Data from marketing platform Billo dated June to December 2025 shows Meta ad competition rose 40% between August and the November peak. Billo, which connects brands with creators to produce social video ads, says the brands that win Black Friday test their creative already in August
New Billo data shows Meta ad competition rising about 40% and the cost to reach 1,000 impressions climbing roughly 18% between August and the November Black Friday peak. Brands that wait until fall to plan their campaigns enter an auction that is already crowded and expensive, with the outcome largely shaped by creative built weeks earlier. Black Friday and Cyber Monday together make up the single largest ecommerce advertising event of the year, and the brands that prepare earliest tend to capture a disproportionate share of that spending.
Billo, which connects brands with creators to produce social video ads for platforms including TikTok, Meta and YouTube, has tracked the same pattern in its own client data. Donatas Smailys, co-founder and CEO of Billo, said brands that enter Black Friday without tested creative end up paying more for weaker results, regardless of how much they spend.
“Everyone treats Black Friday as a fourth-quarter problem, so everyone ends up competing for the same ad space at the same time,” Smailys said. “Brands that create their ads early and test them in August get better results than brands that wait until October or November. By the time November comes, the brands that tested early already know what works, while the brands that waited are launching untested ads during the most expensive weeks of the year.”
September and October are when brands learn which ads actually convert, and that testing takes weeks. August gives brands exactly enough time to brief creators, film several options, and get results back before Black Friday begins.
“You don’t need a media budget to find out if an ad works,” Smailys said. “In August, we tell our clients to post a few short variants organically, each with a different hook and a different creator. A small, specific audience responds within days, and that tells you which version actually lands. The trick is picking the right audience for that test: people who already care about the product. Once you know what they respond to, you know exactly what to put the budget behind in November.”
Brands that follow this approach typically produce three to five short variants per product, each testing a different angle: a different opening line, a different creator, or a different pain point. The variants that perform best organically become the ads brands scale with paid budget once Q4 begins.
Figures are based on Billo client Meta ad data, tracked monthly from June through December 2025. Comparisons reflect August 2025 against the November 2025 peak, and where noted, December. Cost per 1,000 impressions reached is a derived figure, calculated as total spend divided by total impressions, multiplied by 1,000; it is not a reported column in the underlying data.
The post Smart Brands Prepare for Black Friday in August Before Ad Costs Climb 18% and Competition Jumps 40% appeared first on SiteProNews.
Startups.co.uk’s latest survey reveals that 90% of AI-using SMEs are worried that their company data is being used to train the AI tool.
This is a sensible apprehension, as company data entered into a public AI model can’t be recalled, deleted, or localized.
According to Startups.co.uk‘s findings, a staggering 50% of SMEs admitted to leaking company data into free public AI chatbots in order to complete work tasks.
Over a quarter of SMEs (28%) are leaking company data into AI chatbots at least once a week, and another 22% are doing so multiple times a month.
These businesses are effectively trading their long-term corporate security for short-term productivity.
IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report shows that a third (32%) of businesses who reported a data breach had to pay a fine and nearly all organisations suffered operational disruption.
Among organisations that reported recovery, most took more than 100 days on average to do so.
Proprietary workflows, pitch decks, and internal numbers may already be sitting in a competitor’s future AI prompt response.
Despite widespread concern for company security, startups continue to upload data in order to keep up with daily workloads.
Startups.co.uk found that businesses are manually preparing data before using AI tools, to help mitigate security risks.
Almost a quarter (23%) of businesses say they spend a ‘significant’ amount of time manually preparing data, meaning it often takes longer to clean the data by hand than AI takes to process it.
Additionally, over half (52%) of leaders who use AI spend a moderate amount of time manually preparing or anonymising data to ensure privacy and security.
This need for manual preparation and rework is a clear downside of public AI adoption. Those who do not use public AI face far less friction: only 11% report significant manual rework compared to 22% of public AI users.
“Our data shows how startups are caught in a tough productivity trap. Half of all SMEs leak data into public chatbots just to keep up with daily workloads, yet 90% are privately terrified of where that data will end up. UK founders know that blindly feeding proprietary data into a public model means their pitch decks or internal numbers could easily end up in a competitor’s future AI prompt but they feel they don’t have a choice. Is the price of innovation gambling with your company’s intellectual property?”
The post 90% of AI-Using SMEs Worry Company Data is Training Their AI Tool appeared first on SiteProNews.
It’s come full circle… Netflix, the company that crushed live television is now considering adding live television to it’s platform. According to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, Netflix is having internal discussions about live channels on it’s platform. This would allow users an option to watch scheduled programming based on a live channel or select something from Netflix massive on-demand library.
This strategy is meant to combat “choice fatigue”. Many subscribers feel overwhelmed by the endless library of TV shows and movies to select from. For some subscribers it can take longer to select a movie to watch than the actual length of the movie itself. Offering pre-programmed, 24/7 feeds would create a frictionless viewing experience. Subscribers overwhelmed by choice fatigue could simply tune in and let a channel run, which would ironically mimic traditional cable TV.
This change would also allow Netflix to compete to with free ad-supported services like Tubi, Pluto TV, and The Roku Channel that have exploded in popularity. A 24/7 feed would also boost Netflix growing ad-supported tier with increased advertising. If implemented, this strategy may well keep viewers engaged and prove that the future of streaming looks a whole lot like traditional cable.
The post Netflix Considers Adding Live TV to Increase Engagement appeared first on SiteProNews.
How to make sure your website can be found is a question as old as the internet itself. For most of the web’s history, discovery followed a familiar path. Build a credible site, earn links, climb Google’s results, and turn that visibility into traffic. That model has held stable for the past twenty years, but now it’s falling to pieces, and most small businesses have yet to notice.
The shift is a big one. Cloudflare tracks bot versus human traffic and recently found that automated traffic, bots and AI agents, has overtaken human traffic on the web for the first time, crossing 57% of requests to web pages. As WordPress VIP’s CTO described the shift, websites now have two audiences, humans AND AI agents.
It’s a shift that matters a lot more for small businesses than it might sound like at first. When a potential customer queries an AI assistant for “a good web host for a small online store,” or “the best accountant near me,” the AI provides a short and confident answer pieced together through a handful of sources. Your business is either included in that answer or it’s completely invisible.
There is no in between, no page two. There’s no long results page and scrolling. And, most importantly, the analytics dashboard with its traffic, rankings, and pageviews tells almost nothing about what is actually happening. Small businesses that have not figured this out are flying blind!
The old analytics assumed that a person would be typing into a search box and clicking on the results. None of it captures the reality of a new group of visitors that acts nothing like we humans do.
The metrics that most businesses have come to rely on were designed for a human-only web. Metrics like bounce rate, time on page, and session duration can reveal how humans behave on a site, but AI models do not browse that way. They don’t bounce; they don’t spend 90 seconds on a pricing page, for example. The AI reads the content, decides whether it trusts and understands it, and then, either includes you in its answer or moves on, often in just a fraction of a second, and without ever registering as a normal visit.
This is a wake-up call. A business can be doing everything that the old dashboard rewarded and still be losing the game in this new reality. The best SEO no longer defines the winners. Instead, those that win the game are now the ones that AI systems can most easily read and trust, a different skill that requires different measurements.
There is, however, some good news in all of this. A costly new analytics stack isn’t needed in order to serve this new world. Simple visibility of three key things will provide an edge over what the old dashboard ignores.
Starting at zero with the most basic question is critical. When people ask AI tools about your category do you show up and is what AI says about you accurate? Consider this as the AI-era equivalent of a Google ranking with the exception that almost no one is checking it.
Site owners can do this easily in as little as ten minutes. Once a month, query ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google’s AI-powered search results, asking the questions that your customers might actually ask. Questions like “the best [your category] for [your type of customer],” and “is [your business] any good,” as well as “who are the alternatives to [a competitor].”
Note whether or not you appear in the results as well as the AI’s accuracy. Such a simple, manual check serves as a baseline that most competitors still don’t have.
The second shift comes in recalibrating what gets counted as success. The goal has been getting more people to the site, boosting traffic. But AI is changing what a visit now looks like. The raw number of visits is less important than what those visitors actually did on the site.
So now the metric to keep closer attention to moves downstream, from clicks to actions. Things like form submissions, phone-number taps, bookings, quote requests, actual purchases are what we should be paying closer attention to.
Today, the AI-assisted visitor who arrives, reads a few pages, and then books a call is worth far more than a hundred casual clicks. If a dashboard is still centered around traffic volume, the old game is still being measured. Measure the actions that mean money, and you will make better decisions about where your site is actually working.
The third metric happens to be the one that most businesses miss entirely, and it is where this whole conversation connects back to your web host.
With bots and AI agents now accounting for more than half of all web traffic, websites are being hit far more often, and differently than even just a year ago. AI crawlers are not polite browsers, looking at one page at a time. They tend to request many pages rapidly, hammering parts of your site a human would never touch. That can generate load patterns your setup was never tuned for.
Consider this. When an AI crawler comes to your site to answer a potential customer’s question and the site is slow, timing out, or throwing out errors under the load, you won’t get cited. The AI will move to a competitor whose site answered more cleanly and didn’t time out. The key is being reachable and fast when a bot comes calling; this has become a new ranking factor in the AI era. A site that buckles under the pressure of automated traffic will be invisible.
Uptime and server response time are not abstracts. It’s how your host handles sudden bursts of automated requests – the unglamorous infrastructure layer that most small business owners never think about until it costs them.
While this new world might feel overwhelming, there’s no reason for panic. None of it means abandoning what already works. Good SEO is still important. Human visitors still matter. Don’t toss the old dashboard, simply stop treating it as the whole picture.
Start with the things that don’t cost anything. Run the manual AI visibility check this month and note where you stand. Check the facts, make sure your information is clear, consistent, and easy to find. AI crawlers reward a site that plainly states who you are, what you do, and who you serve. Shift attention from raw traffic to visitor actions that actually convert. Check with your host and ask about site performance when automated traffic spikes, are you optimized for when a crawler comes calling?
Thriving in this new world means noticing early on that the web now has two audiences and to start measuring for both. Those that keep watching only the old dashboard won’t necessarily fail, but they will slowly become invisible to more than half of the web that is now deciding who gets recommended. The opportunity is ripe as not many are paying attention to this yet, which means, for now, that simply looking is an advantage!
The post Your Website Now Has Two Audiences. Only One of Them Shows Up in Your Analytics appeared first on SiteProNews.
Ford has announced it’s new electric pickup truck, the Fathom. The Fathom will use Ford’s new manufacturing process, the Universal Electric Vehicle Platform. This new approach will allow Ford to produce affordable and profitable EV vehicles.
Starting at $28,350 ($29,945 after transportation fees), the Fathom is reasonably priced when compared gas power alternatives. Pre-orders will begin in early 2027 and deliveries are expected later in the year.
The mid-sized Fathom truck features include:
By combining an affordable price with an eco-friendly EV, Ford is positioning the Fathom to be a real winner.
The post Ford’s New Fathom Will Be A Game-Changer appeared first on SiteProNews.
Disclosure: We are a professional review site that receives compensation from the companies whose products we review. We are independently owned and we have spent time and effort doing our best to offer you the most relevant and accurate information. All the "customer reviews" are posted by real webmasters (hosting customers) and we're not responsable for their opinions. Purchasing any service from the hosting companies listed on our site is your solely decision.
| Stats Panel | Last 24h | Last Month | Total |
| Articles | 1 | 36 | 6600 |
| News | 20 | 1175 | 51665 |
| Hosting Sites | 0 | 0 | 2537 |
| Reviews | 0 | 0 | 2533 |
| Coupons | 0 | 0 | 566 |
