I feel like this is much more accessible, much more fun and sort of takes, I mean, yeah, it takes that fun approach to film, which I think is really important. Even when you’ve got, you’re going to have films that are going to be serious and sad and, you know, horror on all of the different genres.
But I think that this lends itself to the whole thing, being much more fun and accessible than other. Ones have been previously from my assumption. Cause I’m not super familiar with this space.
Germaine: It’s got sort of a, like a music festival vibe, even, maybe doesn’t eventually, like you’re saying, like it might be that they’re trying to appeal to a younger generation trying to go from like, you know, you gotta be in your sixties.
And [00:44:00] and again, I don’t know whether that’s atomic, dog and demographic or if that’s the demographic historically, but Yeah, like it is more inviting. And they’ve done a pretty good job, I would say of translating that language across so that it, it all is tied in together fairly well. A huge thing here though, is that they’ve been able to get away with so much variety because I think.
They would have a variety of applications to play with. Like, they’d have posters, they’d have billboards, they’d have advertising they’d have various platforms and they’d have the audience. So if you’re, for example, looking at this and you’re like, you know, they’ve got two, two type faces, which is fine, but you need to have enough I guess enough touchpoints.
Basis to apply this brand for it to be effective. Like if you’re just starting off, you don’t want this, this variety because what’s more important than is that you [00:45:00] communicate something and people will remember you with some sort of consistency where these guys, the film festival probably runs for a month.
So it’s more important that you sort of see something and go, oh, what’s that? And find out that it’s a film festival and you might attend then necessarily building out. Equity in the brand. And you know, having like it’s not going to exist in, in a months time. It’s not going to exist in a week’s time, probably depending on when you look at it.
So it’s more important that they get your, they get your eye and sort of draw you to, you know, the S F F four S S S F film or Sydney film festival sort of wording than trying to necessarily make you remember a specific logo because. This example here they have got what, like 15 different variations.
Kelsey: I think it looks like the copying various TV brands though, and identities that are very familiar. I can’t put my finger on what any of them actually are. I look at them and I go, Hey, this looks like a [00:46:00] Lego I’ve seen before. So I think that’s a fun little take on it. And as you sort of mentioned, I think.
Catching your eye. For me, I’m not somebody who would traditionally go to a film festival, but this actually does look kind of cool. And I think I have this idea now around the films that they be showing that a much less amateur and I don’t know all of these pre predispositions. I think I had about it. I don’t get them as much because of this branding.
And it makes me want to find out more about it. Whereas previous ones definitely haven’t
Germaine: fried. Interesting because I see it. It’s to me, it’s almost communicating like a, it’s a bit of it’s a bit of everything. There’s not necessarily a and I’m, and I’m not meaning any offense, but to me, it’s just like, it could be anything from like a film shot by, by an 18 year old to have a massive production like it, because there’s this variety.
Like it’s not, to me, it’s not like a consistent Promise it’s sort of consistent brand promise. It’s a bit of [00:47:00] everything. And yeah, it makes me like, I don’t, I don’t see how anything can match this. Like I don’t see how any of the films can actually match this level of branding. Like the branding is almost, I won’t say dishonest, but is doesn’t quite capture what you do expect to go to mean like the product, the end product.
I don’t see how the end product could make. This, it could match one of these things. But not all of them.
Kelsey: I think the word that’s coming to my mind at the moment is that this feels more mainstream which is probably, I don’t know if that’s what they’re going for, but it feels more mainstream. So then I do have this idea that the films that they’re going to be showing on much less artsy, and I’m sure that they will still be artsy, but just not in the negative artsy way that I’ve previously thought
Germaine: about it.
I think. Pretentious or there’s negative connotations or classes connotations around it. Yeah. Just trying to see if there’s a link to their website, just [00:48:00] to see what that might look like. Okay. They’ve done a good job of carrying that branding across. Yeah. That does seem to be a variety. Of into solutions, all like, sorry, and products, I guess.
So. Yeah. No, it’s on at the moment. It’s gonna wrap up very soon.
Yeah, I think, I think ultimately like it’s, it’s very interesting. They’ve done a fantastic job. It sounds like last, last time they worked on the same agency worked on this in 2019, they had thousands of logo variations. It was just kind of cool. And, and it works when it’s such a, you know, short lived sort of, it just needs to sort of exist for three months, sorry for three weeks.
From the third to the 21st But yeah, I think worth, worth talking about [00:49:00] worth pointing out. Really good for events that well for events, I think that that lasts for more than a more than a day, but don’t go for more than sort of a few weeks. And then every, every year you reinvent and have like significant festival 20, 22, I would imagine, would have its own look and feel that is quite different.
And that’s really cool because he can have a different view. But whether, yeah, the Andrew, like whether what you experienced when you visit is going to be matching or not is, is, is the question any other takeaways from this one?
Kelsey: No, just that I like it. I’m kind of curious. Now I want to find out more about the film festival and maybe check out some films.
Germaine: Yeah. I’m going to look into it. It’s, it’s, it’s intriguing. Isn’t it? All right. That’s, that’s all the news for this week. This is the last episode for the year. As I mentioned at the start we will be taking Christmas break, so we are a few weeks away from Christmas now. What like six weeks, which is just [00:50:00] a few weeks, I would say we’re going to be doing a bit of a bit of work on the podcast and the fish trap show side of things.
And we’re planning to be back next year. So thank you for listening. This’ll be the last episode with Kelsey as the host as well. It’s been fun. It’s been different. It’s been fun. It’s, it’s been good. I think we’ll continue to, we’re going to explore a few things on, on this break and then come back with the next season.
Nothing’s set in stone yet as to what you can expect, but I would say expect, expect something different. And yeah, as, as we, well, one last thing I want to mention as we finish up is to check out the group. We are hiring and one of those roles will be involved more with the group. So we’re hoping to introduce a few things, then make a few changes over the next few weeks.
So podcast is going to be. But everything else probably won’t be as quiet joined the group [00:51:00] to sort of stay in the loop and see, see things as they happen and hear about things as they happen and and getting involved. So that’s about it. I’m going to leave Kelsey to do the, her final sign off.
Gosh,
Kelsey: final sign off. I mean, my son officer usually so short, it’s just a catch next week. Thanks for everything and see you guys later
Germaine: see you around. Yeah. Awesome. All right. That’s roll the app or .