Busking your way through digital acronyms

Thirty years ago cell phones were the domain of the super elite, telegrams were still sent, fax machines were standard pieces of office equipment and video recorders were essential household appliances. Not much time has passed but a lot has changed and in these swiftly moving digital times it is often very hard to keep up. Each day that passes sees hundreds of new acronyms being spawned, new technologies arriving and old ones being rendered obsolete.

digital acronyms

It’s not easy for digital experts to keep up, so for the average person in the street it is almost impossible. We thought it might be helpful to provide a quick overview to some of the key acronyms and technology terms that are being bandied around these days. Good luck as you try to keep up!

Server talk

The days of server rooms and basement super computers that powered everything are long gone. Now days everything is in the cloud, which means that you don’t need the actual physical stack where you are. If you want a solution for a VPS Melbourne, Sydney or any other major city in the worlds has a number of companies who can help kit you out. Of course that stands for Virtual Private Server and it’s a machine to which you have virtual access, not physical access.

Making money from digital

The big term that everyone uses here is RTB. It stands for Real Time Bidding and it is sometimes also referred to as programmatic advertising. In short it is a real time auction process that ensures available advertising slots on websites are matched with the appropriate adverts. It means that every time a page is opened it is monetized as effectively as possible with the auction process ensuring that both the publisher and the advertiser get the best possible deal.

Fashionable phrases

Some terms have been around forever and we all know what they mean, but their acronyms are new and not always as familiar. The term return on investment is pretty standard and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that it is what you make off the money that you spend. But in recent times the acronym ROI has come to the fore and seems to be coming increasingly ubiquitous.

Cost Per X

In the world of digital advertising there are so many different models and they all have their own acronyms. The most commonly heard is CPM, which is short for cost per thousand (where the ‘M’ stands for the Latin word for a thousand, Mille). But there are other models as well: acquisition (CPA), per click (CPC), per lead (CPL) or by conversion (CPC).

Security

In the old days all websites started with the letters ‘http’. Lots still do. That stood for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. But increasing the old school ‘http’ has been replaced with the letters ‘https’. This stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure and it means the website is protected by more acronyms, like SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and TLS (Transport Layer Security), which mean greater encryption and data transfer safety.

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