Daily Tech Snippet: Monday October 5

• After stopping Product Ads, Amazon discontinues recently-launched Text Ads: As of October 31, Amazon’s recently launched Text Ads program will be RIP-status. Yesterday afternoon, Amazon notified its advertisers via email that the Amazon Text Ads (ATA) program will be discontinued on October 31 — ironically, the same day that Amazon Product Ads also get the boot. Let’s back up. ATA ExampleThroughout the past year, you may have noticed text-based ads within Amazon search results and product listings. The Amazon Text Ads program delivered content based on keywords used in Amazon shoppers’ browser searches. This past August, Amazon used the sunset announcement of its popular Product Ads advertising format to introduce Text Ads as a possible alternative. The program has been in beta since Q4 2014 but will never see a public debut. It’s important to note that Amazon’s Text Ads and Product Ads take shoppers off Amazon and to the advertiser’s website. Is Amazon discontinuing these programs in an attempt to keep shoppers within the Amazon ecosystem? What does this mean for its remaining advertising program, Sponsored Products (with auction-based, keyword-driven ads promoting your Amazon listings when you have the Buy Box)? No one can say for sure. However, we recently caught sight of Sponsored Products in a new location on the Amazon webpage, which makes us think that Amazon is possibly working to improve this channel to help sellers promote their products on the marketplace.   

• Google Inc has morphed into Alphabet Inc.: After U.S. markets closed on Friday, Alphabet replaced Google as the publicly traded company that will house Google's search and Web advertising businesses, maps, YouTube and its "moonshot" ventures such as driverless cars. Google's class A shares and class C shares will automatically convert into the same number of Alphabet class A shares and class C shares and start trading on the Nasdaq from Monday. The ticker symbols will not change. The core businesses will be called Google and operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet. Sundar Pichai will head Google. Alphabet will be run by Google co-founder Larry Page and each of its businesses will have its own chief executive. Starting from the company's fourth quarter in January, Alphabet will have two reporting units - Google and all other Alphabet businesses taken as a whole.

• Amazon to Stop Selling Apple TV and Chromecast:  Amazon said on Thursday that it would stop selling devices from Apple and Google that compete with its own streaming media players, escalating the entertainment battle between the major tech companies. Apple TV and Google’s Chromecast are popular items in Amazon’s electronics store. But the devices are in a brawl for market share with Amazon’s Fire TV and Fire TV Stick, which were introduced in 2014. The Fire Stick delivers Amazon’s rapidly expanding video offerings to its customers. Apple TV and Chromecast do not. Amazon’s move to ban competitors is not a retailing gambit. In fact, the company is willing to risk annoying customers who cannot get what they want because it is pursuing a much bigger prize. The stick is crucial to Amazon’s ambitions to move from being just a retailer to a multifaceted provider of everything virtual and physical. “It’s unlike Amazon to be this territorial,” said James McQuivey, an analyst with the research firm Forrester. But he said it was a logical and perhaps inevitable move.

• Facebook Expands Mobile Video Feature That Helps Content Creators Make Money 55% of ad revenue in curated video feeds goes to creators: In July Facebook made a big move into YouTube's turf with plans to launch Suggested Video—a feed of curated video clips from brands like Funny or Die, the NBA and Tastemade. After a small test over the past three months, it's now showing up in more mobile news feeds. Clicking on a video from a news feed leads to a page that pulls all of the publisher's videos together in a stream, as well as other related clips. To help publishers make money off those clips, an ad appears between every few videos, similar to a commercial. Similar to YouTube's business model, creators receive 55 percent of money sold from the ads while Facebook gets 45 percent. All video ads are sold by Facebook. The program is geared specifically for iPhone viewers, since a majority of Facebook's traffic comes from mobile, to help publishers squeeze some extra money from clips watched from a smartphone. The stream pulls in video ads that brands have already bought, meaning that marketers are not paying extra money to get their clips to appear in the new section.  During a small test on Thursday and Friday, ads for Under Armour, Procter & Gamble, Taco Bell, Jet Blue, Target and KFC were playing alongside publishers' clips. Just this week, Sheryl Sandberg pitched a room of agencies and brand marketers at Advertising Week on Facebook's size as equivalent to a Super Bowl. "What people are starting to understand is that what we offer is really broad reach—we have a Super Bowl on mobile in the U.S. every day," Sandberg said. "Our data says that if you do TV plus Facebook, you enhance your reach by 17, 18 percent and more than double that for millennials, which is a hard group to reach right now on TV."

• Pew stuty of teen dating measures effects of social media and technology: Ah, young love. Many of us may remember the intensity and ecstasy of puppy love. But how have those relationships changed in an era of constant communication, oversharing and emoji? That's what a new study into teen dating, published Thursday by the Pew Research Center, explored in-depth. The study takes a look at how social media and technology weave into every stage of the dating process, from flirting to breakup. There's a lot of digital flirting going on -- one boy said that his way of flirting is to put "a bunch of emojis" under a girl's  photo. But asking someone out in person is still the most common way to start a relationship. Over three-quarters of teens said they've never dated someone they initially met online, though a quarter did admit they have dated (or hooked up) with people they met first online. One thing is for certain: if Romeo and Juliet had carried out their romance today, they probably would have avoided their catastrophic communication breakdown. Thirty-eight percent of teens who date expect to hear from their partners at least once per day; 11 percent expect to hear from their partner every hour. That doesn't mean, however, that teens necessarily like this constant communication. Sure, many teen daters have used online messages or texts to resolve arguments (48 percent) or just engage in conversations that makes them feel closer to each other (70 percent). But 43 percent have also found themselves in situations where they think their partner is distracted by their gadgets during their alone time. The study also explored some questions of gender differences. Girls, for example, are much more likely to experience unwanted flirting, mirroring another Pew finding that women are more likely to be the victims of online harassment. Male and female teens, however, reported that there are definitely times when partners have crossed the line. Online tools can also exacerbate jealous tendencies, the study found, and 69 percent of teens reported that they think social media in particular gives too many people a window into their private lives. Many teens told researchers that pressure to post about their relationships made them present a less authentic picture of their lives. Others said they stayed away from posting too much about their dating lives online because it leads to "drama";  one teen said it was because "more people ask questions and stuff like that." Digital communication had its role to play at the end of relationships as well, researchers found, but in some ways teens were surprisingly traditional. Yes, there were slivers of teens -- 7 percent each -- that think it's perfectly fine to break with someone by proxy or by just changing your social media status to "single." (That's cold, kids.)