📈 Grow Weekly Newsletter | DALL-E 3's Out

Dear valued readers,

We are elated to announce the return of our beloved newsletter, "Grow 📈 ", after a brief hiatus. Your patience and unwavering support during our absence have not gone unnoticed, and we are deeply appreciative.

In light of recent events, we'd like to extend our heartfelt wishes to our CEO and the resilient people of Israel. These times have been challenging, but the indomitable spirit of Israel continues to inspire us all. We stand steadfastly with Israel, offering our unwavering support and solidarity. Through the toughest of times, unity and understanding are paramount. We hope and pray for only good things for Israel and its people.

Thank you for being a part of our community. Here's to growth, understanding, and a brighter tomorrow.

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Anyway, as far as good stuff to know about goes, some of you may remember us writing about DALL-E 3 a few weeks ago. OpenAI announced (well, tweeted) yesterday that it’s now available to its ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise subscribers. 

The life hack for those of you not paying $20 a month for priority ChatGPT access is that there’s a free workaround. Head to bing.com/create and sign in with a Microsoft account. It doesn’t matter if you registered it in the 90s or make one right now. Every Microsoft account works. Once you’re there and signed in, just start feeding Bing’s Image Creator prompts. It runs on DALL-E 3.

We strongly recommend playing around with DALL-E 3 if you haven’t yet. It’s fun. It’s incredible. We’ll even reach for a word that we’d normally be embarrassed to use and call the experience magical. 

DALL-E 2 was capable of producing masterpieces but those always required elaborate instructions that you really had to work at. DALL-E 3 is comparatively effortless. You can see the prompt that Viking image resulted from (the text on the right if you missed it). That isn’t a fourteenth attempt that we meticulously tweaked. Bing/DALL-E 3 gave us that image on our first try and we’re not even sure we chose the best one (each prompt spawns four images; you can see all the variations here).

Google’s October 2023 core update finished rolling out yesterday. It’ll probably take the better part of a week before there are any persuasive, data-backed post-mortems to chew on. The comments section of this Search Engine Roundtable page is chock full of anecdotes if you’re eager for analysis in the meantime, but it suffers from the same problem that plagues many comment sections: you’ll need to invest real time to figure out who knows what they’re talking about and who’s an idiot doesn’t. 

To be clear: the comments on Search Engine Roundtable are pretty high quality compared to any other site we’ve seen. We just want to warn you not to take anything you read there (or in any comments section) at face value, especially since people are (mostly) basing their assessments on Google Search Console data that you’re blind to.

YouTube widened the front in its battle against ad blockers on Tuesday. This is the third wave of an attack that started in May. The first salvo impacted a trivial number of YouTube users (the figures aren’t public but the incident was well-documented) and was meant to gauge the way people reacted to an announcement that said they’d be cut off from videos if they didn’t pay for a premium account or view advertisements. A follow-up round of disable-your-ad-blocker-or-else notices followed in June, but the majority of people blocking YouTube’s ads were unaffected. 

We don’t know what percentage of ad-blocking YouTube viewers were served with a warning this week. We only know that it was more than the number of people who had to deal with one in June.

We do know this is an arms race and that Google has a lot of built-in advantages for dealing with people using their Chrome browser. We don’t think it’s a good idea to defy Google, so we beg you: whatever you do, do not follow these up-to-date, step-by-step instructions that explain exactly how to avoid advertisements on YouTube without paying for a premium account. Don’t even think about it.

We don’t have time for many closing links this week because we misjudged the time zone we’re in and this email’s already late. The Atlantic published an article on Wednesday titled Self-Checkout Is a Failed Experiment. It’s not related to marketing but it’s good and we think anyone who’s ever heard “unexpected item in the bagging area” will enjoy it.

Stay safe out there and have a great weekend. 

If you need help scaling your company using these new marketing strategies, Single Grain’s experts can help!

We hope you learned something new.
To your growth!

The Grow Team 📈