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myRA retirement plan is dead. Here’s some alternatives for your funds
 Arielle O'Shea

NerdWallet

The Treasury Department announced Friday that it is ending the Obama administration’s myRA program, a savings account designed to help low- and middle-income savers put money away for retirement.

The myRA launched nationwide in 2015 as a spinoff of the Roth IRA. It was positioned as a starter retirement account, giving savers the ability to make contributions directly from their paychecks. The account had the same income eligibility requirements as a Roth IRA but offered Treasury savings bonds as the only investment option, appealing to savers who feared losing their principal.

In a press release about the end of the program, U.S. Treasurer Jovita Carranza said a review of the myRA program found it wasn’t cost-effective.

“The myRA program was created to help low to middle-income earners start saving for retirement. Unfortunately, there has been very little demand for the program, and the cost to taxpayers cannot be justified by the assets in the program,” Carranza said in the statement.

That low demand may have been due to the fact that there are other — potentially better — retirement savings vehicles out there, including the Roth IRA. Here’s how to invest for retirement in absence of the myRA.

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Transfer your account

The myRA website was quickly replaced with a short FAQ, which noted that the Treasury Department would reach out to current account holders with information about how to close or transfer existing accounts.

The best place to transfer that money is a Roth IRA, which was the basis for the myRA in the first place. The accounts share many similarities — the myRA was intended as a steppingstone to the Roth IRA, and myRA accounts had a balance limit of $15,000, at which point investors would be asked to transfer their balances, anyway.

» Want more info? See this guide to Roth IRAs

To transfer your balance, open a Roth IRA and ask the account provider to help you initiate a direct rollover, which will seamlessly move your money between accounts. Most brokers will allow you to quickly open a Roth IRA online.

Don’t take a distribution

The alternative to a direct rollover is to take a distribution of your account balance. Because myRA contributions are made after taxes, they can technically be pulled out at any time, tax- and penalty-free.

However, doing so is a blow to the retirement savings you’ve built, and you could be taxed or penalized if you also withdraw the earnings on those contributions.

Let’s say you’re 35 and you have $10,000 in the account. That may not seem like much when you consider how much you’ll need for retirement, but over the next 30 years, it could grow to nearly six times that amount in a Roth IRA, assuming a 6% investment return. That’s with no additional contributions on your part.

Invest your balance

What a myRA didn’t offer that a Roth IRA does: the ability to select investments beyond ultra-safe Treasury savings bonds. Roth IRA providers offer a wide selection of investment options, including low-cost index funds and exchange-traded funds.

» Learn more: What is an index fund?

These funds allow you to buy a basket of investments — like stocks, bonds or both — in a single transaction, by tracking an index like the Standard & Poor’s 500. They’re an inexpensive and quick way to build a diversified portfolio, which reduces your risk.

“A Roth IRA is a great alternative; an investor would likely see better returns because they are moving from one government fund to an open investment architecture,” says Steve Minkoff, a certified financial planner in San Francisco.

If you have a long time horizon, investing in an index fund that holds stocks will allow your money to grow much faster. According to a recent analysis by NerdWallet, choosing a safe vehicle like a savings account over investing in the stock market could result in a $3.3 million difference in how much you’re able to accumulate over 40 years. The low-return savings bonds offered within a myRA are likely to fall short in a similar fashion.

Continue to make contributions

There is one feature of the myRA that can’t be easily replicated with a Roth IRA, and that’s the ability to make contributions automatically via paycheck deferral.

That means you have to self-motivate a bit, by setting up automatic contributions to your new Roth IRA. Ask your bank to make that transfer at the beginning of the month or after your first paycheck of the month, so the money is saved before you have a chance to spend it.

In 2017, you can contribute $5,500 to a Roth IRA, or $6,500 if you’re 50 or older. Any contributions you’ve made to your myRA this year will reduce that limit.

More about saving for retirement

Arielle O’Shea is a staff writer at NerdWallet, a personal finance website. Email: aoshea@nerdwallet.com. Twitter: @arioshea.

The article Obama-Era Retirement Plan Is Dead. Here’s an Alternative originally appeared on NerdWallet.

Output: The Treasury Department announced Friday that it is ending the Obama administration’s myRA program, a savings account designed to help low- and middle-income savers put money away for retirement.


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Turbulent times force innovation on oil and gas industry
 Some companies such as Exxon Mobil and Chevron re-directed large shares of their capital spending towards the US shale patch while others bet on favourable prospects for deep-water offshore. Yet, what they all have in common is a tendency to increasingly target smaller projects that can deliver paybacks over a shorter period of time. This is a notable change for an industry that has traditionally been dominated by long lead-time projects.

Companies have significantly changed the way they pick projects and execute on them. For example, conventional onshore development has shifted towards brownfield and satellite fields to minimise capital spending. Meanwhile the offshore industry is experiencing even more rapid change as companies have scaled down projects, introduced strict standards for facilities and equipment and optimised project design.

In tandem with this shift in strategy, global upstream costs have fallen both in the US shale industry and globally – these costs were a key determinant of skyrocketing expenditure in the first part of this decade.

The fundamental question that the industry now faces is to what extent these cost reductions can be sustained in the future. Standardisation of equipment and operations, improved design, efficiency in projects and corporate activities, integrated approaches in supply chains and increased use of digital technologies are all areas that have contributed to bringing costs down.

However, a large component of costs, including commodities and raw materials prices, as well as labour, remain cyclical by nature. The sector will need to continue to improve its operations in order to offset those inflationary pressures.

Despite these improvements, the sector has not solved all its challenges. The risk of another round of skyrocketing costs remains, especially if the lessons of the last three years are forgotten. In most cases, companies face significant debt exposure and relatively poor financial health. The capital discipline recently adopted will need to be balanced with the imperative to scale up investment in new projects in order to offset the natural decline of fields and meet demand requirements. At the same time, large job cuts have led to the loss of many important competences that will not be easily replaced. And the imperative of meeting energy demand needs while minimising environmental impacts remain an open task for the industry.

Though challenges remain, one thing is certain. The oil and gas industry has belied its reputation as a conservative sector and proved it was capable of constant innovation itself and proven it could adapt rapidly to a changing world.

Output: Investment priorities in the oil and gas sector are shifting after an oversupply of oil and the growth in shale production, with more focus on smaller projects that promise quicker paybacks. Investors are looking for scaled-down offshore projects and onshore brownfield and satellite fields in order to reduce capital expenditure. The industry is reacting to the lower price of oil with tighter financial discipline and by shedding staff. Standardisation across the industry has also helped control costs. However, the lack of funding for larger projects and rising demand for energy are putting pressure on companies to continue to innovate.


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3,000 North Korean hackers pillaging online wallets
 SEOUL • North Korea's state-sponsored hackers are increasingly going after money rather than secrets, according to a report by a South Korean government- backed institute.

Formerly, most such attacks appeared intended to cause social disruption or purloin secret data, and the targets were generally the computer networks of government agencies or media companies in countries it saw as hostile.

The best-known example was a 2014 attack on computers at Sony Pictures Entertainment.

That kind of attack is still occurring, but in the past few years, North Korean hackers seem to have become more interested in cash, the Financial Security Institute said in its report on Thursday.

It said North Korean-linked hackers were behind the digital theft of US$81 million (S$110 million) from Bangladesh's central bank last year. The North Koreans also tried to breach Polish banks, leaving traces that led anti-hacking experts to believe the hacking group also planned to steal money from more than 100 other organisations around the world.

North Korea is isolated, impoverished and desperately short of foreign currency to pay for imports. Even so, it has trained a large army of hackers, originally as an inexpensive means of espionage, sabotage and propaganda, but now also as a moneymaker.

Russian cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab has identified a hacking group called Bluenoroff that it says is to blame for attacks on foreign financial institutions, like those in Poland and Bangladesh. Bluenoroff is said to be an offshoot of Lazarus, the North Korea-linked hacking group implicated in earlier hits.

Output: North Korean hackers are attacking financial institutions in a bid to steal funds, according to a South Korean institute backed by the government. North Korean defectors have described an official state-sponsored force of around 3,000 hackers trained in China and Russia that is targeting virtual currency service providers. The group's focus has changed from uncovering government secrets and disrupting the social order to acquisition of funds. North Korean hackers were responsible for the $81m theft from the Bangladeshi central bank in 2016.


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Redrow Show homes open at Redrow's Stafford development
 Stylish, spacious show homes now open in Stafford

Buying a new home isn’t something to do on a wing and a prayer, but with a heavenly pair of show homes now open at Church View in Stafford buyers can make an informed decision about their housing options.

Located on Tixall Road, on the edge of Stafford, the Redrow development offers a selection of substantial four and five-bedroom designs from the sought-after Heritage Collection.

Initially sold off plan, the opening of two stylish show homes is the answer to the prayers of those buyers who prefer to look before they buy.

Pauline Turnbull, sales director for Redrow Homes (Midlands), said: “Church View features some of the larger designs from our ever-popular Heritage Collection of traditional looking homes. In many cases while people want to live here, they wanted to wait until they could view the properties before committing to buy. Those who’ve visited already have lots of praise for the homes – they love the Arts & Crafts inspired architecture, high ceilings that emphasise the spacious layouts and superb specification interiors designed to meet the demands of modern living.”

The show homes are professionally styled and fully furnished examples of the four-bedroom Henley and five-bedroom Marlborough house types.

In the Henley, an open plan layout puts the combined kitchen, dining and family room, with adjoining utility very much at the heart of the home. This inviting, sociable space spans the entire width of the property and is complemented by a separate lounge for quieter relaxation. A convenient cloakroom completes the ground floor.

Upstairs, both the master and second bedroom have an en-suite, leaving the family bathroom to serve the remaining two bedrooms.

The five-bedroom Marlborough is the largest of the two show homes, offering 1,906 sq ft of well-planned living space.

Along with the open plan kitchen, dining and family room, plus utility and separate lounge, the Marlborough also features a study or snug.

“More and more people spend at least part of their working week not in the office, but at home. Recognising that setting up a temporary desk on the dining table is far from ideal, our larger homes such as the Marlborough include a home office where mum or dad can work away from the distractions of family life,” Pauline explained.

“Alternatively those who don’t have the option to work from home may want to use this space differently – perhaps as a toy room for young children or a TV lounge for teenagers.”

Upstairs, two of the five bedrooms in the Marlborough have an en-suite, helping to minimise the morning rush for the family bathroom.

Current prices at Church View start from £399,995, with a Henley available from £424,995 and a Marlborough from £444,995.

Nearby Priory Park offers a selection of three to five-bedroom designs, priced from £249,995.

Situated off a quiet country road, on the eastern edge of Stafford, just a few minutes’ journey from the town centre, the homes offer the perfect balance between town and country. The area is well-served by ‘good’ and ‘outstanding’ schools, making this a great choice for buyers with children or those hoping to start a family.

To experience the style and finish of a brand new Redrow home for yourself, visit Church View, where the show homes are open Thursday to Tuesday from 10am to 5.30pm. For more information, visit redrow.co.uk/church.

Output: The first show homes in Redrow's Church View development in Tixall Road, Stafford, have opened. A few minutes from the town centre, Church View offers a selection of four-bedroom Henley and five-bedroom Marlborough designs from the developer's Heritage Collection, which will initially be sold off plan.


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Race to adopt EVs depends on supply of rare materials
 Britain last week joined France in pledging to ban sales of petrol and diesel cars by 2040 in an attempt to cut toxic vehicle emissions. The move to battery-powered vehicles has been a long time coming. Environmental campaigners claim that charging cars and vans from the grid, like a laptop, is sure to be cleaner than petrol or diesel power. The government agrees and says it will invest more than £800m in driverless and clean technology, and a further £246m in battery technology research.

BMW plans to build a fully electric version of the Mini at Cowley in Oxford from 2019. Volvo announced earlier this month that from the same year, all its new models will have an electric motor.

Huge potential profits await those that can tap into this burgeoning market. Transparency Market Research estimated the global lithium-ion battery market at $30bn in 2015, rising to more than $75bn by 2024. Morgan Stanley analysts expect global car sales to rise by 50% by 2050 to more than 130m units a year, and estimates that electric vehicles will account for at least 47% of that total.

Lithium-ion batteries have long been used to power smartphones, laptops and other gadgets. Scaled-up versions are now being developed for electric vehicles. These batteries should last for at least 10 years, or 150,000 miles, until they need to be replaced.

However, the road to a promised land of zero-emission vehicles is littered with speed bumps and red lights that threaten to seriously slow the progress of the electric car. Battery makers are struggling to secure supplies of key ingredients in these large power packs – mainly cobalt and lithium. The hopes of both battery and vehicle manufacturers hang on the mining sector finding more deposits of these precious minerals.

Trent Mell of First Cobalt, a Toronto-based mining company, said: “Cobalt is tricky because of the scarcity of supply. There aren’t a lot of producers. We’re relying on more discoveries. It’s out there: we’ve just got to find it.”

The First Cobalt boss added that his company was currently confident of making discoveries in Idaho and Ontario. Investors see a chance of cashing in on the mineral’s key role: the price of shares in the Canadian firm has risen from C$0.06 to C$0.76 in the past year.

This is the mother of supply chain headaches, and one hi-tech car manufacturers and electronics firms could do without. At the heart of the global cobalt trade is Glencore. The metals and mining giant produces almost a third (28,300 tonnes) of the world’s annual supply. As much as 65% of this global supply comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where cobalt production has fallen this year because of the unstable political situation. This sparked a 90% jump in the price of cobalt to a peak of $61,000 a tonne earlier this month.

Inside the Katanga Mining copper and cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Photograph: Getty Images

Macquarie Research predicts that trouble in the DRC and rising demand for electric vehicles will lead to a four-year-long cobalt shortage. Writing in academic journal The Conversation, Ben McLellan, senior research fellow at Kyoto University, warned further: “Manufacturers such as electric vehicle makers should be concerned that the supply of one of the key mineral components, or the processing and refining infrastructure, could become too centralised in a single country. Without diverse source options, the possibility of supply restriction becomes more likely.”

The squeeze on cobalt has sent car giants such as Volkswagen scurrying to lock in supply deals with the likes of Glencore. First Cobalt’s Mell said: “I think there is going to be some jockeying for supply.”

Volkswagen, which had been slow to develop battery-powered vehicles, it is now pushing through an ambitious programme as it seeks to regain the trust of customers and investors after the diesel emissions scandal. The German manufacturer wants to launch more than 10 electrified models by the end of next year and is aiming at 30 battery-powered models by 2025. It plans to increase electric-car sales to a million a year by 2025, from tens of thousands at present.

Demand for other key battery ingredients, such as graphite and lithium carbonate, is also outstripping supply. The current shortage of lithium has seen prices double since 2015. Global lithium demand was 184,000 tonnes in 2015, with battery demand accounting for 40%. Analysts at Deutsche Bank expect demand to increase to 534,000 tonnes by 2025, with battery manufacturers accounting for 70%. Lithium deposits are found mostly in China and Bolivia.

Two South Korean battery makers – Samsung SDI and LG Chem – have responded to the crisis by stepping up development of new power packs that use more nickel and less cobalt.

Other battery pioneers are trialling alternative materials in an attempt to crack the booming energy storage market. In June, the US Naval Research Laboratory signed a commercial licensing agreement with California-based EnZinc. This firm was co-founded by Michael Burz, who worked previously on the design of the Tomahawk cruise missile as well as for Nissan.

The agreement gives EnZinc exclusive rights to a nickel-zinc battery for use in electric road vehicles, to hybrid cars that use that battery, and microgrids (small localised electric grids that can run independently) of up to 60 megawatts. Burz expects his zinc-based battery technology to be ready for market in about two years, with another year to gear up production.

Lithium-ion batteries can include other materials such as magnesium, cadmium, manganese and cobalt oxide. They also use a flammable electrolyte, which makes them more risky than lead-acid batteries. EnZinc’s solution is to incorporate less-volatile metals – zinc and nickel – in a battery with sponge-like silicon electrodes.

A key advantage of EnZinc’s plan is that zinc is in much more plentiful supply than cobalt and lithium. Deposits of the metal are found in China, Australia, Peru and the US among others. The US alone produces about 900,000 tonnes of zinc a year, much of it from the huge Red Dog Mine in Alaska, operated by Vancouver-based Teck Resources. It is thought around 600,000 tonnes of zinc would be required to make batteries for a million electric vehicles. One large international zinc company mines around 14m tonnes a year.

But while big corporations work on a green energy revolution, Amnesty International has shone a light on the dark side of this dream. The human rights group says children as young as seven continue to work in perilous conditions in mines in the DRC.

In 2014, according to Unicef, about 40,000 children were working in mines across southern DRC, many of them extracting cobalt. A report by Amnesty and Afrewatch (African Resources Watch) published in January said corporations such as Apple, Samsung, Sony, Microsoft, Daimler and Volkswagen were failing to do basic checks to ensure that they did not use cobalt mined by child labourers in their products.

Mark Dummett, business and human rights researcher at Amnesty International, said: “The glamorous shop displays and marketing of state-of-the-art technologies are a stark contrast to the children carrying bags of rocks, and miners in narrow manmade tunnels risking permanent lung damage.

“Millions of people enjoy the benefits of new technologies but rarely ask how they are made. It is high time the big brands took some responsibility for the mining of the raw materials that make their lucrative products.”

Output: Recent developments, such as Britain's decision to ban sales of diesel and petrol engines from 2040 and Volvo's announcement that all its new models will have an electric motor from 2019, mean the global lithium-ion battery market is set to expand exponentially. Transparency Market Research estimated that by 2024 it could be worth $75bn. Morgan Stanley predicted that global car sales could rise by 50% by 2050, of which EVs will account for 47%. However, a significant factor in continued growth is finding sufficient supplies of the rare metals, such as cobalt and lithium, that are an essential component of batteries.


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2017 biofuel costs will hit record highs: CVR Refining
 CVR Refining says 2017 biofuel costs will hit a record

NEW YORK (Reuters) — CVR Refining racked up its highest-ever bill to meet US biofuel standards during the second quarter, putting it on track to pay a record amount in 2017, the company said in an earnings call on Thursday.

The refiner, which is majority-held by billionaire investor Carl Icahn, said it paid $106 MM to meet the US biofuel regulations in the quarter, far surpassing its previous quarterly record of $65.5 MM in 2013, according to a Reuters analysis.

The company now expects to pay $200 MM to $250 MM in biofuels costs in 2017, up from its previous forecast of $170 MM. CVR held a record $205.9 MM in outstanding biofuel obligations in 2016, but it deferred most of those costs into this year in hopes that the cost of the credits at the heart of controversial program would fall.

The US Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency, requires biofuels, such as ethanol, to be blended into the nation’s gasoline and diesel. Fuel importers and refiners have the responsibility to blend the renewable fuels or purchase credits from others that have.

A Reuters review of securities filings earlier this year showed that CVR had accumulated a large short position in biofuels blending credits, called Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs). The short position meant the company would have been in a strong position to profit if RIN prices fell.

Renewable fuel credits have been hovering at 80 cents each in recent days, up significantly from this year's low of 34 cents hit in March.

CBR's short position helped yield a rare, though modest, profit in the first quarter as prices for the renewable fuel credits tumbled amid news that Icahn - by then an informal adviser for President Donald Trump - pushed for market-moving changes to the controversial program.

Icahn's actions have drawn the ire of several Democratic senators, who called on US regulators to examine whether he was benefiting from his informal role with the White House.

Jack Lipinski, the chief executive of CVR, has been among the most hardened critics of the US biofuel policy, calling it "stupid" and prone to market manipulation that benefits traders and big oil companies at the expense of smaller refiners.

Lipinski was asked in Thursday's call to provide some more details on the company current credit short position. He declined, saying he would answer that question "when Chevron, Exxon and when the traders that are manipulating the RINs market open up their books and say what they're doing."

Reporting by Jarrett Renshaw and Chris Prentice; Editing by Leslie Adler

Related News

From the Archive

Output: CVR Refining has said that it expects to pay a record amount to meet US biofuel standards in 2017. The company forecasts costs of an estimated $200-250m, up from the company's previous prediction of $170m. The Environmental Protection Agency oversees the US Renewable Fuel Standard, and mandates that biofuels be blended into the US' petrol and diesel fuel. The responsibility of blending lies with importers and refiners.


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UK ad viewability rises to 51%, the highest level for over a year
 Joshi: "The UK is still well behind other markets and the industry has much work to do"

Ad viewability levels in the UK rose for the first time in nine months to the highest level seen for over a year, according to the latest quarterly benchmark report from ad verification company Meetrics.

In the second quarter of 2017, the proportion of banner ads served that met minimum viewability guidelines rose from 47 per cent to 51 per cent – the first rise since Q3 2016 – and the highest level since Q1 2016, when the figure stood at 54 per cent. Despite the rise, however, the UK still lags far behind Austria (69 per cent), France (58 per cent) and Germany (57 per cent).

“It’s certainly a step in the right direction and shows ad viewability initiatives, such as from JICWEBS and the like, are starting to impact the market,” said Anant Joshi, Meetrics’ commercial director for UK & Ireland. “However, the UK is still well behind other markets and the industry has much work to do. We can’t celebrate the fact that we’re back to almost half of banner ad budgets being wasted on ads that don’t have the chance to be seen.”

For the first time, Meetrics has revealed the different viewability levels between ads purchased directly versus ads purchased programmatically across Europe. Joshi says: “Not surprisingly, direct ads have a better viewability level (59 per cent) than programmatic (52 per cent). Direct ads may be more expensive but in the end, their viewability rates are higher and are more likely to be in a brand-safe environment.”

Meetrics has also published an international viewability figure for video ads. This shows that 69 per cent of video ads meet the IAB and Media Ratings Council’s recommendation that 50 per cent of the video ad is in view for at least two seconds. For banner ads, its 50 per cent for at least one second. The average time a video ad is in view, or has the opportunity to be seen, is 23.4 seconds, compared to 25.5 seconds for banner ads.

“As video ad spend continues to rise, it’s extremely encouraging to see such a good initial viewability rate for video,” said Joshi. “This is partly because viewers tend to be more engaged with video due to its greater screen size and being less surrounded by other ads.”

Don’t forget to enter the Effective Mobile Marketing Awards. More details here.

Output: Ad viewability rates in the UK have risen for the first time in nine months to reach the highest level for more than a year, according to ad verification firm Meetrics. The number of banner ads meeting the minimum guidelines for viewability rose from 47% to 51% in Q2, the highest since Q1 2016. However, the UK is behind Austria, France and Germany, on 69%, 58% and 57% viewability respectively. Anant Joshi, Meetrics’ commercial director for the UK and Ireland, said: “We can’t celebrate that we’re back to almost half of banner ad budgets being wasted on ads that don’t have the chance to be seen.”


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Amazon pledges to become 'ad platform leader'
 The prospect of Amazon emerging as the main rival to Google and Facebook’s duopoly over digital media seems increasingly plausible, now that some of the world’s biggest brands are starting to consider it for their budgets.

Interest has built since the turn of the year, with RBS Group chief marketing officer David Wheldon and WPP boss Martin Sorrell almost willing the online retailer to break Google and Facebook’s stranglehold on online media by speculating that its advertising business could make the market more competitive. Amazon has stoked that enthusiasm, pledging to become an “ad platform leader” for advertisers that’s capable of “best-in-class service” and “strategic consultation,” according to several marketing and agency executives who have heard its pitch.

What was once a search and programmatic proposition now includes Amazon’s Echo personal assistant and its Prime Video service, said Sam Fenton-Elstone, VCCP’s chief digital officer. Conversations between the agency and Amazon’s sales teams are much bigger than they were 12 months ago, when the focus was on trying to shift money from Google through programmatic and search, he said.

And yet, search budgets are where the most immediate aftershocks of Amazon’s sales pitches are being felt. VCCP has seen advertisers switch paid search dollars from Google to the online retailer over the past nine months, which “have delivered strong ROI.” Furthermore, GroupM, which handles budgets for NBCUniversal and Unilever, said clients are spending 10 to 15 times more on paid Amazon search ads each month in 2017 than a year ago, Bloomberg reported.

But the migration of search budgets is still just a trickle in the grand scheme of things. Amazon doesn’t break out ad sales, but researcher eMarketer predicts they will rise by a third to $1.5 billion this year and top $2.4 billion by 2019. Google, by contrast, posted more than $79 billion in ad revenue in 2016, while Facebook reported $27 billion.

Courting advertisers

There’s a sense among brands and agencies alike that Amazon is set to go all-in on advertising. Its retail business can only grow so much. And advertising brings with it the possibility of 20-30 percent profit margins versus around 5 percent for retail goods, according to financial analyst Steven Mallas.

Amazon, for its part, has courted high-level marketers at the world’s biggest brands. Senior marketers from Unilever met with the online behemoth last year to get a grip on the advertiser’s concerns. This resulted in Amazon letting the packaged-goods maker use Moat to verify the display and video ads it bought on the site during the last quarter of 2016 were 100 percent in-view.

The trial was part of a wider beta test Amazon ran in the U.K. with other advertisers. The trial now looks almost prophetic, given just months later, viewability would be at the heart of an industrywide debate leading Google and Facebook to let brands independently verify their ad metrics. Unlike those rivals, though, Amazon let advertisers pick third-party vendors to measure and optimize their campaign. A current list of approved vendors is here.

With advertising shifting to safer platforms, Amazon is well-positioned because it can offer advertisers an environment devoid of content that brands would deem risky. The issue, however, will be what happens to ads Amazon buys from the open exchange, outside of its walled garden. That’s still risky, said one agency source, which has bought ads on Amazon on behalf of clients for several years. “When Amazon run ads on your behalf on their site, they do a really good job, but when those ads appear off the site, it should be treated with as much suspicion like you would with any other ad network.”

The threat to publishers

James Bourner, svp of global head of display at Jellyfish, expanded on that point, wondering if Amazon’s push into off-site advertising will take ad share from publishers. “Will Amazon reignite the arbitrage model in a massive way? I would have zero doubt that they would be amazing at putting their computing and data might to work at being able to buy impressions through their bidder at the cheapest possible price. Is the real threat to traditional publishers?”

In a mark of its faith in Amazon, spirits and beer producer Diageo has included the online retailer’s inventory in what it calls its “trusted marketplace.” Like other big advertisers, the Smirnoff owner has pushed media owners to introduce independent verification. As part of that, it’s briefed Amazon and several other partners on nine requirements it wants from them in exchange for its media budget.

To really grow its ad revenue, Amazon will need to move from lower-funnel media buys toward the upper end, where the larger brand budgets are, said Fenton-Elstone. With search and display opportunities on Amazon’s site and app, which also provides cross-device matching, Amazon’s sweet spot is in the mid- to lower-funnel, though, said Bourner. However, the retailer’s past purchase data is a strong proxy for shoppers’ interests and, to a certain degree, income, which can be useful to brand advertisers, he said.

The data factor

Regardless, data will be Amazon’s trump card if it presses forward into advertising, particularly after it revealed last year that 55 percent of online shoppers in the U.S. start their product searches on the site. Facebook knows who people are and what they are interested in, and Google knows what people are actively looking for. But only Amazon has data on what people buy.

It means advertisers prioritizing ROI on online purchases should be able to get better performance from Amazon’s range of media offerings than from Facebook and Google, although in practice, results from campaigns bought from the retailer have been mixed, said Gareth Owen, the managing director of Roast, an agency that has internal specialists for the different parts of Amazon’s ad products. He added that more feedback from Amazon’s account teams would help.

Other things holding Amazon back from growing its ad business are the complexity of its display and paid search inventory as well as issues with account management and its slow response time, Owen said.

“If there was more proactivity here, Amazon would be growing this area more quickly,” he said.

Amazon’s recruitment drive for digital and programmatic specialists would suggest it’s wise to Owen’s observation. The number of salespeople joining the company’s advertising and Amazon Web Services units is growing at a rate faster than the 42 percent average across the entire company, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said on the company’s earnings call on July 27. And the Amazon Media Group in the U.K. has several senior advertising openings posted.

Output: Amazon’s bid to be a rival ad platform provider alongside Google and Facebook is looking more likely, thanks to support from leading brands such as RBS, Unilever and NBC Universal. Amazon is offering an ad platform with strategic consultation and will include its Echo AI assistant and its Prime Video service alongside its search and programmatic features. Research firm eMarketer has predicted its ad sales will rise by about a third to reach $1.5bn this year, increasing to at least $2.4bn by 2019. The amount pales in comparison to Google’s 2016 revenue of $79bn and Facebook’s revenue of $27bn.


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Adblocking software pushing advertisers to be more intrusive
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Just as summer’s sear leads to winter’s freeze, the unchecked growth of ad blockers (30 percent increase last year) will lead to a comeback in banner ads.

The reason comes down to why most people install ad blockers in the first place. It’s not for ideology — an obsession with privacy or an anti-capitalist bent — it’s a cost-benefit calculation. The price of an ad blocker is a free, two-minute download, and the benefit is less friction while browsing the web. Good deal!

Recent trends will change those economics and for some, it’s already happened.

“I am Spartacus!”

The poster-child for bad behavior in digital advertising is the pop-up message. You’re reading an article and, jerkily, your screen changes into something else. You’ve lost your place and your patience.

You installed your ad blocker to stave off interruptions like these, but now ad blockers are the surest way of attracting them. That’s because publishers will tug ceaselessly at your pant legs bawling, “please won’t you whitelist us in your ad blocker!” And these messages will only grow in number and fervor for two reasons.

First, mobile traffic is cannibalizing desktop traffic and mobile traffic is hard to monetize. That increases the value of desktop traffic and makes media companies desperate to save every desktop ad view. People with ad blockers are a low-hanging fruit target.

Second, anti-ad blocking messages are no longer taboo. Everyone from The Atlantic to Gawker runs them. In the early days, publishers were wary of looking draconian, but being the 45th person to yell “I am Spartacus!” calls much less attention to yourself than going first. And anti-ad blocking messages still look benign alongside the paywalls we’re seeing more of.

Can’t ad blockers retaliate?

Ad blocking has been likened to a cat-and-mouse game, where every move from a publisher provokes a counter move from the ad blocking software. Maybe this was the case back when publishers were less motivated and the ecosystem less sophisticated, but today it’s a fight between a cat and a swarm of bees.

It takes less than two hours for a programmer to code and deploy an anti-ad blocking message written from scratch. There are also plug-and-play options for smaller blogs and websites, like one recently from CloudFlare.

AdBlock Plus can go toe-to-toe with a single mega-platform like Facebook, but it doesn’t have the resources to counter the code changes of thousands of smaller, motivated publishers, each with their own techniques and layouts. [Update: And as Johnny Ryan points out, AdBlock ultimately lost the battle with Facebook.]

Ad blockers face another handicap: If they’re too aggressive they could block legitimate content, mess up a site’s design, or provoke much worse publisher retaliation, like speed throttling.

As if keeping up with buzzing publishers wasn’t bad enough, ad blockers will soon face a dragon.

Google’s fire-breathing browser

When Google announced it would build ad blocking into Chrome, some took the news as a final death knell for banner ads. Closer inspection shows Google’s target lay elsewhere.

The Chrome ad blocker is a diet ad blocker that targets malware and auto-playing video but leaves normal banner ads intact. That’s good enough for most people and won’t trigger pop-up messages or retaliation from publishers. It’s also what ad blocking should have been in the first place: a compromise, not a mandate.

Ad blocking companies naively imagine a world in which their software will do-si-do with Chrome’s new competitor. Even if we give them that fantasy, they’re missing the second part of Chrome’s adblock tool: site contributions.

Chrome will offer publishers yet another means to launch “please whitelist us!” pop-ups, but this time those pop-ups will be backed by the browser, meaning no extension could remove them even if it wanted to. This tool’s simple existence will go a long way toward legitimizing pop-ups among the hold-outs and making the web an even more hostile place for ad-blockers, subverting their economics.

And when your ad-blocking software causes more and more pop-up messages to appear on your screen, you’ll do what you do whenever a piece of software on your computer gets cumbersome: You’ll click “remove.”

Adam Ghahramani is an independent product and marketing producer based in New York and a frequent contributor to VentureBeat.

Output: Adblocking's dramatic increase in usage, up 30% from last year alone, is causing advertisers to be more intrusive in their campaigns. Pop-up ads are likely to increase as advertisers struggle to retain profitable desktop ad viewership. Additonally, asking for exemption from adblockers is now seen as common rather than an exception, and is more palatable to viewers than ads themselves.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Insurance brokers neglecting customers, ignoring social media
 According to a survey from Ecclesiastical brokers have only just started using social media to do business.

Over a third of smaller brokers only speak to their clients once at renewal time, Ecclesiastical revealed in a poll.

The survey polled 250 brokers to see how, when and why they interact with clients.

It also found that over half only contacted their clients once or twice a year.

“What became clear is that in some cases, brokers are not in regular contact with their customers,” said the insurer.

Additionally, the vast majority, a total of 94% of the brokers polled, contact clients with renewal

Output: Survey results from brokers Ecclesiastical have suggested that brokers are new to using social media as a way of carrying out business. A total of 250 brokers were polled and the results showed that over half contact clients only once or twice annually, with 94% contacting clients to issue renewal reminders and 29% regarding an upsell or different products. Just 22% of brokers have used LinkedIn in the past year and 21% have used Twitter.


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Business Insider targets mobile viewers across platforms
 Business Insider is gaining an audience on YouTube by using the same short social videos that have helped the publisher achieve more than 2.5 billion views across Facebook.

Business Insider’s three YouTube channels — Business Insider, Tech Insider and Insider — generated 139 million YouTube video views in June, up from 11 million video views in June 2016, according to Tubular Labs. The growth was organic, too, as Business Insider did not pay for subscriber acquisition or views, said Nicholas Carlson, editor-in-chief of Insider, BI’s distributed-media brand.

Business Insider’s YouTube growth is also not the result of a new content strategy involving the creation of original vlogs, hosted series, animated explainers and other formats known to perform well on YouTube. Instead, Business Insider is putting the same videos on Facebook and YouTube.

“A lot of people look at Insider and think, ‘Oh, you’re good at doing Facebook videos because you’ve clearly gamed Facebook,’” said Carlson. “No, what we’re doing is building a type of video that people love to watch on their phones, and that happen to be available on whatever platform they’re using to watch video.”

Take a recent 90-second clip of horror-themed cakes. The video was published to both the main Insider Facebook page, where it has had more than 4.3 million views, and YouTube, where it has gotten more than 118,000 views.

Syndicating and repackaging videos across Facebook and YouTube goes against the grain of what digital publishers have said in the past about what works and doesn’t work on both platforms. Carlson argues that Facebook’s role in making video ubiquitous within the News Feed has conditioned users to expect that kind of video on other platforms, too.

“Common sense would say that to create an ideal viewing experience, content would need to be optimized to the platform. But who knows? In a couple of years, Snapchat made vertical video a thing consumers completely expect and prefer,” said Amanda Parker, associate media director at ad agency GSD&M. “Maybe the proliferation of the sound-off video has changed enough consumers’ expectations to make that their default on any platform.”

Other media companies are paying closer attention to YouTube. Vox.com has seen similar growth on YouTube. The Atlantic, meanwhile, recently switched to a YouTube-first strategy, even using the YouTube video player on its own site — something Business Insider is also doing across its verticals.

The renewed attention on YouTube coincides with publishers spending more time thinking about producing longer videos and measuring success by time-spent metrics, which itself was precipitated by Facebook prioritizing longer videos and watch time within its algorithm.

Business Insider is not ignoring these areas. The publisher has done long-form documentaries in the past. More recently, Insider set up a content team called Insider Shows to create longer videos across platforms, Carlson said.

As for the attention Business Insider is placing on YouTube, it’s not because YouTube has a consistent ad system where publishers can make money from pre-rolls, Carlson said. Business Insider does get to sell its own YouTube video inventory, though.

“We’re not having difficulty monetizing Facebook,” Carlson said. “The idea that YouTube is better at monetization than Facebook, I disagree with, because we’re making Facebook work with a sales team that works directly with clients and as a partner on Facebook’s ad breaks. YouTube is attractive on its own merits, not in comparison to Facebook.”

Photo via Insider

Output: American news website Business Insider is going against the trend and reaping the rewards of publishing the same videos on Facebook and Google-owned rival YouTube. In June 2017, the company's three YouTube channels, Business Insider, Tech Insider and Insider, generated 139 million views, compared to 11 million the previous year. "We're building a type of video that people love to watch on their phones, and that happens to be available on whatever platform they’re using", said Nicholas Carlson, editor-in-chief of Insider.


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Encrypted messenger apps spreading 'fake news' in India
 When India threatened to put people responsible for fake news behind bars, it didn't exactly know how it'd do that.

The Indian Minister for Electronics and Information Technology admitted that the country is "helpless." It's unable to access "objectionable" content because of encryption , according to The Economic Times.

WhatsApp 's encryption is the only obstruction to the government's ability to act on reported content, added the minister. The government would otherwise be able to use laws that are already in place to punish people for spreading fake news.

"Instances of objectionable videos being uploaded through mobile phones and shared through WhatsApp have been noticed," he said. "According to WhatsApp, the messages are end-to-end encrypted and they and any third-party cannot read them. In other words, the messages are only seen by the sender and the receiver."

"WhatsApp provides a feature to report any objectionable content. However, they also admit that since they do not have the contents of the messages available with them, it limits their ability to take action," he added. "A user can take [a] screenshot of the content and share it with appropriate law enforcement authorities."

India is not the only country expressing frustration with encryption. Countries such as Australia and the UK have cited security concerns when calling for tech companies, especially Facebook 's WhatsApp, to give authorities access to content when required. Messaging app Telegram has been admonished for creating a safe haven for terrorists to plot attacks in countries such as Indonesia and Russia.

While no backdoors to encrypted content have been created, companies are responsive to governments' repeated calls for action to fight terrorism. Facebook, for instance, is part of a joint forum created with other tech giants such as Google's YouTube and Twitter to combat extremism.

Despite what the minister said, India isn't entirely helpless in its move to rid undesirable content from WhatsApp. One WhatsApp group administrator was arrested in the country in May for sharing an edited image of India's prime minister so it looked "ugly and obscene." The arrest was made just two weeks after an Indian magistrate announced new rules forbidding WhatsApp users to spread fake news on the app, saying it will hold WhatsApp group administrators accountable for the spread of any such content.

Logging Out: Welcome to the crossroads of online life and the afterlife.

Virtual reality 101: CNET tells you everything you need to know about VR .

Output: India has become the latest country to grow frustrated at the end-to-end encryption on Facebook-owned tool WhatsApp, claiming it cannot access "objectionable" content and punish those sending it. Australia and the UK have made the same complaint, while Facebook, Google and Twitter have formed a joint forum to combat extremism on their platforms. In May, a WhatsApp group administrator was arrested in India for manipulating the image of the country's prime minister, Narendra Modi.


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Research shows Facebook can target political views
 Social media can influence how you vote Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto/Getty

Could Facebook really tip the balance in an election? Over the past year firms like AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica have been credited with using AI-targeted ads on social media to help swing the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election respectively. But a lack of evidence meant we have never known whether the technology exists to make this possible.

Now the first study detailing the process from start to finish is finally shedding some light. “This is the first time that I’ve seen all the dots connected,” says Joanna Bryson, an artificial intelligence researcher at the University of Bath, UK.

At the heart of the debate is psychographic targeting – the directing of political campaigns at people via social media based on their personality and political interests, with the aid of vast amount of data filtered by artificial intelligence.

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Though Facebook doesn’t explicitly provide the tools to target people based on political opinions, the new study shows how the platform can be exploited. Using combinations of people’s interests, demographics, and survey data it’s possible to direct campaigns at individuals based on their agreement with ideas and policies. This could have a big impact on the success of campaigns.

“The weaponised, artificially intelligent propaganda machine is effective. You don’t need to move people’s political dials by much to influence an election, just a couple of percentage points to the left or right,” says Chris Sumner at the Online Privacy Foundation, who is presenting the work this week at DEF CON in Las Vegas.

Checks and balances

No one yet knows how much this can permanently change people’s views. But Sumner’s study clearly reveals a form of political campaigning with no checks and balances.

To get to grips with the complex issue of psychographic targeting online, Sumner and his colleagues created four experiments.

In the first, they looked at what divides people. High up on the list was the statement: “with regards to internet privacy: if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear”. During the Brexit referendum they surveyed more than 5000 people and found that Leave voters were significantly more likely to agree with the statement, and Remain voters more likely to disagree.

Next, by administering various personality tests to a different group they found traits that correlate with how likely you are to agree with that statement on internet privacy. This was converted into an “authoritarianism” score: if you scored high you were more likely to agree with the statement. Then, using a tool called PreferenceTool, built by researchers at the University of Cambridge, they were able to reverse engineer what sort of Facebook interests and demographics people with those personalities were most likely to have.

Just 38 per cent of a random selection of people on Facebook agreed with the privacy statement but this shot up to 61 per cent when the tool was used to target people deemed more likely to agree, and down to 25 per cent for those who they deemed more likely to disagree. In other words, they were able to demonstrate that it is possible to target people on Facebook based on a political opinion.

Ad campaigns

Finally, the team created four different Facebook ad campaigns tailored to the personalities they had identified, using both pro and anti-surveillance messages. For example, the anti-surveillance ad aimed at people with high levels of authoritarianism read: “They fought for your freedom. Don’t give it away! Say no to mass surveillance,” with a backdrop of the D-day landings. In contrast, the version for people with low levels of authoritarianism said: “Do you really have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide? Say no to state surveillance,” alongside an image of Anne Frank.

Overall they found that the tailored ads resonated best with the target groups. For example, the pro-surveillance, high-authoritarianism advert had 20 times as many likes and shares from the high-authoritarianism group versus the low one.

Though the picture is becoming clearer, we should be careful not to equate a short-term decision to share or like a post, with long-term political views, says Andreas Jungherr at the University of Konstanz, Germany. “Social media is impacting political opinions. But the hype makes it hard to tell exactly how much,” he says.

However, maybe changing political opinions doesn’t have to be the end game. Perhaps the goal is simply to dissuade or encourage people from voting. “We know it’s really easy to convince people not to go to the polls,” says Bryson. “Prime at the right time and you can have a big effect. It’s not necessarily about changing opinions.”

Facebook allows targeted advertising so long as a company’s use of external data adheres to the law.

Greater transparency is the aim for the future. The Information Commissioner in the UK, Elizabeth Denham, is midway through an investigation into the use of targeted advertising by political campaigns and is due to publish her findings later this year. The Green Party in Germany has started making all of its social media adverts available online for anyone to see. This may encourage others to follow.

But a better approach might be to create new institutions to audit the algorithms used for political targeting. “It’s absolutely fundamental to democracy that there is more transparency,” says Bryson.

Output: Researchers at the University of Bath have discovered how Facebook can be exploited by political campaigns using psychographic targeting. In a study presented at DEF CON, the team created four experiments to find out what divides social media users, used personality tests in a different group to find correlating traits, and created a series of Facebook ads aimed at the personalities identified. The results revealed the tailored ads worked best with the target groups, but the team warned that while social media was clearly influencing public opinion, it was impossible to gauge how much.


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US voting machines put to test by hackers
 They were among the hundreds of cybersecurity experts who descended on “Voting Village,” one of the most talked-about features of the annual DEF CON hacker conference. In a cramped conference room, they took turns over three days cracking into 10 examples of voting machines and voter registration systems — a reminder, they say, of the risks awaiting upcoming U.S. elections.

“I could have done this in 2004,” said Schurman, who could gain administrative-level access to the voting machine, giving him the power to see all the votes cast on the device and to manipulate or delete vote totals. “Or 2008, or 2012.”

In the wild, he estimated, it would take him about a minute to break in.

Anne-Marie Hwang, an intern at the digital security firm Synack, demonstrated that by bringing a generic plastic key to mimic the ones given to poll workers and plugging in a keyboard, she could simply hit control-alt-delete and enter the voting machine’s generic password to gain administrative access.

The lesson: “The bad guys can get in,” said Jake Braun, a panel moderator at the conference who advised the Department of Homeland Security on cybersecurity during the Obama administration.

And that means election officials must acknowledge that no security is foolproof. Instead, Braun said, they need to adopt the private sector model of working to better detect and minimize the effect of successful cyberattacks rather than trying to become impenetrable.

“‘Unhackable’ is absurd on its face,” Braun said. “If the Russians and Chinese and whoever else can get into NSA and Lockheed Martin and JP Morgan, they absolutely can get into Kalamazoo County or the state of Ohio or the [voting machine] vendor.”

Already, the country has seen Moscow-backed hackers attack the 2016 U.S. election in what intelligence officials said was a widespread digital meddling campaign orchestrated by Russian President Vladimir Putin. According to U.S. officials, the Kremlin’s digital spies targeted at least 21 state voter registration systems and successfully infiltrated at least two, Arizona and Illinois. On Election Day, the White House staff was so worried about Russian hackers tampering with the actual voting process that it drew up a 15-page contingency plan that included potentially deploying the military and National Guard.

But Nov. 8 came and went with no indication that any votes were altered, a point U.S. officials stress regularly. Voting security experts caution, though, that the country doesn’t have the mechanisms in place to make such a definitive conclusion.

“One thing that’s been very unfortunate in the way a lot of election officials have talked about the breaches is saying the phrase we have no evidence that X, Y, or Z happened,” Braun added. “However, the real answer is they have no idea what happened, or [way] of knowing. I’m not suggesting votes were switched or voters were deleted from voter files, but the point is the security is so lax and so bad that they have no way of going back and doing the forensics and saying one way or the other.”

Federal and state officials argue that it would be extremely unlikely for hackers to manipulate vote tallies. Voting machines are not connected to the internet and many states collect voter registration information at the county level, providing a backup to confirm the veracity of the statewide database. Basically, the system is decentralized and lacks key internet links, they say.

Before the 2016 election, former FBI Director James Comey assuaged fears by telling Congress that the system was so “clunky” — comprised of a mishmash of different kinds of machines and networks, with each state’s results managed by a consortium of state and county officials — that its overall integrity was fairly safe.

Election security advocates aren’t as confident. Barbara Simons, Board Chair of Verified Voting, a nonprofit that since 2003 has studied U.S. elections equipment, said that the vulnerabilities on display in Las Vegas only served to reiterate a need for the country to adopt a nationwide system of verifiable paper ballots and mandatory, statistically significant audits.

While numerous states have starting moving in this direction, Simons worries it’s not enough.

“Nobody’s done a really thorough examination,” Simons said. “Even where there are paper ballots, most ballots haven’t been checked to see if there was any hacking or intrusion, so even if security people didn’t see any outside hacking occurring on Election Day, things could have been attacked earlier.”

Verified Voting, Simons said, plans to partner with Braun and several other groups that have not yet been named to aggressively campaign for increasing DHS grants that would pay for states to make specific upgrades to their election security systems.

“It’s actually pretty cheap to do it,” Braun said, putting the price tag at $500-600 million.

A significantly more secure election, while relatively difficult to implement, doesn’t need to be complicated, Simons said.

“We know how to protect ourselves against Russian hacking,” she said. “Paper ballots and post-election ballot audits before the results are certified. That’s what we need across the country. It’s a straightforward solution.”

Output: Hackers have demonstrated the many vulnerabilities in electronic voting systems used across the US during the Voting Village event, part of the recent DEF CON Conference. While supporters say the decentralised system, which lacks internet links, is secure because of its "clunky" nature, cyber security experts have called for the US government to emulate the private sector, and focus on detection and minimising damage. "Paper ballots and post-election ballot audits before the results are certified, that’s what we need across the country. It’s a straightforward solution", said Barbara Simons, board chair of Verified Voting.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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UK SMEs continue to neglect cybersecurity: Zurich
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Small and medium-sized businesses are not earmarking significant amounts of cash to bolster their cyber-security defences, despite almost one-sixth of all companies suffering an attack within the last year.

According to data compiled by insurance company Zurich, 875,000 SMEs across the UK have been affected by a cyber-attack over the last 12 months, with firms in London worst affected.

Of the companies hit, just over a fifth reported that it cost them more than £10,000 and one in 10 said that it had cost them more than £50,000.

Recommended Girls Scouts launches new badges in robotics and cyber security

But despite those potential losses, a survey of over 1,000 UK SMEs also showed almost half – or 49 per cent – admitted that they plan to spend £1,000 or less on their cyber defences in the next 12 months, while 22 per cent said that they don’t know how much they will spend.

That’s despite 25 per cent of medium-sized businesses saying that they had been directly asked by a current or prospective customer about what cyber security measures they have in place.

“The results suggest that SMEs are not yet heeding the warnings provided by large attacks on global businesses,” said Paul Tombs, head of SME proposition at Zurich.

“While the rate of attacks on SMEs is troubling, it also shows that there is an opportunity for businesses with the correct safeguards and procedures in place to leverage this as a strength and gain an advantage.”

In April, a study commissioned by cyber security firm CGI and conducted by Oxford Economics found that public companies’ share prices fall by an average of 1.8 per cent on a permanent basis following a severe cyber-breach, where large amounts of sensitive information are lost.

A report by Lloyds of London earlier in July argued that a major, global cyber attack – akin to the Wannacry attack that took down the NHS in May – could trigger an average of £41bn of economic losses, a figure on par with a catastrophic natural disaster such as US superstorm Sandy in 2012.

“While recent cyber-attacks have highlighted the importance of cyber security for some of the world’s biggest companies, it’s important to remember that small and medium sized businesses need to protect themselves too,” Mr Tombs said.

The research was conducted by YouGov on behalf of Zurich.

Output: Almost 900,000 small and medium-sized businesses across the UK have been affected by a cyber attack in the past 12 months, but fewer than half plan to spend more than £1,000 ($1,300) on cybersecurity, according to a survey by insurance company Zurich. The revelations come despite more than 20% of firms admitting cyber attacks had set them back £10,000, while 10% lost more than £50,000. Share prices permanently lose 1.8% after a cyber attack, according to a study commissioned by cybersecurity firm CGI.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

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Facebook terminates bots after AI creates its own language
 These Ultra-Microscopic Sculptures Fit Inside the Eye of a Needle—Here’s How the Artist Paints Them

Output: Facebook has closed down one of its artificial intelligence (AI) programmes after the bots taking part stopped using English and developed their own language. The social media giant played down the issue, AI researcher Dhruv Batra explained that: "agents will drift off from understandable language and invent code-words for themselves". Rivals Google, and OpenAILab, run by Elon Musk, have both experienced similar issues with AIs. Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have publicly aired their personal opinions of the other's take on AI and its monitoring, with Musk warning of the potential dangers posed by the sector and Zuckerberg calling Musk's comments "irresponsible".


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Amazon's media service revenue hit $945m in Q2
 Amazon's hopes of building an online advertising business to rival that of Facebook and Google is at the core of its recruitment drive at present. The company’s finance chief told investors that its 42% year-on-year increase in headcount was driven primarily by it acquiring software engineering talent and building teams to promote its emerging media services offering.

Additionally, Amazon is also pre-empting the closure of its proposed $13bn purchase of Whole Foods by experimenting with a number of e-commerce solutions as well as bricks and mortar outlets, as well as staffing up to bolster its emergent advertising business, according to leadership.

Amazon's Q2 earnings

The e-commerce giant yesterday (July 27) posted a 25% annual increase in sales revenue which hit $38bn during the three months to June 30, although a spike in the company’s operating costs saw its level of profitability plunge.

Despite the impressive increase in revenue, Amazon’s stock prices actually fell in the early hours after trading due to the company missing analyst expectations – incidentally this decrease in stock price meant that Amazon chief Jeff Bezos was ‘the richest man in the world’ for only a matter of hours.

While retail sales make up the vast bulk of Amazon’s revenues are generated via retail sales (both e-commerce and increasingly in its bricks and mortar stores) the company did breakout its earnings by sub category.

Chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky run-rate of its online cloud computing service Amazon Web Services (AWS) was $16bn during the second quarter, compared to $14bn in the previous one, with the increase in revenue representing the largest sequential increase in its earnings since its launch in 2006.

Nascent media business

Meanwhile, the company’s emerging media services business (which includes Amazon A9, plus Amazon Advertising Platform, or AAP, etc) are categorized as a “other”, with revenues in this category hitting $945m during the quarter, compared to $626m 12 months earlier, according to the filing.

Answering questions on its operating expenses Amazon’s Olsavsky pointed out that a notable cause of its cost increase was a significant increase in the company’s headcount, as well as its B2B marketing efforts.

The growth rate of its headcount (now north of 382,000) was 42% year-over-year, and while this has historically been driven by hires in its operations staff, but as it continues to diversify its revenue streams, this is changing, according to Olsavsky.

“Right now what we’re seeing is an accelerated growth rate in software engineers and also sales teams to support, primarily in the US and advertising, the growth rate of those two categories exceeded the company growth rate of the company,” he told analysts.

“So we are having success at hiring a lot of people and pointing them at some very important programs,” Olsavsky added, while also pointing out that marketing spend to promote AWS and its advertising offerings had “probably larger than normal impacts on Q2 operating margin.”

During the call with finance analysts, Olsavsky pointed out that while its proposed Whole Foods purchase was not included in this guidance, it is preparing for this eventuality.

“On the place of Amazon Fresh – and we include Prime Now and some of our other efforts – we believe there will be no one solution, so we’re experimenting with a number of formats from physical pickup points with Amazon Go, to online ordering and delivery to your door through Prime Now and Amazon Fresh,” he said.

“We’ll see how customers respond, we’ll see how customers respond we’ve liked the response so far,” he said. “Amazon Go is not out of beta, but the other ones are. On top of that we’re looking forward to adding the Whole Foods team and their great reputation for quality customer service to this offering.”

Amazon's ad business to generate $1bn in 2017

Industry observers have noted with interest how Amazon has spent the last 18 months stepping up the promotion of its advertising services, with eMarketer forecasting that Amazon’s advertising offering, which offers brands the ability to promote their wares on its own website plus third parties based on vast swathe of first party data are poised to generate $1bn in revenue in 2017.

This increase has prompted WPP chief Sir Martin Sorrell to label Amazon as “the sleeping giant” of online media, with a 2017 study of advertisers and agencies revealing that its demand-side platform (which lets advertisers bid on ad inventory based on Amazon data) surpassing Google’s offering DoubleClick as the most used DSP on the market.

That’s according to research firm Advertiser Perceptions, which surveyed 800 media buyers to gauge their reaction to the offering, with the results indicating that the buy-side of the industry was eager for the option of an alternative to DoubleClick's DBM.

Addressing analysts on the call, Olsavsky explained that although its online advertising tools were self-service platforms (ie where the media buyers users software of ‘a dashboard’ to automate their media buyers) Amazon still wanted staff to explain the tools.

“So, we built self-service tools and obviously we want to make those as efficient as possible for customers and advertisers, but we realize that we will need actual sales contact with the accounts as well. So it's a mix. I can't get into the split, really, but I would see both growing,” he concluded.

SaveSave

Output: Revenues for Amazon A9 and Amazon Advertising Platform hit $945m during Q2 2017, compared to $626m the previous year, according to an earnings call. The retail giant also posted sales revenue figures of $38bn, a 25% annual increase, and a 42% rise in headcount since 2016. Despite this, shares in Amazon fell as the figures revealed the firm fell short of analyst expectations. Amazon has been on a push to extend its advertising capability, with the expanded workforce mostly directed at the emerging media services offering.


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Global warming linked to 60,000 farming suicides in India
 Climate change may have contributed to the suicides of nearly 60,000 Indian farmers and farm workers over the past three decades, according to new research that examines the toll rising temperatures are already taking on vulnerable societies.

Illustrating the extreme sensitivity of the Indian agricultural industry to spikes in temperature, the study from the University of California, Berkeley, found an increase of just 1C on an average day during the growing season was associated with 67 more suicides.

An increase of 5C on any one day was associated with an additional 335 deaths, the study published in the journal PNAS on Monday found. In total, it estimates that 59,300 agricultural sector suicides over the past 30 years could be attributed to warming.

Temperature increases outside the growing season showed no significant impact on suicide rates, suggesting stress on the agriculture industry was the source of the increase in suicides.

Also supporting the theory was that rainfall increases of as little as 1cm each year were associated with an average 7% drop in the suicide rate. So beneficial was the strong rainfall that suicide rates were lower for the two years that followed, researcher Tamma Carleton found.

Farm sector suicides in India decreased last year, but remain at epidemic levels in some states and are a source of immense pressure on legislators.

One drought-hit state, Maharashtra, reported 852 farmer suicides in the first four months of this year, while in 2015, one of the worst years on record, about 12,602 farmers killed themselves across India. Overall, more than 300,000 farmers and farm workers have killed themselves in the country since 1995.

In recent months, a site in central Delhi has been strewn with evidence of the despair felt by the Indian agricultural sector.

Skulls and bones said to belong to farmers who killed themselves have been piled at Jantar Mantar, within walking distance of the Indian parliament.

They were brought to Delhi by farmers from Tamil Nadu, a state suffering its worst drought in 140 years, which the protesters claim has triggered hundreds of suicides in the past months.

Worse than the parched crops were the bank loans that loomed over many farming families, said Rani Radhakrishnan, one of the protesters.

In February, owing 80,000 rupees (£945), her husband stood outside his bank branch in the city of Trichy, and consumed a toxic concoction. He died on the spot.

Tamil Nadu is suffering its worst drought in 140. Protestors claim it has triggered hundreds of suicides. Photograph: Julian Chung/The Guardian

“He had talked about things like this [suicide] happening with others, but never about doing it himself,” she said.

The next week, Radhakrishnan and her daughter-in-law stood outside the bank brandishing wads of rupees. “We told them, we have repaid your money, now will you give us back my husband’s life?” she said.

Last year the Indian government launched a £1bn insurance scheme to protect against crop failures and try to halve farmer and farm worker suicides.

Maharashtra, Punjab and the country’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, have all passed farm-debt waivers at enormous cost to the public purse to appease the demands of the agricultural sector, which commands strong political sway.

Carleton said her research showed little evidence Indian farmers were changing their practices to accommodate rising temperatures.

“Without interventions that help families adapt to a warmer climate, it’s likely we will see a rising number of lives lost to suicide as climate change worsens in India,” Carleton said.

The true suicide rate was probably higher, she added, because deaths are generally underreported in India and, until 2014, suicide was considered a criminal offence, discouraging honest reports.

“The tragedy is unfolding today,” she said. “This is not a problem for future generations. This is our problem, right now.”

Output: Crop-damaging global warming has contributed to the suicides of 59,300 farmers and agricultural workers in India over the past 30 years, according to research from the University of California, Berkeley. The study found that an increase of 1C on an average growing season day was linked to an additional 67 suicides. This number rose to 335 when the temperature increased by 5C on any one day. Rainfall increases of 1 cm per year were linked to a 7% fall in suicides.


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Wells Fargo faces class-action over auto insurance
 Wells Fargo & Co., which is still settling class-action lawsuits over its fake-accounts scandal, has now been hit with yet another — related to the bank’s revelation last week that it charged auto loan customers for unnecessary insurance.

An Indiana man who says he was charged $598 for auto coverage despite repeatedly asking Wells Fargo to rescind the charges is the lead plaintiff in the case, which accuses the San Francisco bank of scheming with National General Insurance Co. to “bilk millions of dollars from unsuspecting customers.”

The lawsuit, filed Sunday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, does not name the insurance carrier as a defendant. It is seeking class-action status.

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Last week, the bank acknowledged that an internal probe spurred by customer complaints found that, between 2012 and 2017, about 570,000 borrowers may have been wrongly pushed into auto-insurance policies despite having their own coverage.

The policies, so-called collateral-protection insurance, are typically issued by lenders after a customer takes out an auto loan on a vehicle and does not have coverage for it.

Wells Fargo said last week that it will pay $80 million in compensation to the customers, including some 20,000 who had their cars repossessed after the charges for the insurance caused them to default on their loans.

Catherine Pulley, a Wells Fargo spokeswoman, declined to comment on the specifics of the lawsuit but noted the bank’s offer of compensation.

“We announced a plan to remediate auto loan customers who may have been financially harmed due to issues related to auto CPI policies placed between 2012-2017,” the statement said. “We are very sorry for the inconvenience this caused impacted customers, and we are in the process of notifying them and making things right.”

The federal lawsuit accuses Wells Fargo of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, as well as California’s Unfair Competition Law and Indiana’s Deceptive Consumer Sales Act. It also alleges fraud.

The lawsuit was filed by Baron & Budd, a law firm with offices in California, Louisiana and Texas. Other law firms also have announced they are investigating whether to file lawsuits over the matter, including Keller Rohrback, a leading class-action firm.

National General could not be reached for immediate comment.

laurence.darmiento@latimes.com

Follow me @ldarmiento on Twitter

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Output: Wells Fargo is facing a class-action lawsuit related to last week’s disclosure that it charged customers for unnecessary auto insurance. The bank is still settling class-action suits relating to last year’s false accounts scandal, which resulted in a $185m fine. The lead plaintiff in the case, filed on Sunday in San Francisco, claims to have been charged $598 for insurance despite repeated requests to have the charges rescinded. Wells Fargo has pledged to pay $80m in compensation after disclosing that an internal investigation found 570,000 customers may have been forced to take unnecessary insurance between 2012 and 2017.


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World’s first Social Impact Bond rewards investors
 Big ideas are few and far between, and social progress usually occurs incrementally, bit by bit. But sometimes a big idea – even one that starts modestly – can thoroughly transform our view of what is possible.

LONDON – Big ideas are few and far between. Progress usually occurs incrementally, bit by bit. But sometimes a big idea – even one that starts modestly – can thoroughly transform our view of what is possible.

Last week, a small social experiment conceived ten years ago to help 2,000 young delinquents in Peterborough, in eastern England, paid off – literally. More important, the Peterborough experiment has become the guiding light for hundreds of millions of dollars in investment in social reform.

During the last Labour government, I worked with one of Britain’s greatest entrepreneurs and philanthropists, Sir Ronald Cohen, to create what became the world’s first Social Impact Bond (SIB). Concerned about the rate of youth reoffending, Sir Ronald and his colleagues persuaded a group of investors to back an innovative program of personal mentoring and support, individually tailored to young people leaving their cells.

The SIB initiative was one of the last decisions I signed off on in Government. Within months, Social Finance – another Cohen-initiated social enterprise – had raised £5 million ($6.6 million) from 17 trusts and foundations to launch the bond.

The Peterborough SIB funded One Service, an umbrella organization designed to respond to the complex needs of offenders to help them break the cycle of recidivism. Over five years of operation, One Service offered post-release support for a period of up to 12 months to two cohorts of 1,000 male prisoners who had served short sentences. Engagement was voluntary, but the whole cohort was included in the measurement of the results.

Most of the 2,000 youngsters who received help from One Service in Peterborough had not only been in detention, but had reoffended on several occasions. A term in custody appeared to be no deterrent at all. But many had acute needs that no one had been addressing. A high proportion suffered from mental health and substance abuse challenges. Many had housing needs, lacked the right skills to find employment, had no access to income, and were in debt to moneylenders – a formula for recidivism.

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Investing in this new kind of bond was a risk, but we wanted the Peterborough SIB to show the world that private investment could be mobilized to tackle even the most complex and intractable social problems. So, according to the scheme I approved, the government would pay bondholders if the project cut youth recidivism by 7.5%.

In fact, by working with locals in the Safer Peterborough Partnership, One Service reduced the recidivism rate of these short-sentence offenders by 9% more than a national control group. As a result, the 17 investors in the Peterborough SIB will receive a single payment representing their initial capital, plus an amount that will represent an annual return of just over 3% for the period of investment.

Along the way, Peterborough did indeed show the world. Today, social impact bonds are mobilizing £300 million of investment in a wide range of projects. Such bonds finance help for refugees seeking jobs in the US; aid for homeless, unemployed youth and the elderly in the United Kingdom; efforts to reduce schoolgirls’ dropout rates in parts of Asia; and diabetes prevention in Israel.

As Sir Ronald has explained, the government pays out only for success. The key to unlocking social progress is accurate impact measurement – including the benefits of prevention – and converting social gains into a financial return capable of attracting investment from capital markets.

I am now working on a new project with Sir Ronald, who believes we can raise substantial sums for urgently needed educational investments, including for the world’s 30 million displaced and refugee children. But the Cohen plan is even bolder and covers the entire field of social problems in urgent need of amelioration. He foresees a tipping point by 2020, with billions of dollars in new investment in bonds coming from the world’s top 100 institutional investors, 50 foundations, and 50 private companies.

Just as venture capital, which Sir Ronald also pioneered in Britain, responded to the financing needs of the dot-com revolution a generation ago, social impact investment can help us reach the next stage of innovative social reform. As one of its supporters told me a few days ago, the person who shows how risk-taking for financial return can be combined with achieving social impact to change the world is worthy of the next Nobel Peace Prize.

Output: Investors in the world’s first Social Impact Bond (SIB), created ten years ago to help 2,000 youth offenders in Peterborough in the UK, will receive a single payment equal to their initial capital plus an annual return of just over 3%, writes Gordon Brown in Project Syndicate. The SIB, created by UK entrepreneur and philanthropist Sir Ronald Cohen, had 17 investors. The SIB backed the One Service programme of mentoring for offenders and the government agreed to pay bondholders if reoffending rates fell 7.5%. As a result of the initiative, recidivism fell by 9% more than the control group.


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Gender pay gap may lead to strike at FT
 Financial Times' journalists could strike over the gender pay gap at the newspaper amid fury that female journalists are being paid 13% less than male colleagues.

Sky News has learnt the FT's union has called a meeting on Wednesday after concluding senior managers were not taking the lack of pay parity and pay transparency at the newspaper "seriously enough".

"The gender pay gap in FT Editorial is nearly 13% - the biggest shortfall in a decade - and the company's 'ambition' to reach equality by 2022 is worse than the BBC's present target of 2020," said Steve Bird, father of the FT's National Union of Journalists chapel, in an email to 600 staff.

"Working for a private company where even the salaries of the editor and CEO are not disclosed does not inspire confidence in the FT's commitment to transparency.

"And recent corporate statements seem more concerned about the commercial implications of gender bias than bringing women's salaries into line with those of male counterparts.

"After a recent leader in the FT stated: 'Women are right to be angry at the pay gap', it's time for the Financial Times to put its money where its mouth is."

The gender pay gap has raced up the agenda after the BBC revealed this month that only a third of its 96 top-earning talent were women and its seven best paid stars were all men.

Image: One FT journalist told Sky News that morale was poor

Senior women at the BBC issued an open letter in protest at pay inequity and demanded immediate action to close the gap after Lord Hall promised to "sort it" by 2020.

Other organisations could too come under pressure to tackle pay inequality: From next April, companies with more than 250 employees must publish the pay and bonus gaps between male and female staff.

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The requirement covers about 9,000 employers with 15 million staff, roughly half the UK workforce. The gender pay gap in the UK currently stands at on average 18.1%.

One FT journalist told Sky News that morale was poor.

"There is such a lot of anger about this. It's like a pressure cooker," the journalist said.

A recent internal pay audit showed female staff make up the majority of those paid between £30,000 and £50,000 at the Financial Times, while men dominate the £60,000-plus pay bands, with over 70 male staff members earning over £80,000 against just over 20 women.

The FT told Sky News in a statement: "We take the matter of gender pay seriously and welcome the Government's move to make all large UK companies report on the issue.

"We have a 50/50 female-male split among our workforce and there are more women in senior roles across the newsroom and commercial teams than ever before. We have a long list of active initiatives in place to further that progress.

"We will be reporting on pay in due course, in line with the UK government timetable. From benchmarking we have seen we compare favourably to the industry."

The union is expected to put out a statement on further action after the meeting on Wednesday.

Output: Journalists at the Financial Times (FT) may strike over the newspaper’s gender pay gap, which is currently at 13%, the largest in a decade. Steve Bird, father of the FT’s National Union of Journalists chapel, said that "the company’s ‘ambition’ to reach equality by 2022 is worse than the BBC’s present target of 2020". Earlier this month, the BBC disclosed that just one third of its top 96 earning stars were women.


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Tobacco companies manipulate prices to subvert tax rises
 Big tobacco companies have been manipulating the prices of cigarettes for more than a decade to undermine government attempts to deter people from smoking, research suggests.

A study published in the journal Nicotine & Tobacco Research has found that the increasing availability of cheap tobacco has hampered public health efforts to discourage smoking, the leading cause of preventable death.

Scientists at King’s College London and the University of Bath analysed data from more than 6,000 smokers to look at the price they paid for tobacco between 2002 and 2014.

They found that, by switching brands, smokers could buy tobacco in shops at the same prices they paid in 2002. The range between the cheapest and most expensive brands almost doubled over the 12 years. In 2002 it was 12p per cigarette but by 2014 this had increased to 23p. In 2014, the most expensive pack of 20 factory-made cigarettes cost about £10, whereas the cheapest pack cost only £5.33. “Our research suggests that tobacco companies are able to meet tax requirements and keep cheap products available by markedly increasing prices on premium brands,” says the study’s co-author, Rosemary Hiscock from the University of Bath’s Tobacco Control Research Group.

The practice is known as “over-shifting”, whereby cigarette companies use their premium products to in effect subsidise cheaper alternatives.

The researchers argue that the widening gap between the cheapest and most expensive products is evidence that the industry deliberately introduced a wide variety of brands to meet smokers’ declining budgets.

The study also looks at the rising use of roll-your-own tobacco. The number smoking it almost doubled between 2002 and 2014 and it is particularly popular among younger people. The study found that the price increase in roll-your-own was lower than that for factory-made cigarettes. By 2014, the cheapest roll-your-own tobacco cost £1.63 for 10 grams, enough to make 20 cigarettes.

There were large increases in the tax on tobacco over the 12 years but the price of cigarettes rose only by an average of 10p per cigarette.

The researchers suggest their work provides evidence that marked tax increases have not resulted in price rises large enough to persuade smokers of the cheaper products to quit.

“Increasing tobacco prices is known to be one of the best deterrents to reduce smoking, but an increase in availability of cheaper products in conventional stores in response to this appears to be thwarting public health campaigns,” said the study’s lead author, Timea Partos of the addictions department at King’s College London.

“Policy-makers need to focus on regulating tobacco prices so that the tobacco industry is not able to undermine tax increases by offering such a wide range of cigarette prices.”

The authors suggest that the price of all types of tobacco should be equally high so that smokers are discouraged from simply switching products to reduce costs.

Output: Major tobacco firms have been manipulating the cost of cigarettes for over a decade in order to subvert government anti-smoking initiatives, according to research by King’s College London and the University of Bath. The scientists found that the practice of “over-shifting”, or using premium products to subsidise cheaper ones, meant that, by switching brands, smokers were able to buy tobacco for the same prices they paid in 2002. By analysing data from more than 6,000 smokers, the researchers found that the gap between the cheapest and the most expensive brands had almost doubled between that date and 2014.


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Growing number of UAE home buyers use internet search
 Dubai: The global property technology (PropTech) revolution has arrived in the UAE, with more than two-thirds of UAE home buyers turning to technology to help gather information relevant to their purchases, according to a research from HSBC.

The study found that 72 per cent of UAE property buyers search for available properties online, 67 per cent check the value of their current home, 65 per cent look for information on taxes and regulations, 65 per cent research where to live, and 64 per cent explore prospective home prices.

‘Beyond the Bricks, The Future of Home Buying’, the new global research report from HSBC, assesses the views of over 9,000 people in nine countries, including over 1,000 respondents in the UAE. The study provides insights into how people really feel and behave when buying, renting and owning their own homes.

The HSBC-commissioned research quantifies how the wide-scale use of technology in the real estate purchase process is bringing the PropTech revolution to the UAE.

Disruption

The UAE findings reinforce forecasts that in the wake of the revolutionary change that financial technology (fintech) is having on the banking sector, PropTech will similarly disrupt the property sector.

Property websites are increasingly turning to technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality to transform each stage of the home-buying process. They are delivering end-to-end services, including many of those traditionally offered by estate agents.

The scale of this transformation globally can be seen in the funding of disruptive PropTech firms, which rose phenomenally, from $221 million (Dh811.73 million) in 2012 to over $2 billion in 2016.

“The process of buying a home in the UAE will change substantially in coming years,” said Kunal Malani, regional head of Customer Value Management, Retail Banking and Wealth Management, HSBC, MENA. “It will be a more streamlined transaction, with buyers and sellers having greater control and relying much more on technology.”

These efforts are being led by UAE smart government and Smart Dubai initiatives, and forward-looking government entities and regulators such as the Dubai Land Department (DLD) and its Real Estate Regulatory Agency (Rera).

“By putting a growing number of databases and services online, they are demonstrating the early power of PropTech and helping to simplify the home-buying process,” Malani said.

Some examples of the DLD’s work in this field include the Investment Map portal that gives investors and businesses practical information on ongoing real estate investment projects; the Trust Account System app, which manages the registration of developers and their projects; and Ejari, a lease application and management app designed to provide flexibility and transparency to the process.

The UAE private sector also is helping to drive the PropTech trend, with the number of property listing websites rising sharply in recent years, followed by a growing range of mortgage comparison sites. These websites compete for users by offering a wide array of services to improve and simplify the home buying process.

Technologies include live chat services, searchable databases of online brokers and agents, and cloud-based services that let website visitors save property favourites for later viewing on any device.

“While many people in the UAE are already doing their property research online, physically visiting an estate agent’s office could soon become a thing of the past. Property websites are becoming considerably more sophisticated, including by partnering with real estate consultants to use big data to bring more and better properties to prospective buyers,” said Asma Dakkak, a research manager with JLL in Dubai.

Output: The UAE has seen over two thirds of property buyers turn to the internet to research their purchases, according to research from HSBC. Around 72% of UAE buyers search for properties online, with 67% looking for tax and regulation information digitally, according to the report. Further, it found that 65% of buyers research locations and 64% find potential home prices using the web. The report took into account 9,000 global citizens, including 1,000 UAE residents. The UK is currently the largest user of online property search tools, with 93% of home buying or renting originating online.