Instagram’s New Collaboration Status Feature Might Help Creators

The main focus of most social media platforms these past few years has been catering to social media influencers whenever possible. These content creators can be vital to a platform’s success because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up bringing their fans to the site as well. Followers of these influencers would be less likely to leave the platform than might have been the case otherwise so long as their favorite creators are still onboard.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that Instagram might be working on a new way to entice these influencers and encourage them to put their content up on the app. Noted reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi recently took to Twitter to reveal the new feature that Instagram is testing out, namely its “collaboration status” feature.

From the looks of things, this so called collaboration status can be switched on or off. If toggled on, creators would be signaling that they are willing to work with other influencers on the platform. This can facilitate enhanced cooperation which can add to Instagram’s appeal as a hub for creatives with all things having been considered and taken into account.

Creators that have switched this feature on will display their desire to collaborate on their main profile, DMs as well as when they appear in search results. It might also prove useful to those creators who prefer not to collaborate, reducing miscommunication and the wasted time that this can lead to.

In spite of the fact that this is the case, some are criticizing Instagram for failing to improve their other features whilst simultaneously releasing new ones. The platform has been facing an uphill battle in terms of user growth, with the rise of TikTok and its star making algorithm proving to be a much more appealing choice for creators who are targeting Gen Z.

It will be interesting to see if this new feature makes a difference when it receives a wider rollout. It might help Instagram make up some ground in its battle against TikTok.

Read next: Meta Platforms Is In The Works Of Launching a New Decentralized Twitter Rival By Summer 2023
by Zia Muhammad via Digital Information World

Twitter’s New CEO Breaks Her Silence And Claims She’s Ready To Revamp The App After Getting Inspired By Elon Musk

Twitter has a new CEO and she’s none other than Linda Yaccarino.

The news comes after tech billionaire Elon Musk was quick to mention through a tweet how he was glad to introduce the firm’s new CEO but chose to keep her identity a mystery.

But the surprise did not last long as Linda Yaccarino was unveiled as the new leader who recently tweeted about how excited she was to assume the leading role in the firm.

Furthermore, she added how inspired she was by the vision of the world’s second richest person and therefore was tasked with the great responsibility to steer it to new heights of success by allowing it to undergo a transformation.

Linda spoke in public for the first time since speculations of her taking charge made their way online as talks between her and the firm began as early as last week.

Elon Musk has been in charge of the firm for a while now, serving as its CEO ever since he bought the company for a staggering $44 billion in October of 2022.

Linda Yaccarino also reiterated how Musk has always been a true source of inspiration for her and how excited she was to take on the challenge to revamp the entire Twitter business as a team.

As far as past work experience is concerned, she’s been the head of advertising at NBCUniversal and that’s where she reportedly spent most of her time bringing in huge gains for the entire advertising sector for the company. Now, she’s been told to really commit and make the future brighter for Elon’s popular microblogging website.

For her, feedback from users of the app is significant and she said that it is necessary to make the app better than ever.

It makes absolute sense as to why Elon Musk has hired Yaccarino to control the platform because the current status of Twitter’s advertising business is at an all-time low and no matter how much Musk may deny it, facts are facts.

Yes, some advertisers are returning but others are simply no longer interested in coming back. Therefore, it’s a huge challenge that’s been set up for the new CEO to try and reverse the declining stats and overcome the huge obstacles that are compounded by huge debts.

Advertisers are simply scared to come back to the app and plenty of advertisers have ended up fleeing as they feel advertisements might soon pop up against inappropriate content after Twitter was seen losing most of its advertising revenue.

Musk has mentioned time and time again how keen he is on designing the application that entails everything. In the past, we’ve seen him speak about how such a platform would also be authorized to provide a long range of services including payments done from one peer to the next. Meanwhile, he added how the company’s core would continue to be reliant on digital advertising as it hopes to expand that focus further.

Elon Musk vowed to step down from the leading CEO role in February and hoped that by this year’s end, he’s found the right person in charge who could help steer the business in the right direction.

Clearly, it appears that day has come and now, he’s going to be having more time to focus on other ventures that may have been neglected in the past. And that includes the top electric-automobile-making company, Tesla.

Through a recently published Tweet, Musk vowed to devote more time to places that he felt needed his authority.

Read next: VPN Restrictions Impact 47.3% of Global Population
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

VPN Restrictions Impact 47.3% of Global Population

VPNs have become popular among internet users because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up allowing them to circumvent restrictions put in place by governments. Numerous national governments have tried to impose blocks on internet access that can leave its citizens less free than might have been the case otherwise, which makes VPNs a useful tool to ensure that you are not deprived of essential information.

In spite of the fact that this is the case, there are around 14 countries that are trying to restrict VPN access entirely. These countries include China, Pakistan, India, Iran, Iraq, Egypt and Turkey. The UAE, Russia, Belarus, Tanzania, Oman and Myanmar are also included in this list. Uganda is the only country so far that has removed these restrictions, thereby allowing its internet users to once again begin utilizing VPNs with all things having been considered and taken into account.

This data comes from Surfshark which recently conducted a study on VPN usage among internet users in various countries. With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that VPN restrictions are still impacting around 3.7 billion people around the world. That makes up approximately 47.3% of the global population.

Considering that ten out of the fourteen countries that are currently prohibiting the use of VPNs are located in Asia, the population of this gigantic continent is especially affected. It is estimated that as many as 71.6% of the people living in Asia are prevented from using VPNs by their governments, although most users find ways to get around these blocks and incorporate VPNs into their internet usage regardless.

One thing that bears mentioning is that several other countries could potentially be restricting internet access. Surfshark only didn’t include them in the list out of a lack of conclusive data.

For example, North Korea places enormous restrictions on internet usage, with barely any websites being available for internet users in the East Asian nation. However, there is no clear cut evidence that suggests that VPN usage in particular has been curtailed.

Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Indonesia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan are just some of the other nations that may very well be preventing VPN usage, but the evidence remains inconclusive at best. The fact that all of these countries are present in Asia might indicate that only a small minority of people on the continent, namely those living in Japan, South Korea and a handful of other nations, are able to use VPNs freely.

This is a concerning development, since it suggests a dire state of internet freedom in Asia which is far worse than the rest of the world.

Read next: Most Parents Are Concerned About The Negative Impact Of Social Media On Mental Health, New Survey Proves
by Zia Muhammad via Digital Information World

5 Strategies That Will Help You Improve Your Website Speed

In today’s fast-paced digital world, website speed is vital for your business success and your user experience. Users have higher expectations and decreased patience. According to many pieces of research, users will wait up to 3 seconds for your site to load, meaning that slow loading speeds can lead them to your competitors. As a result, you’ll face fewer sales and less page traffic.

Also, website speed plays a significant role in search engine rankings. More precisely, Google prioritizes fast sites that provide an excellent user experience. Therefore, it’s crucial to offer fast loading times.

But if you wonder how to do that, you just need to check out the five most efficient strategies we’ve selected. So, let’s start!

Use a Reliable Web Hosting Provider

Web hosts are essential for website speed as they provide storage, power, and connectivity for your website to perform in the best way possible. Therefore, the quality and the capacity of the web host directly impact your website’s loading times.

By purchasing a reliable web host, you will get high-quality hardware and software, processors, SSDs, and stable network connections that will significantly decrease your site’s latency and prevent it from being unresponsive and sluggish.

However, keep in mind that there are different hosting types. You should usually start with affordable shared hosting, and as your business grows and needs more resources, move to VPS, then dedicated and cloud hosting. To make the best decision, we recommend visiting this link and choosing the best web host with a suitable hosting plan.

Utilize a CDN

Once your website is available online, customers from all around the world can access it. Unfortunately, they may face slower loading times due to the distance from the server that hosts the website and their location.

However, a CDN can help you overcome this issue. The CDN is a distributed network of servers that stores and shares static website elements, such as images, videos, and CSS, globally. It reduces the distance between your visitors and the server by duplicating and storing these files on several servers worldwide.

For example, suppose a server in the US hosts your server. In that case, the CDN will deliver the static elements of your website to a server that is physically closer to your potential customers, decreasing the time it takes for the content to reach their browsers.

Employ Caching

When more visitors access your website at once, servers might slow down and take longer to load your site to them. Fortunately, caching can help you solve this issue. Caching is the process of storing data in temporary storage so that your data will be presented faster with future requests. In other words, the website won’t need to load over and over again for each user, meaning it will use fewer resources and get better loading times.

However, there is a different approach to caching, depending on the platform the website relies on. For example, if you built your website by using WordPress, you can implement plugins like W3 Super Cache or W3 Total Cache. Unfortunately, most shared servers don’t enable caching. But that’s why VPS and dedicated servers allow you to activate it by accessing your web host provider’s settings.

Optimize Your Website’s Images

High-quality images are eye-catching, but they can cause significant issues with your site’s speed and, therefore, decrease your page traffic. However, there are a few ways that can assist you in reducing image size without affecting its quality.

First, you should use the JPEG or PNG format and avoid BMP and TIFF. Next, you can crop unnecessary elements from the image and resize it to fit your website. In addition, you can utilize tools like JPEGmini or ImageOptim.

Another method is to implement HTML responsive image attributes (<secret> and >size>) and adjust the image size according to the display properties. Lastly, if you use WordPress for building your website, you can use a plugin like Imagify that will optimize the images.

Minify CSS and JavaScript Files

Nowadays, JavaScript and CSS are crucial for your website performance, as they control your site’s layout, formatting, and presentation. But they are complex files that can cause slow loading times. That’s why you should minimize them.

You can achieve that by removing comments, line breaks, spaces, and block delimiters in the code. As a result, the code becomes lighter and reduces the amount of data that needs to be transmitted. You can also combine CSS files together and also do that with JavaScript ones.

However, if you don’t have coding expertise, you can always use tools like Closure Compiler or choose a caching or CDN tool with built-in minify features. If your supporting platform is WordPress, you can make this process even easier. You can choose a plugin like WP Super Minify that will help you get better speed rates in no time.

Final Thoughts

Enhancing your website speed can be a challenging task, especially with the fast advancement of technology. However, it is crucial to establish a fast site as it has a positive impact on your customers and your business. Nonetheless, we recommend you follow these five essential tips we’ve provided and see how your speed boosts.

by Web Desk via Digital Information World

Snapchat Experiences Unexpected Increase in Ad Portal Traffic Despite Struggling to Translate it Into Profit

Snapchat has seen a significant surge in ad portal traffic over the past month. Despite posting disappointing earnings results recently, April saw a 126% increase in mobile revenue growth for the platform.

Snap Inc. recently reported mixed earnings results, but one bright spot was the 126% increase in mobile ad portal traffic as spotted by Similarweb. Companies are beginning to view Snapchat as a competitive option to other social media platforms. Despite its impressive expansion, the site still needs help making a profit. Most of Snapchat's traffic growth has come from outside the US because the company is still trying to establish itself there.

At the same time, US traffic to Twitter's ad portal was up 4.8% year-over-year in April, indicating a potential return of domestic advertisers. Unfortunately, worldwide traffic to the portal remains sceptical at a 20.7% decrease.

Snapchat has been making progress towards improving its advertising business by introducing new product features such as shoppable ads and demographic targeting options for businesses looking to reach specific audiences on the platform. They have added fresh alternatives for users to engage with advertisements, like augmented reality lenses and games integrated into sponsored posts.

Despite these developments, many experts believe Snap Inc.'s revenue growth will stay sluggish since it can't persuade big businesses like Facebook and Google to use their services regularly. Furthermore, since they are worried about their privacy or do not think the advertising is sufficiently relevant to their interests, a significant portion of Snapchat's present users do not actively interact with the ads.

• Also read: American Trust In Media 2023: Which News Outlets Are Most Reliable For Information In The US

It appears that despite an increase in domestic and international mobile ad portal traffic, Snapchat is still having trouble turning this into profits, in large part due to its inability to draw in more recognizable brands and maintain its users' interest in the advertisements that appear on its platform.

With a 13.7% rise from March to April, Snapchat's net revenue from the App Store was $8.7 million, as per AppFigures data. Despite the possibility that Snapchat's income growth rate isn't the fastest, it has been rising month over a month ever since the in-app purchase feature was implemented is encouraging. Snapchat effectively sells status by offering early access to features, but in the current business environment, they need to provide more to draw users and advance its growth rate.

Regarding advertising, Snapchat saw a 126% rise in ad portal traffic globally in April compared to last year. Its traffic share among rivals Meta/Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and TikTok rose from 0.6% to 1.4%. Facebook's ad portal traffic decreased by 7.8% yearly, whereas Twitter's traffic increased within the US and decreased by 20.7% globally. The growth in TikTok's ad gateway traffic was 13.4% globally but just 4.8% in the US, which indicates the app's regulatory obstacles in the US market. We can foresee how these social media companies' operations will develop by monitoring traffic to their ad portals.

Read next: Just 0.28% of App Store Apps Cost Under a Dollar
by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

American Trust In Media 2023: Which News Outlets Are Most Reliable For Information In The US

With misinformation running at an all-time high around the globe, it makes absolute sense as to why some people are really skeptical about trusting media outlets in today’s time.

And when we look at the picture in the US, the divide is very visible among both the Republicans and the Democrats. Not everyone feels the same about the media world and which news sources can be relied upon the most.

In 2022, we saw YouGov unveil the results of a poll that surveyed Americans about where they got their news sources from and how much they really did trust the 22 very visible media organizations out there. And this year, the firm opted to do the same by questioning Americans about how much they really trust in things like social media, broadcast, print, digital, and more. Out of a staggering 56 responses, the answers were recorded and we’ve got them for you below.

The respondent was questioned about how much they trust, distrust, or do not trust and distrust the various kinds of media outlets on display. From such a result, it’s quite possible to see which outlet’s total trust score came out to be high or low. The former had to do with much likely Americans were toward mentioning if outlets were trustworthy or very reliable as compared to not being trusted at all or very unreliable.

Among all the various options on display, it's the Weather Channel that continued to be the most trusted source for news of them all in the US. To help give you a better picture about this, US citizens were 53 points more liable to call the channel trustworthy than unreliable. And it’s also the only one where more Democrats referred to it as a reliable source than the Republicans.

Meanwhile, the Republicans displayed a lot of trust in the media outlet Fox News. In terms of the national rankings on display, after the Weather Channel, it was PBS, and then BBC which was trusted a lot, and then the Wall Street Journal. And it’s interesting to note how the top four most trustworthy sources were the same as last year, despite more additions being added to this poll in 2023.

Moving on to the world of social media, younger American citizens claimed to have more trust in the news published by 11 social media apps than adults.

Read next: Public Concern Grows as AI's Impact on Jobs Comes Under Scrutiny
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

Just 0.28% of App Store Apps Cost Under a Dollar

Apple’s business model relies largely on the App Store because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up giving the company a 30% cut of all revenues generated by the apps it features. However, one limiting factor that proved frustrating for certain developers was the minimum price of $0.99. Any app on the App Store had to cost at least this much, or alternatively it could be free to download and generate revenue entirely through ads.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that Apple recently changed this rule. Developers could now set any price they liked, even if it was under a dollar. In spite of the fact that this is the case, it turns out that just 220 apps on the App Store have availed this opportunity. That accounts for a measly 0.28% of all apps, and even if we only factor in paid apps, it still comprises just 5% of the total.

This seems to suggest that there is not a lot of demand for such cheap apps. If the price is lower than a dollar, it might as well be cheap since this can lead to more downloads than might have been the case otherwise. Many are saying that the era of paid apps is over, which explains why there are so few apps that are priced at this low range.

However, countries like India are still using the lower price limit to their advantage. Indian consumers generally prefer to pay an up front charge while buying the app rather than paying for subscriptions, and the high rupee to dollar ratio means that even low dollar amounts can suffice.

All in all, it seems like in-app purchases are the name of the game. They can generate vastly more revenue than paid downloads, which explains why so many developers are opting for the hybrid model. The lack of third party tracking options further boosts the growth of in-app revenue, and that makes cheap paid apps even less attractive to developers and users alike.

H/T: Appfigures

Read next: Public Concern Grows as AI's Impact on Jobs Comes Under Scrutiny
by Zia Muhammad via Digital Information World