Wayback Machine Down Amid Cyberattack, 31 Million Accounts Exposed via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern

The Internet Archive has been hit by a cyberattack, compromising the personal data of over 31 million users.

The nonprofit organization, known for its Wayback Machine service, which archives web pages, is grappling with the aftermath of the sophisticated attack.

Breach Details

On October 9, visitors to the Internet Archive’s website were greeted with a pop-up message indicating a security breach.

A hacker group operating under the name SN_BlackMeta has claimed responsibility for the attack, stating on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) that they had launched “several highly successful attacks” against the Archive.

The breach exposed user records, including email addresses, screen names, and bcrypt-hashed passwords.

Troy Hunt, founder of the data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned, confirmed receiving a database containing information on 31 million unique email addresses associated with the Internet Archive.

Ongoing Disruption

The Internet Archive’s website and Wayback Machine service remain inaccessible as of this writing.

This outage is concerning given Google’s recent integration of Wayback Machine links into its search results, a feature announced just last month to enhance access to historical web content.

The timing of this attack could potentially disrupt Google’s new feature, which was designed to provide users with easy access to archived versions of web pages directly from search results.

Response From Internet Archive

Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive, acknowledged the breach in a post on X, stating:

“What we know: DDOS attack–fended off for now; defacement of our website via JS library; breach of usernames/email/salted-encrypted passwords. What we’ve done: Disabled the JS library, scrubbing systems, upgrading security.”

Kahle is saying that while they were attacked in several ways, they’re actively working to fix the problems and make their systems safer.

However, user data was compromised, so users should be cautious and change their passwords.

The organization is actively working to restore its services and secure its systems, but the full extent of the damage remains unclear.

Why This Matters

The attack on the Internet Archive is troubling, given its role in preserving digital content.

Founded in 1996, the organization aims to provide “universal access to all knowledge” and has become a resource for researchers and journalists.

While the exact motivations behind the attack remain unclear, cybersecurity experts speculate that the attackers may have been searching for specific information or attempting to alter historical records.

This serves as a reminder of the vulnerabilities in digital infrastructure, even for organizations dedicated to preserving it.

Looking Ahead

This attack compromises user data and temporarily denies access to an invaluable resource for internet users worldwide.

As the Internet Archive continues its recovery efforts, users are advised to change their passwords and remain vigilant for any potential misuse of their personal information.


Featured Image: Piotr Swat/Shutterstock

Snapchat Is Testing 2 New Advertising Placements via @sejournal, @brookeosmundson

The Snapchat ad ecosystem just expanded with two new placement options.

On Tuesday, Snap announced they started testing on two new placements:

  • Sponsored Snaps
  • Promoted Places

While not available to the general public yet, Snap provided information on the test, including their launch partners and more about the ad placements.

The goal of these placements are for brands to expand their reach across some of the most widely adopted parts of the platform.

Sponsored Snaps Ad Placement

Snapchat is testing a new Sponsored Snaps placement with Disney, in the announcement from October 8th.

The Sponsored Snaps placement shows a full-screen vertical video to users on Snapchat.

Users can then opt-in to opening the Snap, with options to engage with the advertiser in one of two ways:

  • Sending a direct message to the advertiser by replying
  • Use the call-to-action to open the link chosen by the advertiser.

Sponsored Snaps aren’t delivered via a push notification and will appear differently than other Snaps in a user’s inbox.

After a certain amount of time, any unopened Sponsored Snaps disappear from a user’s inbox.

Promoted Places Ad Placement

Snap partnered with two other brands for their Promoted Places ad placement test: McDonalds and Taco Bell.

This new ad placement shows on the Snap Map, which is meant to help users discover new places they may want to visit.

Promoted Places will highlight sponsored placements of interest within the Snap Map.

In early testing, Snap said they’ve found adding places as “Top Picks” drives a typical visitation lift of 17.6% for frequent Snapchat users.

They also mentioned the possibility of exploring ideas around customer loyalty on the Snap Map in future phases.

Summary

Snap hasn’t yet announced how long these ad placement tests will run, or when they’ll be available for broader advertisers.

Snap said the Sponsored Snaps and Promoted Places placements will evolve from feedback within the Snapchat community and the brands partnered with them at launch.

In the future, there’s possibility of integrating features like CRM systems and AI chatbot support to make communication more streamlined between brands and Snapchat users.

Ask A PPC: Should I Pause My Expanded Text Ads via @sejournal, @navahf

The latest question for Ask A PPC is based on Ad Strength and Creative. It comes from Isha in Delhi, who asks:

“Should extended text ads be paused or kept running as we can’t edit?”

The short answer is the age-old, “It depends.”

However, recent data indicates there may be more value in moving away from expanded text ads.

In this post, we’ll go over:

  • The state of expanded text ads (ETAs).
  • Reasons to keep them.
  • Reasons to pause.

This is a Google-specific perspective. However, the same logic could be applied to Microsoft.

The State Of ETAs

Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) allow users to include three 30-character headlines and two 90-character descriptions.

These ads serve creative in the order specified in the original ad, but they might be truncated based on the search engine result pages (SERP) they served on.

As a general rule, mobile SERPs would only show headlines one and two (with some truncation possible in headline two).

They also were “deprecated” in June of 2022. The quotes exist because – while advertisers can no longer create or edit ETAs – ETAs were allowed to continue running.

This is similar to standard ads (which received the same treatment in September 2017).

As such, there are still a significant number of advertisers using ETAs instead of or in partnership with Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) and Performance Max ads.

While I can’t share a concrete number of how many ETAs are still running, a recent Ad Strength study from Optmyzr found around 20% of advertisers still have some ETAs running in their accounts (~5,000 accounts).

There is no clear answer on ETAs. It truly depends on the state of your business and performance.

Reasons To Keep ETAs

The biggest reason to keep ETAs is they are performing well.

Most agree that 200% ROAS is the baseline for passable performance (i.e., put $1 in and get $2 back). Based on the data, ETAs seem to struggle to meet this:

Length Bucket No. Of Ads CPC CPA CTR Conversion Rate ROAS
0-20 69296 1.49 34.80 5.98% 4.27% 159.38%
21-30 165899 1.78 30.52 6.61% 5.83% 148.83%
31+ 8964 0.91 4.93 9.00% 18.42% 161.40%

(Data from the Optmyzr Study)

However, if you’re not using conversion values, you might need to use conversion rate and CPA to determine success.

To contrast ETA data, here’s the Optmyzr data for RSAs:

Heading Length Bucket No. Of Ads CPC CPA CTR Conversion Rate ROAS
0-20 92744 1.26 17.36 8.85% 7.26% 208.78%
21-30 716888 2.20 30.61 7.95% 7.19% 181.35%
31+ 31631 1.86 40.01 7.75% 4.65% 224.73%

While longer ads are close to ETA performance (which makes sense because longer ads are a tactic from the ETA era), it’s clear shorter ads outperform their predecessor.

However, big data doesn’t always translate to your individual performance.

That’s why, it’s critical to establish your own thresholds for performance. If you’re seeing your ad underperform (likely due to not being as eligible for enough SERPs), you may want to make the switch.

It’s important to remember that you can’t “undo” this choice.

Another reason to keep these ads is just so you can have them. Once they’re paused, you’re not getting them back.

Reasons To Pause

The main reason to move away from ETAs is you want the most access to all placements for your search terms.

Google has many different SERPs which can force truncation. Leaning into RSAs and PMax ensures you have the most opportunity to succeed.

Final Takeaway

There is no right or wrong answer on whether to move away from ETAs. However, it is important that you honestly audit your ETAs and confirm they’re still working for you.

Have a question about PPC? Submit via this form or tweet me @navahf with the #AskPPC hashtag. See you next month!

Read the full Ad Strength & Creative Study from Optmyzr.

More resources: 


Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/SearchEngineJournal

How To Get Quality SEO Content Out Of Generative AI [Checklist] via @sejournal, @DAC_group

This post was sponsored by DAC Group. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

With its ability to rapidly produce content at scale, generative AI has quickly become a pivotal content creation tool for any brand trying to maximize its visibility, engagement, and performance online.

However, while AI significantly reduces the time from ideation to creation, the real challenge has become clear: How do you make sure the content it generates is relevant, resonates with your brand’s voice, and drives measurable SEO gains?

This is where the careful combination of AI’s capabilities and human expertise becomes critical. By leveraging AI for its strengths in processing and content generation while applying human insights to refine and guide these outputs, you can strike a balance that achieves both efficiency and quality.

In this article, you’ll explore actionable strategies that combine AI’s rapid output with human creativity, enabling you to produce SEO-optimized content that truly connects with your target audiences. Then you can use the checklist below to create a process for AI in your SEO workflows.

A step by step checklist for incorporating AI into SEO content production processes.

Blending AI With Human Expertise In SEO

At its core, AI’s strength is its ability to process vast amounts of data quickly. When it comes to keyword and topic research, AI can analyze thousands of keywords in seconds, identifying patterns and uncovering trending themes. This capability empowers SEO experts to spot opportunities that might otherwise be missed and prioritize topics that are more likely to resonate with their audience.

For instance, AI can help in:

  • Analyzing large data sets to find keyword patterns.
  • Identifying popular topics and emerging trends through large-scale natural language processing (NLP).
  • Prioritizing topics based on search volume and relevance.

Yet human expertise remains indispensable in interpreting the data AI produces. AI might identify a keyword with high search volume, for instance, but only a human expert can determine if that keyword aligns with a brand’s message and audience’s intent.

With human analysts bringing critical thinking, contextual understanding, and the ability to interpret subtle nuances that AI might miss, this is a collaboration built to make data-driven decisions that strategically align with business goals.

For more sophisticated semantic analyses, you can leverage AI’s ability to perform advanced topic clustering. By utilizing models like sentence transformers, AI can understand and group similar ideas, helping SEO specialists identify overarching themes and subtopics—leading to the creation of comprehensive content recommendations that cover key topics from multiple angles, thus boosting SEO coverage and performance.

Leveraging AI For Strategic Content Ideation And Planning

AI’s ability to quickly generate content ideas makes it a powerful tool for content strategy. By feeding AI data on audience behavior, brand guidelines, and the aforementioned SEO trends and insights, you can produce a wealth of content ideas in a fraction of the time it would take manually. However, it’s important to view AI’s output as a starting point rather than a final product.

By layering AI into your content strategy processes, you can:

  • Rapidly generate a wide array of content ideas.
  • Use audience and SEO data to inform and enrich content ideation.
  • Brainstorm high volumes of original content angles.

Content strategists play a crucial role in fine-tuning these AI-generated ideas, directing content to make sure it aligns with a brand’s overall market strategy and audience expectations. This process may involve assessing AI suggestions—produced rapidly in an organized format—for their potential to meet business objectives, refining content briefs, and proposing content initiatives that integrate SEO opportunities identified earlier.

You can ensure a symbiotic, collaborative use of AI with the following approach to content ideation:

Strategy is also the bridge between SEO insights and creative execution to ensure that the resulting content recommendations are both data-informed and strategically sound. This step is essential to create content that resonates with your intended audiences while simultaneously fulfilling your business’s strategic goals.

Ensuring Quality And Consistency In AI-Generated Creative Content

Generative AI excels in speed, making it an invaluable tool for brainstorming ideas and generating serviceable first drafts. Even so, its outputs can be repetitive, unoriginal, inaccurate, and may lack the nuanced voice of a brand.

To mitigate these weaknesses, remember that generated content is only a starting point. Even when an AI model has been extensively trained and all the major kinks worked out, it’s not perfect. Human oversight and intervention are essential to refine the output for human audiences.

This is where copywriters and editors step in to finesse the content, applying edits to ensure it aligns with a brand’s tone and style. In addition to paraphrasing repetitive structures and adding the “human touch” throughout, refinements in this final step may include:

  • Reviewing for natural phrasing to ensure keywords are integrated smoothly.
  • Adjusting tone and vocabulary to capture the brand’s voice more accurately.
  • Correcting any factual errors, unsubstantiated claims, or AI hallucinations.
  • Enhancing engagement by making the content more audience-focused

This emerging process is beginning to transform copywriting as a discipline. Writers working with AI are likely to spend less time creating first drafts and more time editing, fine-tuning, and curating AI-generated content for human audiences. The result, in theory, is higher quality content produced far more rapidly than traditional methods.

To maximize the benefits of AI in content creation, it’s essential to establish a feedback loop that joins the dots between SEO, strategy, and creative. Content creators should regularly review AI outputs and provide feedback, helping the system improve over time by refining the AI’s training data, experimenting with its parameters, or even rethinking how AI is integrated into the content creation process. This culture of continuous refinement can enhance the quality of your AI-assisted content while minimizing its shortcomings.

The Future Of AI In Content Creation And SEO

Generative AI has already begun to revolutionize content creation, particularly for brands that have integrated it into well-structured content strategies supported by human expertise. By following the best practices outlined in this guide, you can leverage AI to produce SEO-optimized content that not only enhances your online presence but can help you carve out your position as a thought leader.

As you explore these strategies, consider how DAC can support your enterprise-level content needs with scalable AI-driven solutions. By blending the strengths of AI with the critical insights of human experts in SEO, content strategy, and creative copywriting, your business can create content that resonates with your audience, ranks well in search engines, and drives measurable results.


Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by LookerStudio/Shutterstock. Used with permission.

Productivity Electrified: Tech That Is Supercharging Business

This sponsored session was presented by Ford Pro at MIT Technology Review’s 2024 EmTech MIT event.

A decarbonized transportation system is a necessary pre-requisite for a sustainable economy. In the transportation industry, the road to electrification and greater technology adoption can also increase business bottom lines and reduce downstream costs to tax payers. Focusing on early adopters such as first responders, local municipalities, and small business owners, we’ll discuss common misconceptions, barriers to adoption, implementation strategies, and how these insights carry over into wide-spread adoption of emerging technology and electric vehicles.


About the speaker

Wanda Young, Global Chief Marketing & Experience Officer, Ford Pro

Wanda Young is a visionary brand marketer and digital transformation expert who thrives at the intersection of brand, digital, technology, and data; paired with a deep understanding of the consumer mindset. She gained her experience working for the largest brands in retail, sports & entertainment, consumer products, and electronics. She is a successful brand marketer and change agent that organizations seek to drive digital and data transformation – a Chief Experience Officer years before the title was invented. In her roles managing multiple notable brands, including Samsung, Disney, ESPN, Walmart, Alltel, and Acxiom, she developed knowledge of the interconnectedness of brand, digital, and data; of the importance of customer experience across all touchpoints; the power of data and localization; and the in-the-trenches accountability to drive outcomes. Now at Ford Pro, the Commercial Division of Ford Motor Company, she is focused on helping grow the newly-launched division and brand which only Ford can offer commercial customers – an integrated lineup of vehicles and services designed to meet the needs of all businesses to keep their productivity on pace to drive growth.

Young enjoyed a series of firsts in her career, including launching ESPN+, developing Walmart’s first social media presence and building 5000 of their local Facebook pages (which are still live today and continue to scale), developing the first weather-triggered ad product with The Weather Company, designing an ad product with Google called Local Inventory Ads, being part of team who took Alltel Wireless private (which later sold to Verizon Wireless), launching the Acxiom.com website on her first Mother’s Day with her daughter on her lap. She serves on the board of or is involved in a number of industry memberships and has been the recipient of many prestigious awards. Young received a Bachelor of Arts in English with a minor in Advertising from the University of Arkansas.

Preventing Climate Change: A Team Sport

This sponsored session was presented by MEDC at MIT Technology Review’s 2024 EmTech MIT event.

Michigan is at the forefront of the clean energy transition, setting an example in mobility and automotive innovation. Other states and organizations can learn from Michigan’s approach to public-private partnerships, actionable climate plans, and business-government alignment. Progressive climate policies are not only crucial for sustainability but also for attracting talent in today’s competitive job market.

Read more from MIT Technology Review Insights & MEDC about addressing climate change impacts


About the speaker

Hilary Doe, Chief Growth & Marketing Officer, Michigan Economic Development Corporation

As Chief Growth & Marketing Officer, Hilary Doe leads the state’s efforts to grow Michigan’s population, economy, and reputation as the best place to live, work, raise a family, and start a business. Hilary works alongside the Growing Michigan Together Council on a once-in-a-generation effort to grow Michigan’s population, boost economic growth, and make Michigan the place everyone wants to call home.

Hilary is a dynamic leader in nonprofits, technology, strategy, and public policy. She served as the national director at the Roosevelt Network, where she built and led an organization engaging thousands of young people in civic engagement and social change programming at chapters nationwide, which ultimately earned the organization recognition as a recipient of the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions. She also served as Vice President of the Roosevelt Institute, where she oversaw strategy and expanded the Institute’s Four Freedoms Center, with the goal of empowering communities and reducing inequality alongside the greatest economists of our generations. Most recently, she served as President and Chief Strategy Officer at Nationbuilder, working to equip the world’s leaders with software to grow their movements, businesses, and organizations, while spreading democracy.

Hilary is a graduate of the University of Michigan’s Honors College and Ford School of Public Policy, a Detroit resident, and proud Michigander.

Charts: U.S. TikTok Shop Sales 2023-2024

Charm is a U.S.-based data platform providing retailers, sales teams, and investors with in-depth analytics on direct-to-consumer brands. Charm’s staff has collaborated with ex-ByteDance employees to collect publicly available U.S. TikTok Shop data across various categories from its launch in September 2023 to September 2024.

Notably, “Beauty & Personal Care” dominates, generating over $1 billion in revenue. “Womenswear” follows with $621 million, showing that fashion is another leading sector.

The data also shows an upward trend in U.S. TikTok Shop’s monthly sales from its launch in September 2023 through mid-September 2024, indicating strong early adoption and consistent growth. Revenue peaked in July 2024 at over $600 million.

In addition, the top five products by revenue on U.S. TikTok Shop reveal a strong consumer interest in health and wellness: “15 Day Cleanse” (gut and colon support) with $39.7 million in revenue, followed by “Multi Collagen Peptides Powder” (anti-aging complex, $26.4 million), “BetterAlt Himalayan Shilajit Resin” (nutritional supplement, $20.3 million), “MultiMineral Sea Moss” (nutritional supplement, $20.1 million), and “GuruNanda Cocomint Pulling Oil” (teeth whitener, $19.4 million).

Furthermore, prerecorded video was the top sales channel on U.S. TikTok Shop at $2.5 billion.