Easy for You
To Teach, One Must Learn
One of the benefits of writing is it forces you to structure your thoughts.
If you are doing something to pass a test rote memorization can work, but if you are trying to teach someone else and care it forces you to know with certainty what you are teaching.
When I was in nuclear power school one guy was about to flunk out and I did not want to let him so I taught him stuff for days. He passed that test and as a side effect I got my highest score I ever got on one of those tests. He eventually did flunk out, but he knew other people were rooting for him and tried to help him.
Market Your Work or Become Redundant
Going forward as more work becomes remote it is going to be easier to hire and fire people. The people who are great at sharing their work and leaving a public record of it will likely be swimming in great opportunities, whereas some equally talented people who haven’t built up a bit of personal brand equity will repeatedly get fired in spite of being amazingly talented, simply because there was a turn in the economy and management is far removed from the talent. As bad as petty office politics can be, it will likely become more arbitrary when everyone is taking credit for the work of others & people are not sitting side by side to see who actually did the work.
Uber recently announced they were laying off thousands of employees while looking to move a lot of their core infrastructure work overseas where labor is cheaper. Lots of people will be made redundant as unicorn workers in a recession suddenly enjoy the job stability and all the perks of the gig working economy.
Design
We have a great graphic designer who is deeply passionate about his work. He can hand draw amazing art or comics and is also great at understanding illustration software, web design, web usability, etc. I have no idea why he was fired from his prior employer but am thankful he was as he has been a joy to work with.
Before COVID-19 killed office work I sat right next to our lead graphic designer and when I would watch him use Adobe Illustrator I was both in awe of him and annoyed at how easy he would make things look. He is so good at it that and endless array of features are second nature to him. When I would ask him how to do something I just saw him do frequently it would be harder for him to explain how he does it than doing it.
Programming
Our graphics designer is also a quite solid HTML designer, though strictly front end design. One day when I took an early lunch with my wife I asked him to create a Wordpress theme off his HTML design and when I got back he was like … ummm. :)
We are all wizards at some things and horrible at others. When I use Adobe Illustrator for even the most basic tasks I feel like a guy going to a breakdancing party with no cardboard and 2 left shoes.
There are a number of things that are great about programming
- it is largely logic-based
- people drawn toward it tend to be smart
- people who can organize code also tend to use language directly (making finding solutions via search rather easy)
Though over time programming languages change features & some changes are not backward compatible. And as some free & open source projects accumulate dependencies they end up promoting the use of managers. Some of these may not be easy to install & configure on a remote shared server (with user permission issues) from a Windows computer. So then you install another package on your local computer and then have to research how it came with a deprecated php track_errors setting. And on and on.
One software program I installed on about a half-dozen sites many moons ago launched a new version recently & the typical quick 5 minute install turned into a half day of nothing. The experience felt a bit like a “choose your own adventure” book, where almost every choice you make leads to: start again at the beginning.
At that point a lot of the advice one keeps running into sort of presumes one has the exact same computer set up they do, so search again, solve that problem, turn on error messaging, and find the next problem to … once again start at the beginning.
That sort of experience is more than a bit humbling & very easy to run into when one goes outside their own sphere of expertise.
Losing the Beginner’s Mindset
If you do anything for an extended period of time it is easy to take many things for granted as you lose the beginner’s mindset.
One of the reasons it is important to go outside your field of expertise is to remind yourself of what that experience feels like.
Anyone who has been in SEO for a decade likely does the same thing when communicating about search by presuming the same level of domain expertise and talking past people. Some aspects of programming are hard because they are complex. But when you are doing simple and small jobs then if things absolutely do not work you often get the answer right away. Whereas with SEO you can be unsure of the results of a large capital and labor investment until the next time a core algorithm update happens a quarter year from now. That uncertainty acts as the barrier to entry & blocker of institutional investments which allow for sustained above average profit margins for those who make the cut, but it also means a long lag time and requiring a high level of certainty to make a big investment.
The hard part about losing the beginners mindset with SEO is sometimes the algorithms do change dramatically and you have to absolutely reinvent yourself while throwing out what you know (use keyword rich anchor text aggressively, build tons of links, exact match domains beat out brands, repeat keyword in bold on page, etc.) and start afresh as the algorithms reshuffle the playing field.
The Web Keeps Changing
While the core algorithms are shifting so too is how people use the web. Any user behaviors are shifting as search results add more features and people search on mobile devices or search using their voice. Now that user engagement is a big part of ranking, anything which impacts brand perception or user experience also impacts SEO. Social distancing will have major impacts on how people engage with search. We have already seen a rapid rise of e-commerce at the expense of offline sales & some colleges are planning on holding next year entirely online. The University of California will have roughly a half-million students attending school online next year unless students opt for something cheaper.
Colleges have to convince students for the next year that a remote education is worth every bit as much as an in-person one, and then pivot back before students actually start believing it.
It’s like only being able to sell your competitor’s product for a year.— Naval (@naval) May 6, 2020
What Resolution?
I am horrible with Adobe Illustrator. But one of the things I have learned with that and Photoshop is that if you edit in a rather high resolution you can have many of your errors disappear to the naked eye when it is viewed at a normal resolution. The same analogy holds true for web design but in the opposite direction … if your usability is solid on a mobile device & the design looks good on a mobile device then it will probably be decent on desktop as well.
Some people also make a resolution mistake with SEO.
- If nobody knows about a site or brand or company having perfect valid HTML, supporting progressive web apps, supporting AMP, using microformats, etc. … does not matter.
- On the flip side, if a site is well known it can get away with doing many things sub-optimally & can perhaps improve a lot by emulating sites which are growing over time in spite of having weaker brand strength.
Free, so Good Enough?
Many open source software programs do not do usability testing or track the efforts of a somewhat average user or new user in their ability to download and install software because they figure it is free so oh well people should figure it out. That thinking is a mistake though, because each successive increase in barrier to entry limits your potential market size & eventually some old users leave for one reason or another.
Any free software project which accumulates attention and influence can be monetized in other ways (through consulting, parallel SaaS offerings, affiliate ad integration, partnering with Hot Nacho to feature some great content in a hidden div using poetic code, etc.). But if they lack reach, see slowing growth, and then increase the barrier to entry they are likely to die.
When you ask someone to pay for something you’ll know if they like it and where they think it can be improved. Relying on the free price point hides many problems and allows them to accumulate.
The ability to make things easy for absolute beginners is a big part of why Wordpress is worth many multiples of what Acquia sold for. And Wordpress has their VIP hosting service, Akismet, and a bunch of other revenue streams while Acquia is now owned by a private equity company.
The ability to be 0.0000001% as successful as Wordpress has been without losing the beginner mindset is hard.
Categories:
New Age Cloaking
Historically cloaking was considered bad because a consumer would click expecting a particular piece of content or user experience while being delivered an experience which differed dramatically.
As publishers have become more aggressive with paywalls…
New Age Cloaking
Historically cloaking was considered bad because a consumer would click expecting a particular piece of content or user experience while being delivered an experience which differed dramatically.
As publishers have become more aggressive with paywalls…
Managing Algorithimc Volatility
Upon the recently announced Google update I’ve seen some people Tweet things like
- if you are afraid of algorithm updates, you must be a crappy SEO
- if you are technically perfect in your SEO, updates will only help you
I read those sorts of lines and cringe.
Here’s why…
Fragility
Different businesses, business models, and business structures have varying degrees of fragility.
If your business is almost entirely based on serving clients then no matter what you do there is going to be a diverse range of outcomes for clients on any major update.
Let’s say 40% of your clients are utterly unaffected by an update & of those who saw any noticeable impact there was a 2:1 ratio in your favor, with twice as many clients improving as falling.
Is that a good update? Does that work well for you?
If you do nothing other than client services as your entire business model, then that update will likely suck for you even though the net client impact was positive.
Why?
Many businesses are hurting after the Covid-19 crisis. Entire categories have been gutted & many people are looking for any reason possible to pull back on budget. Some of the clients who won big on the update might end up cutting their SEO budget figuring they had already won big and that problem was already sorted.
Some of the clients that fell hard are also likely to either cut their budget or call endlessly asking for updates and stressing the hell out of your team.
Capacity Utilization Impacts Profit Margins
Your capacity utilization depends on how high you can keep your steady state load relative to what your load looks like at peaks. When there are big updates management or founders can decide to work double shifts and do other things to temporarily deal with increased loads at the peak, but that can still be stressful as hell & eat away at your mental and physical health as sleep and exercise are curtailed while diet gets worse. The stress can be immense if clients want results almost immediately & the next big algorithm update which reflects your current work may not happen for another quarter year.
How many clients want to be told that their investments went sour but the problem was they needed to double their investment while cashflow is tight and wait a season or two while holding on to hope?
Category-based Fragility
Businesses which appear to be diversified often are not.
- Everything in hospitality was clipped by Covid-19.
- 40% of small businesses across the United States have stopped making rent payments.
- When restaurants massively close that’s going to hit Yelp’s business hard.
- Auto sales are off sharply.
Likewise there can be other commonalities in sites which get hit during an update. Not only could it include business category, but it could also be business size, promotional strategies, etc.
Sustained profits either come from brand strength, creative differentiation, or systemization. Many prospective clients do not have the budget to build a strong brand nor the willingness to create something that is truly differentiated. That leaves systemization. Systemization can leave footprints which act as statistical outliers that can be easily neutralized.
Sharp changes can happen at any point in time.
For years Google was funding absolute garbage like Mahalo autogenerated spam and eHow with each month being a new record. It is very hard to say “we are doing it wrong” or “we need to change everything” when it works month after month after month.
Then an update happens and poof.
- Was eHow decent back in the first Internet bubble? Sure. But it lost money.
- Was it decent after it got bought out for a song and had the paywall dropped in favor of using the new Google AdSense program? Sure.
- Was it decent the day Demand Media acquired it? Sure.
- Was it decent on the day of the Demand Media IPO? Almost certainly not. But there was a lag between that day and getting penalized.
Panda Trivia
The first Panda update missed eHow because journalists were so outraged by the narrative associated with the pump-n-dump IPO. They feared their jobs going away and being displaced by that low level garbage, particularly as the market cap of Demand Media eclipsed the New York Times.
Journalist coverage of the pump-n-dump IPO added credence to it from an algorithmic perspective. By constantly writing hate about eHow they made eHow look like a popular brand, generating algorithmic signals that carried the site until Google created an extension which allowed journalists and other webmasters to vote against the site they had been voting for through all their outrage coverage.
Algorithms & the Very Visible Hand
And all algorithmic channels like organic search, the Facebook news feed, or Amazon’s product pages go through large shifts across time. If they don’t, they get gamed, repetitive, and lose relevance as consumer tastes change and upstarts like Tiktok emerge.
Consolidation by the Attention Merchants
Frequent product updates, cloning of upstarts, or outright acquisitions are required to maintain control of distribution:
“The startups of the Rebellion benefited tremendously from 2009 to 2012. But from 2013 on, the spoils of smartphone growth went to an entirely different group: the Empire. … A network effect to engage your users, AND preferred distribution channels to grow, AND the best resources to build products? Oh my! It’s no wonder why the Empire has captured so much smartphone value and created a dark time for the Rebellion. … Now startups are fighting for only 5% of the top spots as the Top Free Apps list is dominated by incumbents. Facebook (4 apps), Google (6 apps), and Amazon (4 apps) EACH have as many apps in the Top 100 list as all the new startups combined.”
Apple & Amazon
Emojis are popular, so those features got copied, those apps got blocked & then apps using the official emojis also got blocked from distribution. The same thing happens with products on Amazon.com in terms of getting undercut by a house brand which was funded by using the vendor’s sales data. Re-buy your brand or else.
Before the Facebook IPO some thought buying Zynga shares was a backdoor way to invest into Facebook because gaming was such a large part of the ecosystem. That turned out to be a dumb thesis and horrible trade. At times other things trended including quizzes, videos, live videos, news, self hosted Instant Articles, etc.
Over time the general trend was edge rank of professional publishers fell as a greater share of inventory went to content from friends & advertisers. The metrics associated with the ads often overstated their contribution to sales due to bogus math and selection bias.
Internet-first publishers like CollegeHumor struggled to keep up with the changes & influencers waiting for a Facebook deal had to monetize using third parties:
“I did 1.8 billion views last year,” [Ryan Hamilton] said. “I made no money from Facebook. Not even a dollar.” … “While waiting for Facebook to invite them into a revenue-sharing program, some influencers struck deals with viral publishers such as Diply and LittleThings, which paid the creators to share links on their pages. Those publishers paid top influencers around $500 per link, often with multiple links being posted per day, according to a person who reached such deals.”
YouTube
YouTube had a Panda-like update back in 2012 to favor watch time over raw view counts. They also adjust the ranking algorithms on breaking news topics to favor large & trusted channels over conspiracy theorist content, alternative health advice, hate speech & ridiculous memes like the Tide pod challenge.
All unproven channels need to start somewhat open to gain usage, feedback & marketshare. Once they become real businesses they clamp down. Some of the clamp down can be editorial, forced by regulators, or simply anticompetitive monpolistic abuse.
Kid videos were a huge area on YouTube (perhaps still are) but that area got cleaned up after autogenerated junk videos were covered & the FTC clipped YouTube for delivering targeted ads on channels which primarily catered to children.
Dominant channels can enforce tying & bundling to wipe out competitors:
“Google’s response to the threat from AppNexus was that of a classic monopolist. They announced that YouTube would no longer allow third-party advertising technology. This was a devastating move for AppNexus and other independent ad technology companies. YouTube was (and is) the largest ad-supported video publisher, with more than 50% market share in most major markets. … Over the next few months, Google’s ad technology team went to each of our clients and told them that, regardless of how much they liked working with AppNexus, they would have to also use Google’s ad technology products to continue buying YouTube. This is the definition of bundling, and we had no recourse. Even WPP, our largest customer and largest investors, had no choice but to start using Google’s technology. AppNexus growth slowed, and we were forced to lay off 100 employees in 2016.”
Everyone Else
Every moderately large platform like eBay, Etsy, Zillow, TripAdvisor or the above sorts of companies runs into these sorts of issues with changing distribution & how they charge for distribution.
Building Anti-fragility Into Your Business Model
Growing as fast as you can until the economy craters or an algorithm clips you almost guarantees a hard fall along with an inability to deal with it.
Markets ebb and flow. And that would be true even if the above algorithmic platforms did not make large, sudden shifts.
Build Optionality Into Your Business Model
If your business primarily relies on publishing your own websites or you have a mix of a few clients and your own sites then you have a bit more optionality to your approach in dealing with updates.
Even if you only have one site and your business goes to crap maybe you at least temporarily take on a few more consulting clients or do other gig work to make ends meet.
Focus on What is Working
If you have a number of websites you can pour more resources into whatever sites reacted positively to the update while (at least temporarily) ignoring any site that was burned to a crisp.
Ignore the Dead Projects
The holding cost of many websites is close to zero unless they use proprietary and complex content management systems. Waiting out a penalty until you run out of obvious improvements on your winning sites is not a bad strategy. Plus, if you think the burned site is going to be perpetually burned to a crisp (alternative health anyone?) then you could sell links off it or generate other alternative revenue streams not directly reliant on search rankings.
Build a Cushion
If you have cash savings maybe you guy out and buy some websites or domain names from other people who are scared of the volatility or got clipped for issues you think you could easily fix.
When the tide goes out debt leverage limits your optionality. Savings gives you optionality. Having slack in your schedule also gives you optionality.
The person with a lot of experience & savings would love to see highly volatile search markets because those will wash out some of the competition, curtail investments from existing players, and make other potential competitors more hesitant to enter the market.
Categories:
Managing Algorithmic Volatility
Upon the recently announced Google update I’ve seen some people Tweet things like
- if you are afraid of algorithm updates, you must be a crappy SEO
- if you are technically perfect in your SEO, updates will only help you
I read those sorts of lines and cringe.
Here’s why…
Fragility
Different businesses, business models, and business structures have varying degrees of fragility.
If your business is almost entirely based on serving clients then no matter what you do there is going to be a diverse range of outcomes for clients on any major update.
Let’s say 40% of your clients are utterly unaffected by an update & of those who saw any noticeable impact there was a 2:1 ratio in your favor, with twice as many clients improving as falling.
Is that a good update? Does that work well for you?
If you do nothing other than client services as your entire business model, then that update will likely suck for you even though the net client impact was positive.
Why?
Many businesses are hurting after the Covid-19 crisis. Entire categories have been gutted & many people are looking for any reason possible to pull back on budget. Some of the clients who won big on the update might end up cutting their SEO budget figuring they had already won big and that problem was already sorted.
Some of the clients that fell hard are also likely to either cut their budget or call endlessly asking for updates and stressing the hell out of your team.
Capacity Utilization Impacts Profit Margins
Your capacity utilization depends on how high you can keep your steady state load relative to what your load looks like at peaks. When there are big updates management or founders can decide to work double shifts and do other things to temporarily deal with increased loads at the peak, but that can still be stressful as hell & eat away at your mental and physical health as sleep and exercise are curtailed while diet gets worse. The stress can be immense if clients want results almost immediately & the next big algorithm update which reflects your current work may not happen for another quarter year.
How many clients want to be told that their investments went sour but the problem was they needed to double their investment while cashflow is tight and wait a season or two while holding on to hope?
Category-based Fragility
Businesses which appear to be diversified often are not.
- Everything in hospitality was clipped by Covid-19.
- 40% of small businesses across the United States have stopped making rent payments.
- When restaurants massively close that’s going to hit Yelp’s business hard.
- Auto sales are off sharply.
Likewise there can be other commonalities in sites which get hit during an update. Not only could it include business category, but it could also be business size, promotional strategies, etc.
Sustained profits either come from brand strength, creative differentiation, or systemization. Many prospective clients do not have the budget to build a strong brand nor the willingness to create something that is truly differentiated. That leaves systemization. Systemization can leave footprints which act as statistical outliers that can be easily neutralized.
Sharp changes can happen at any point in time.
For years Google was funding absolute garbage like Mahalo autogenerated spam and eHow with each month being a new record. It is very hard to say “we are doing it wrong” or “we need to change everything” when it works month after month after month.
Then an update happens and poof.
- Was eHow decent back in the first Internet bubble? Sure. But it lost money.
- Was it decent after it got bought out for a song and had the paywall dropped in favor of using the new Google AdSense program? Sure.
- Was it decent the day Demand Media acquired it? Sure.
- Was it decent on the day of the Demand Media IPO? Almost certainly not. But there was a lag between that day and getting penalized.
Panda Trivia
The first Panda update missed eHow because journalists were so outraged by the narrative associated with the pump-n-dump IPO. They feared their jobs going away and being displaced by that low level garbage, particularly as the market cap of Demand Media eclipsed the New York Times.
Journalist coverage of the pump-n-dump IPO added credence to it from an algorithmic perspective. By constantly writing hate about eHow they made eHow look like a popular brand, generating algorithmic signals that carried the site until Google created an extension which allowed journalists and other webmasters to vote against the site they had been voting for through all their outrage coverage.
Algorithms & the Very Visible Hand
And all algorithmic channels like organic search, the Facebook news feed, or Amazon’s product pages go through large shifts across time. If they don’t, they get gamed, repetitive, and lose relevance as consumer tastes change and upstarts like Tiktok emerge.
Consolidation by the Attention Merchants
Frequent product updates, cloning of upstarts, or outright acquisitions are required to maintain control of distribution:
“The startups of the Rebellion benefited tremendously from 2009 to 2012. But from 2013 on, the spoils of smartphone growth went to an entirely different group: the Empire. … A network effect to engage your users, AND preferred distribution channels to grow, AND the best resources to build products? Oh my! It’s no wonder why the Empire has captured so much smartphone value and created a dark time for the Rebellion. … Now startups are fighting for only 5% of the top spots as the Top Free Apps list is dominated by incumbents. Facebook (4 apps), Google (6 apps), and Amazon (4 apps) EACH have as many apps in the Top 100 list as all the new startups combined.”
Apple & Amazon
Emojis are popular, so those features got copied, those apps got blocked & then apps using the official emojis also got blocked from distribution. The same thing happens with products on Amazon.com in terms of getting undercut by a house brand which was funded by using the vendor’s sales data. Re-buy your brand or else.
Before the Facebook IPO some thought buying Zynga shares was a backdoor way to invest into Facebook because gaming was such a large part of the ecosystem. That turned out to be a dumb thesis and horrible trade. At times other things trended including quizzes, videos, live videos, news, self hosted Instant Articles, etc.
Over time the general trend was edge rank of professional publishers fell as a greater share of inventory went to content from friends & advertisers. The metrics associated with the ads often overstated their contribution to sales due to bogus math and selection bias.
Internet-first publishers like CollegeHumor struggled to keep up with the changes & influencers waiting for a Facebook deal had to monetize using third parties:
“I did 1.8 billion views last year,” [Ryan Hamilton] said. “I made no money from Facebook. Not even a dollar.” … “While waiting for Facebook to invite them into a revenue-sharing program, some influencers struck deals with viral publishers such as Diply and LittleThings, which paid the creators to share links on their pages. Those publishers paid top influencers around $500 per link, often with multiple links being posted per day, according to a person who reached such deals.”
YouTube
YouTube had a Panda-like update back in 2012 to favor watch time over raw view counts. They also adjust the ranking algorithms on breaking news topics to favor large & trusted channels over conspiracy theorist content, alternative health advice, hate speech & ridiculous memes like the Tide pod challenge.
All unproven channels need to start somewhat open to gain usage, feedback & marketshare. Once they become real businesses they clamp down. Some of the clamp down can be editorial, forced by regulators, or simply anticompetitive monpolistic abuse.
Kid videos were a huge area on YouTube (perhaps still are) but that area got cleaned up after autogenerated junk videos were covered & the FTC clipped YouTube for delivering targeted ads on channels which primarily catered to children.
Dominant channels can enforce tying & bundling to wipe out competitors:
“Google’s response to the threat from AppNexus was that of a classic monopolist. They announced that YouTube would no longer allow third-party advertising technology. This was a devastating move for AppNexus and other independent ad technology companies. YouTube was (and is) the largest ad-supported video publisher, with more than 50% market share in most major markets. … Over the next few months, Google’s ad technology team went to each of our clients and told them that, regardless of how much they liked working with AppNexus, they would have to also use Google’s ad technology products to continue buying YouTube. This is the definition of bundling, and we had no recourse. Even WPP, our largest customer and largest investors, had no choice but to start using Google’s technology. AppNexus growth slowed, and we were forced to lay off 100 employees in 2016.”
Everyone Else
Every moderately large platform like eBay, Etsy, Zillow, TripAdvisor or the above sorts of companies runs into these sorts of issues with changing distribution & how they charge for distribution.
Building Anti-fragility Into Your Business Model
Growing as fast as you can until the economy craters or an algorithm clips you almost guarantees a hard fall along with an inability to deal with it.
Markets ebb and flow. And that would be true even if the above algorithmic platforms did not make large, sudden shifts.
Build Optionality Into Your Business Model
If your business primarily relies on publishing your own websites or you have a mix of a few clients and your own sites then you have a bit more optionality to your approach in dealing with updates.
Even if you only have one site and your business goes to crap maybe you at least temporarily take on a few more consulting clients or do other gig work to make ends meet.
Focus on What is Working
If you have a number of websites you can pour more resources into whatever sites reacted positively to the update while (at least temporarily) ignoring any site that was burned to a crisp.
Ignore the Dead Projects
The holding cost of many websites is close to zero unless they use proprietary and complex content management systems. Waiting out a penalty until you run out of obvious improvements on your winning sites is not a bad strategy. Plus, if you think the burned site is going to be perpetually burned to a crisp (alternative health anyone?) then you could sell links off it or generate other alternative revenue streams not directly reliant on search rankings.
Build a Cushion
If you have cash savings maybe you guy out and buy some websites or domain names from other people who are scared of the volatility or got clipped for issues you think you could easily fix.
When the tide goes out debt leverage limits your optionality. Savings gives you optionality. Having slack in your schedule also gives you optionality.
The person with a lot of experience & savings would love to see highly volatile search markets because those will wash out some of the competition, curtail investments from existing players, and make other potential competitors more hesitant to enter the market.
Categories:
New Version of SEO Toolbar
Our programmer recently updated our SEO toolbar to work with the most recent version of Firefox.
You can install it from here. After you install it the toolbar should automatically update on a forward basis.
It is easy to toggle on or off simply by c…
New Version of SEO Toolbar
Our programmer recently updated our SEO toolbar to work with the most recent version of Firefox.
You can install it from here. After you install it the toolbar should automatically update on a forward basis.
It is easy to toggle on or off simply by c…
China Still Censoring Google, Now Globally
Google Gets Out of China
In March of 2010 Google announced they would no longer censor their search results for China:
earlier today we stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong.
While the move was pitched as altruistic, it came only after the state put their thumb on the scales to promote domestic competitor Baidu in part by periodically blocking Google search from working.
The Value of Leaving China
By leaving China on their own accord, Google controlled the narrative for investors. They didn’t “lose” a market, they chose to not operate in a market.
If you are destined to lose due to political interference, you may as well look principled in the process. The idea of staying the course (being highly compromised while also losing) would have lowered Google’s leverage (over publishers and governments) as well as their brand value elsewhere.
Think of how long Google has kept the EU at bay in terms of their anti-competitive practices in search.
Countries like France and Australia are just now beginning to require payment to publishers from Google.
In spite of being in fifth place with about 2% search marketshare in China, one could easily argue that today Google is *still* being censored by China, except now it is global.
Official != Legitimate
Whenever there is a crisis Google has the ability to adjust their news algorithms (and rankings on other sources like YouTube) to prefer authoritative sources. If China lies but gives a direct quote that is an official response which can be reported in the media. Speculating, on the other hand, is not news, and thus is not likely to be done at scale on official sources.
The WHO parroted the official line of the Chinese Communist Party for months before sending in a team to begin investigating the virus which was quietly spreading globally in the background. This is evil (or, more charitably, ill-informed) their advice was:
Tedros said there was no need for measures that “unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade,” and he specifically said that stopping flights and restricting Chinese travel abroad was “counter-productive” to fighting the global spread of the virus.
Evidence is Backward Looking
Promoting “consistent, evidence-based” risk control is utterly stupid because the evidence that you are dead only appears after you die.
It is not a game of 50/50 chance.
One outcome is death. And at the other end of the spectrum you spent $15 needlessly on a facemask.
How lowly must you view the value of a human life to determine a $15 spend on risk mitigation is reckless behavior?
Don’t exceed the global standards based on China’s misinformation. OR ELSE!!!
WHO can hold countries to account when they needlessly exceed these global standards. This is critical to ensuring the international response is evidence-based, measured & balanced to protect human health in ways that are neither over-reactive nor under-reactive.- Dr Houssin pic.twitter.com/HaRMNXpmOb— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) January 30, 2020
Evidence is backward looking even if the sources are not lying scum. When lying is vital to maintaining political power many people die while waiting on the true.
Can anyone who followed official anti-warnings get a refund on their death?
Better luck next life?
Evidence
- Later, as evidence emerged, we find that wearing a facemask is a great idea, in spite of early media reports they would not help you.
- Later, as evidence emerged, we find the WHO sponsored doctors who published studies which showed official Chinese numbers were bogus.
- Later, as evidence emerged, we learn that the CCP are lying, jackbooted thugs. They had coronavirus research destroyed, arrested doctors who mentioned the issue, and held secret internal meetings discussing human to human transmission even as the WHO stated the risk was low & there was no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission, so there should be no restrictions on international travel.
- Later, as evidence emerged, we find that closing borders is a great idea – even China does it. Of course early media reports were to not be xenophobic or racist and accept this global problem: “Ultimately some pandemic responses will require opening borders, not closing them. At some point the expectation that any area will escape effects of COVID-19 must be abandoned: The disease must be seen as everyone’s problem.”
- Later, as evidence emerged, we learn that Taiwan warned the WHO of human to human transmission last December.
- Later, as evidence emerged, we learned that WHO representatives Bruce Aylward hung up on a journalist who brought up the topic of Taiwan. This problem got “solved” by the news organization being reprimanded.
‼️WOW‼️ Bruce Aylward/@WHO did an interview with HK’s @rthk_news & when asked about #Taiwan he pretended not to hear the question. The journalist asks again & he hangs up! She calls back & he said “Well, we’ve already talked about China.”ENJOY+SHARE THE MADNESS! #CoronaVirus pic.twitter.com/jgpHRVHjNX— Hong Kong World City (@HKWORLDCITY) March 28, 2020
While China’s CCP was lying to the world, the WHO shared appreciation for their commitment to sharing info.
Not Just China
Health officials the world over were guilty of the same sort of “evidence-based” stupidity.
Here is a video from February of NYC health commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot advising people to go out and take the subway and live their lives, noting that city preparedness is high, their personal risk is low, and casual contact was not a large risk.
How much of a risk is the new coronavirus to New York City?Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot explains to @InsideCityHall how likely it is to transmit the virus. #NY1Politics pic.twitter.com/mUbU8F0p3N— Spectrum News NY1 (@NY1) February 7, 2020
You can see the stupidity in the circular logic here: “we also know that if it were likely to be transmitted casually we would be seeing a lot more cases.”
Yes we would!
Or soon would be.
And did.
Time shift that statement a couple months and lawmakers are asking her to be fired.
May you enjoy a happy Lunar New Year:
“We are very clear: We wish New Yorkers a Happy Lunar New Year and we encourage people to spend time with their families and go about their celebration,” Dr. Barbot said.
Later, as evidence emerged, we learn from serological studies that around 24.7% of people in New York City & 14.9% of New York state had antibodies for the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
If you are a poor minority you are more likely to die as you have less of a cushion to do things like taking time off work and AVOID TAKING THE SUBWAY.
Thank you Dr. Oxiris Barbot!
Even the New York Times warned against quarantines, virtually guaranteeing the city would get one.
Protecting Yourself from Dr. Oxiris Barbot & the CCP
How many billions of dollars do people spend buying lotto tickets?
A high-quality facemask was a $15 lotto ticket that might save you from death. But buying one was ill-informed & xenophic & antisocial and and and.
Back in January I saw a video on Twitter of a guy walking down the street in Wuhan and then just fall over and die. Upon seeing that, I quickly ordered facemasks for my wife, our babysitter, my wife’s parents, my mom, and my siblings.
My mom thought I was crazy for spending hundreds buying so many masks, but it was a fairly simple calculation. Whatever China was saying was hot garbage as they were literally welding apartment complexes shut.
Ongoing Disinformation Campaign
They accosted doctors who warned of the pending pandemic, locked down millions of people, and held internal briefs about human to human transmission was happening while lying externally about it. China then pushed some garbage about how the US Army created the coronavirus which caused COVID-19, then they both claimed it was racist to state the disease came from China while also claiming it originated in Italy.
That’s the CCP – literally zero shame.
You can be against the jackbooted CCP while not hating Chinese people. I would rather be wrongly called a racist and not die of coronavirus than virtue signal my way to death via Italy’s “Hug a Chinese” day.
As a general rule of thumb, life is more important than the feelz.
My wife took a DNA test and a big part of her ethnic background is Chinese. When she and I are in the Philippines many people think she is a foreigner. When I was walking with my wife in Hong Kong years ago a local street vender started talking to her in Chinese thinking she was a local. And there’s nobody in the world I love more than her, but that does not mean she or I are planning a trip to Wuhan anytime soon or wanted to end up as statistics as a side effect of virtue signaling.
To this day China is using their ability to purchase foreign debts & infrastructure across weaker European countries to push the EU to understate the culpability of the CCP:
“Bowing to heavy pressure from Beijing, European Union officials softened their criticism of China this week in a report documenting how governments push disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, according to documents, emails and interviews. Worried about the repercussions, European officials first delayed and then rewrote the document in ways that diluted the focus on China, a vital trading partner … China moved quickly to block the document’s release, and the European Union pulled back. The report had been on the verge of publication, until senior officials ordered revisions to soften the language.”
Maintaining The Illusion of Stability
The doom scenario for China would be one where the disease spread widely across their society while not directly impacting other economies. Currencies float and trade can eventually be re-routed if supply chains are unreliable. If a place where repeated coronavirus outbreaks happen has massive hidden debts in their shadow economy the propped up currency peg would likely fall as those debts go bad and their economy crashes. Hot money has been rushing out of China for years: their companies buying foreign companies, individuals buying foreign real estate, short domain names, Bitcoin, life insurance policies, etc.
China already faced sharp food price inflation last year as African Swine Flu killed a lot of their herd. When people can’t afford to eat they are more likely to push for political change. Hyperinflation is the reciprocal of political stability. Maintaining a stable food supply is a core requirement of staying in power.
Masks might make no difference, but if I spend a fraction of a percent of my income protecting my immediate and extended family even slightly then that is a good investment.
What is the price of a single needless death?
That is the calculation one should use when adopting simple & cheap life changes that can protect their families and society as a whole.
The mainstream media not only downplayed Covid-19 to pitch Trump as xenophobic & neurotic, but after the most important story they got entirely wrong was revealed as the disaster it was, they also warned about the wrong people hoarding much needed supplies.
If people would have rushed to buy masks in January it would have sent the market signal to make more. Virtue signaling was considered more important than life.
Instead of any attempts at truth we got communist-fed false assurances to provide the illusion of stability. Lives lack value when compared against maintaining political power:
In 1989, when Chinese citizens raised a Goddess of Democracy on Tiananmen Square, some pinned their hopes on the People’s Liberation Army: Surely the people’s army would never fire on the people. In fact, PLA soldiers proved quite adept at firing on the people. And to this day Beijing refuses to come clean about how many it killed at Tiananmen.
…
Communism has always been far more about Lenin than Marx—that is, about getting and holding power, rather than any economic arrangement. And it’s extraordinary how consistent the lies and violence have been across time and geography, given the many different flavors of communism.
Fake News About Fake News
As China was lying to the world, setting hundreds of thousands of people up for death & destroying the global economy, we suggested the problem was not lies from the CCP or the disease that spread globally in part due to their lies, but rather we should fight “fake news”
The rise of “fake news” – including misinformation and inaccurate advice on social media – could make disease outbreaks such as the COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic currently spreading in China worse, according to research published on Friday.
The WHO shills for the CCP:
The lengths to which the WHO went to sacrifice its scientific- and health-related mission for political considerations relating to China were at times both absurd and trivial. For example, in the Coronavirus Q&A that was first posted to its website, the WHO maintained multiple versions. The original English language version of the Q&A counseled that there were four common myths about preventing or curing a COVID-19 infection: smoking, wearing multiple masks, taking antibiotics, and traditional herbal remedies. The original Chinese version omitted ‘traditional herbal remedies’ as a myth. Then the WHO took down ‘traditional herbal remedies’ in both languages. Politics over health. Politics over science. At even the smallest, silliest level.
As the WHO praises the CCP we learn fake news is anything which counters the WHO.
And to protect people globally and fight sources of fake news Google is working with … the WHO:
WHO is also battling misinformation, working with Google to ensure that people get facts from the U.N. health agency first when they search for information about the virus. Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Tencent and TikTok have also taken steps to limit the spread of misinformation and rumors about the outbreak.
YouTube is also removing medically substantiated content about coronavirus.
Even the China Uncensored video about the CCP’s coverup has a COVID-19 learn more banner redirecting attention back to official sources.
Now there are some horrible and ridiculous official statements being made & a whole bunch of crazies spreading “eat aquarium cleaner, protect yourself from COVID-19.” I even read a story about a guy who committed suicide because he feared he had COVID-19. All that stuff is horrible, but any and all attempts to defuse those horrible issues & clean them up should come with a note about how the CCP lied broadly, extensively, and is to not be trusted in any way, shape or form.
The AP report continues…
Chinese officials are increasingly speaking out.
And so should we! At least while we still can:
Where possible, China wants to criminalize any speech … any social media … that does not follow the official party line. Where it’s not possible to criminalize that speech, China wants to ban it through the cooperative censorship of global tech and media platforms. Where it’s not possible to ban that speech, China wants to shame it into the shadows by getting us to reject it as “fake news”.
And if you don’t see that the United States is about two minutes behind China in doing the same damn thing, then you’re just not paying attention.
Categories:
China Still Censoring Google, Now Globally
Google Gets Out of China
In March of 2010 Google announced they would no longer censor their search results for China:
earlier today we stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong.
While the move was pitched as altruistic, it came only after the state put their thumb on the scales to promote domestic competitor Baidu in part by periodically blocking Google search from working.
The Value of Leaving China
By leaving China on their own accord, Google controlled the narrative for investors. They didn’t “lose” a market, they chose to not operate in a market.
If you are destined to lose due to political interference, you may as well look principled in the process. The idea of staying the course (being highly compromised while also losing) would have lowered Google’s leverage (over publishers and governments) as well as their brand value elsewhere.
Think of how long Google has kept the EU at bay in terms of their anti-competitive practices in search.
Countries like France and Australia are just now beginning to require payment to publishers from Google.
In spite of being in fifth place with about 2% search marketshare in China, one could easily argue that today Google is *still* being censored by China, except now it is global.
Official != Legitimate
Whenever there is a crisis Google has the ability to adjust their news algorithms (and rankings on other sources like YouTube) to prefer authoritative sources. If China lies but gives a direct quote that is an official response which can be reported in the media. Speculating, on the other hand, is not news, and thus is not likely to be done at scale on official sources.
The WHO parroted the official line of the Chinese Communist Party for months before sending in a team to begin investigating the virus which was quietly spreading globally in the background. This is evil (or, more charitably, ill-informed) their advice was:
Tedros said there was no need for measures that “unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade,” and he specifically said that stopping flights and restricting Chinese travel abroad was “counter-productive” to fighting the global spread of the virus.
Evidence is Backward Looking
Promoting “consistent, evidence-based” risk control is utterly stupid because the evidence that you are dead only appears after you die.
It is not a game of 50/50 chance.
One outcome is death. And at the other end of the spectrum you spent $15 needlessly on a facemask.
How lowly must you view the value of a human life to determine a $15 spend on risk mitigation is reckless behavior?
Don’t exceed the global standards based on China’s misinformation. OR ELSE!!!
WHO can hold countries to account when they needlessly exceed these global standards. This is critical to ensuring the international response is evidence-based, measured & balanced to protect human health in ways that are neither over-reactive nor under-reactive.
– Dr Houssin pic.twitter.com/HaRMNXpmOb— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) January 30, 2020
Evidence is backward looking even if the sources are not lying scum. When lying is vital to maintaining political power many people die while waiting on the true.
Can anyone who followed official anti-warnings get a refund on their death?
Better luck next life?
Evidence
- Later, as evidence emerged, we find that wearing a facemask is a great idea, in spite of early media reports they would not help you.
- Later, as evidence emerged, we find the WHO sponsored doctors who published studies which showed official Chinese numbers were bogus.
- Later, as evidence emerged, we learn that the CCP are lying, jackbooted thugs. They had coronavirus research destroyed, arrested doctors who mentioned the issue, and held secret internal meetings discussing human to human transmission even as the WHO stated the risk was low & there was no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission, so there should be no restrictions on international travel.
- Later, as evidence emerged, we find that closing borders is a great idea – even China does it. Of course early media reports were to not be xenophobic or racist and accept this global problem: “Ultimately some pandemic responses will require opening borders, not closing them. At some point the expectation that any area will escape effects of COVID-19 must be abandoned: The disease must be seen as everyone’s problem.”
- Later, as evidence emerged, we learn that Taiwan warned the WHO of human to human transmission last December.
- Later, as evidence emerged, we learned that WHO representatives Bruce Aylward hung up on a journalist who brought up the topic of Taiwan. This problem got “solved” by the news organization being reprimanded.
‼️WOW‼️ Bruce Aylward/@WHO did an interview with HK’s @rthk_news & when asked about #Taiwan he pretended not to hear the question. The journalist asks again & he hangs up!
She calls back & he said “Well, we’ve already talked about China.”
ENJOY+SHARE THE MADNESS! #CoronaVirus pic.twitter.com/jgpHRVHjNX— Hong Kong World City (@HKWORLDCITY) March 28, 2020
While China’s CCP was lying to the world, the WHO shared appreciation for their commitment to sharing info.
Not Just China
Health officials the world over were guilty of the same sort of “evidence-based” stupidity.
Here is a video from February of NYC health commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot advising people to go out and take the subway and live their lives, noting that city preparedness is high, their personal risk is low, and casual contact was not a large risk.
How much of a risk is the new coronavirus to New York City?
Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot explains to @InsideCityHall how likely it is to transmit the virus. #NY1Politics pic.twitter.com/mUbU8F0p3N— Spectrum News NY1 (@NY1) February 7, 2020
You can see the stupidity in the circular logic here: “we also know that if it were likely to be transmitted casually we would be seeing a lot more cases.”
Yes we would!
Or soon would be.
And did.
Time shift that statement a couple months and lawmakers are asking her to be fired.
May you enjoy a happy Lunar New Year:
“We are very clear: We wish New Yorkers a Happy Lunar New Year and we encourage people to spend time with their families and go about their celebration,” Dr. Barbot said.
Later, as evidence emerged, we learn from serological studies that around 24.7% of people in New York City & 14.9% of New York state had antibodies for the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
If you are a poor minority you are more likely to die as you have less of a cushion to do things like taking time off work and AVOID TAKING THE SUBWAY.
Thank you Dr. Oxiris Barbot!
“New York politicians are seeking answers on how to handle the growing number of corpses left by the coronavirus pandemic, after dozens of bodies were discovered decomposing in rental trucks outside a Brooklyn funeral home.”
– Ben Chapman, WSJ
Even the New York Times warned against quarantines, virtually guaranteeing the city would get one.
And for a cherry on top of the stupidity cake, New York City only closed their subway system during off hours from 1AM to 5AM for daily cleanings on April 30th, *AFTER* months of letting the virus spread across the city & many blog posts like this one were published. A quarter of their population had to contract the virus before cleaning the subway regularly seemed like a good idea.
We should always in all cases everywhere blindly trust the experts:
just last year, the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the organization led by Dr. Fauci, funded scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other institutions for work on gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses . … Many scientists have criticized gain of function research, which involves manipulating viruses in the lab to explore their potential for infecting humans, because it creates a risk of starting a pandemic from accidental release.
Protecting Yourself from Dr. Oxiris Barbot & the CCP
How many billions of dollars do people spend buying lotto tickets?
A high-quality facemask was a $15 lotto ticket that might save you from death. But buying one was ill-informed & xenophic & antisocial and and and.
Back in January I saw a video on Twitter of a guy walking down the street in Wuhan and then just fall over and die. Upon seeing that, I quickly ordered facemasks for my wife, our babysitter, my wife’s parents, my mom, and my siblings.
My mom thought I was crazy for spending hundreds buying so many masks, but it was a fairly simple calculation. Whatever China was saying was hot garbage as they were literally welding apartment complexes shut.
Ongoing Disinformation Campaign
The CCP accosted doctors who warned of the pending pandemic, locked down millions of people, and held internal briefs about human to human transmission was happening while lying externally about it. China then pushed some garbage about how the US Army created the coronavirus which caused COVID-19, then they both claimed it was racist to state the disease came from China while also claiming it originated in Italy.
That’s the CCP – literally zero shame.
You can be against the jackbooted CCP while not hating Chinese people. I would rather be wrongly called a racist and not die of coronavirus than virtue signal my way to death via Italy’s “Hug a Chinese” day.
As a general rule of thumb, life is more important than the feelz.
My wife took a DNA test and a big part of her ethnic background is Chinese. When she and I are in the Philippines many people think she is a foreigner. When I was walking with my wife in Hong Kong years ago a local street vender started talking to her in Chinese thinking she was a local. And there’s nobody in the world I love more than her, but that does not mean she or I are planning a trip to Wuhan anytime soon or wanted to end up as statistics as a side effect of virtue signaling.
To this day China is using their ability to purchase foreign debts & infrastructure across weaker European countries to push the EU to understate the culpability of the CCP:
“Bowing to heavy pressure from Beijing, European Union officials softened their criticism of China this week in a report documenting how governments push disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, according to documents, emails and interviews. Worried about the repercussions, European officials first delayed and then rewrote the document in ways that diluted the focus on China, a vital trading partner … China moved quickly to block the document’s release, and the European Union pulled back. The report had been on the verge of publication, until senior officials ordered revisions to soften the language.”
Maintaining The Illusion of Stability
The doom scenario for China would be one where the disease spread widely across their society while not directly impacting other economies. Currencies float and trade can eventually be re-routed if supply chains are unreliable. If a place where repeated coronavirus outbreaks happen has massive hidden debts in their shadow economy the propped up currency peg would likely fall as those debts go bad and their economy crashes. Hot money has been rushing out of China for years: their companies buying foreign companies, individuals buying foreign real estate, short domain names, Bitcoin, life insurance policies, etc.
China already faced sharp food price inflation last year as African Swine Flu killed a lot of their herd. When people can’t afford to eat they are more likely to push for political change. Hyperinflation is the reciprocal of political stability. Maintaining a stable food supply is a core requirement of staying in power.
Masks might make no difference, but if I spend a fraction of a percent of my income protecting my immediate and extended family even slightly then that is a good investment.
What is the price of a single needless death?
That is the calculation one should use when adopting simple & cheap life changes that can protect their families and society as a whole.
The mainstream media not only downplayed Covid-19 to pitch Trump as xenophobic & neurotic, but after the most important story they got entirely wrong was revealed as the disaster it was, they also warned about the wrong people hoarding much needed supplies.
If people would have rushed to buy masks in January it would have sent the market signal to make more. Virtue signaling was considered more important than life.
Instead of any attempts at truth we got communist-fed false assurances to provide the illusion of stability. Lives lack value when compared against maintaining political power:
In 1989, when Chinese citizens raised a Goddess of Democracy on Tiananmen Square, some pinned their hopes on the People’s Liberation Army: Surely the people’s army would never fire on the people. In fact, PLA soldiers proved quite adept at firing on the people. And to this day Beijing refuses to come clean about how many it killed at Tiananmen.
…
Communism has always been far more about Lenin than Marx—that is, about getting and holding power, rather than any economic arrangement. And it’s extraordinary how consistent the lies and violence have been across time and geography, given the many different flavors of communism.
Fake News About Fake News
As China was lying to the world, setting hundreds of thousands of people up for death & destroying the global economy, we suggested the problem was not lies from the CCP or the disease that spread globally in part due to their lies, but rather we should fight “fake news”
The rise of “fake news” – including misinformation and inaccurate advice on social media – could make disease outbreaks such as the COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic currently spreading in China worse, according to research published on Friday.
The WHO shills for the CCP:
The lengths to which the WHO went to sacrifice its scientific- and health-related mission for political considerations relating to China were at times both absurd and trivial. For example, in the Coronavirus Q&A that was first posted to its website, the WHO maintained multiple versions. The original English language version of the Q&A counseled that there were four common myths about preventing or curing a COVID-19 infection: smoking, wearing multiple masks, taking antibiotics, and traditional herbal remedies. The original Chinese version omitted ‘traditional herbal remedies’ as a myth. Then the WHO took down ‘traditional herbal remedies’ in both languages. Politics over health. Politics over science. At even the smallest, silliest level.
As the WHO praises the CCP we learn fake news is anything which counters the WHO.
德情報局揭秘：習近平親自要求譚德塞壓下疫情訊息
German intelligence agency reveals Xi Jinping personally asked @DrTedros to downplay the severity of the #WuhanPneumonia outbreak in Chinahttps://t.co/PTu3e8mg3B— (@GEthba37Cgks) May 9, 2020
And to protect people globally and fight sources of fake news Google is working with … the WHO:
WHO is also battling misinformation, working with Google to ensure that people get facts from the U.N. health agency first when they search for information about the virus. Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Tencent and TikTok have also taken steps to limit the spread of misinformation and rumors about the outbreak.
YouTube is also removing medically substantiated content about coronavirus.
Now that the coronavirus is widespread the idea of keeping the economy perpetually shut down with healthy people quarantined is idiotic & runs counter to science. Those who shelter in place have less exposure to viruses and bacteria from their surrounding environment, which over time leads to weakened immune systems. Add to that all sorts of other issues like: doctors and nurses furloughed while hospitals are idled awaiting a pandemic that never came to most places, economic incentives to misclassify deaths as COVID-19 while ignoring other issues, missing routine treatments that would have diagnosed other health issues that are going undiagnosed for months, loss of job, loss of income, loss of purpose/meaning/ability to provide for family, depression, raging alcoholism, increased domestic violence globally & increased divorce rates in China.
Doctors Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi expressed concerns about many of the above types of issues (video interview & presentation here) and were swiftly shot down as YouTube pulled the video.
Even the China Uncensored video about the CCP’s coverup has a COVID-19 learn more banner redirecting attention back to official sources if you watch the video on YouTube.
Now there are some horrible and ridiculous official statements being made & a whole bunch of crazies spreading “eat aquarium cleaner, protect yourself from COVID-19.” I even read a story about a guy who committed suicide because he feared he had COVID-19. All that stuff is horrible, but any and all attempts to defuse those horrible issues & clean them up should come with a note about how the CCP lied broadly, extensively, and is to not be trusted in any way, shape or form.
The AP report continues…
Chinese officials are increasingly speaking out.
And so should we! At least while we still can:
Where possible, China wants to criminalize any speech … any social media … that does not follow the official party line. Where it’s not possible to criminalize that speech, China wants to ban it through the cooperative censorship of global tech and media platforms. Where it’s not possible to ban that speech, China wants to shame it into the shadows by getting us to reject it as “fake news”.
And if you don’t see that the United States is about two minutes behind China in doing the same damn thing, then you’re just not paying attention.
And while the WHO has tech companies censor “fake news” the CCP releases puppet theatre cartoons about the coronavirus which has killed hundreds of thousands of people.
Once Upon a Virus… pic.twitter.com/FY0svfEKc6— Ambassade de Chine en France (@AmbassadeChine) April 30, 2020
Yes that video is real. And yes, they really are that scummy.
The puppet theatre video makes no mention of police going after doctors for mentioning the virus, Taiwan reporting the virus to the WHO, the WHO ignoring Taiwan, internal briefings to Xi while the public was left in the dark, or any of the other disconnects between inside and outside voices.
The CCP disinformation campaign is widespread. They buy ads for content use cute animals to promote their absolute propaganda:
Anything that diminishes the power and prestige of the CCP is worse than death:
The biggest threat facing the U.S. is not the new virus, but rather right-wing populists who are intent on creating trouble with their strain of political virus.
The above statement only serves to confirm the following:
Communism has always been far more about Lenin than Marx—that is, about getting and holding power, rather than any economic arrangement. And it’s extraordinary how consistent the lies and violence have been across time and geography, given the many different flavors of communism.
Luckily China does not have a monopoly on political cartoons and they have not yet managed to classify the following as some form of fake news or hate speech to be censored.
pic.twitter.com/gcUjnNvZZM— The Laughing Man (@laughingmantwit) May 14, 2020
“This is the Chinese Communist Party, with their callousness, their deceitfulness, their inhumanity, and their disregard for any values. This has come to the forefront. That’s what this pandemic has done. It has exposed to the world exactly who they are, what they are, what they will do and what means they will use to get to the ends they want. … [China’s lap dogs are] a combination of the city of London and Wall Street and global corporatists, and even certain media outlets. … They knew they had community spread no later than the third or fourth week of December 2019. They prosecuted many of the heroes of Wuhan who tried to get word out to their fellow citizens. As you know, they prosecuted Dr. Li [Wenliang, the early whistleblower who died of Covid-19 at the age of 33] and other heroes. And they made them sign rumor mongering confessions, which is one of the worst things you can do in China. … The University of Southampton in the United Kingdom did a study that showed that had they just come forward in the last week of December or the first week of January and admitted that they had human-to-human transmission and community spread that 95 percent of the the deaths, 95 percent of the agony, 95 percent of the economic destruction could have all been avoided. … they were hiding things. They wanted to make sure that nothing came up before they signed the trade deal [January 15, 2020]. They wanted to make sure nothing exposed them during Davos [January 21-24, 2020], where they had organized their biggest contingent ever to Davos. But if Lunar New Year had not been in those weeks, if this had happened in, let’s say, in October or November, we have no earthly idea how long they would have tried to suppress this. … We now know that Xi Jinping took personal responsibility starting on January 6 or 7. We know that the World Health Organization put out its press release on the 9th. Then the tweet on the 14th said that after consultation with China’s Ministry of Health that there is no human-to-human transmission or community spreading. That’s all a lie. We also know they [China] restricted travel shortly thereafter, or in China domestically. But they did not stop traveling throughout the world, particularly to Europe and the United States. … They’re engaged in economic warfare.” – Steve Bannon
Categories:
Increasing Time on Site
Changing User Intents
Google’s search quality rater document highlights how the intent of searches can change over time for a specific keyword.
A generic search for [iPhone] is likely to be related to the most recent model. A search for [President Bush] likely was related to the 41st president until his son was elected & then it was most likely to be related to 43.
Faster Ranking Shifts
About 17 years ago when Google was young they did monthly updates where most of any ranking signal shift that would happen would get folded into the rankings. The web today is much faster in terms of the rate of change, amount of news consumption, increasing political polarization, social media channels that amplify outrage and how quickly any cultural snippet can be taken out of context.
Yesterday President Trump had some interesting stuff to say about bleach. In spite of there being an anime series by the same name, news coverage of the presser has driven great interest in the topic.
And that interest is already folded into the organic search results through Google News insertion, Twitter tweet insertion, and the query deserves freshness (QDF) algorithm driving insertion of news stories in other organic search ranking slots.
If a lot of people are searching for something and many trusted news organizations are publishing information about a topic then there is little risk in folding fresh information into the result set.
Temporary Versus Permanent Change
When the intent of a keyword changes sometimes the change is transitory & sometimes it is not.
One of the most common ad-driven business models online is to take something that was once paid, make it free, and then layer ads or some other premium features on top to monetize a different part of the value chain. TripAdvisor democratized hotel reviews. Zillow made foreclosure information easily accessible for free, etc.
The success of remote working & communication services like Skype, Zoom, Basecamp, Slack, Trello, and the ongoing remote work experiment the world is going through will permanently change some consumer behaviors & how businesses operate.
A Pew survey mentioned 43% of Americans stated someone in their house recently lost their job, had their hours reduced, and/or took pay cuts. Hundreds of thousands of people are applying to work in Amazon’s grueling fulfillment centers.
To many of these people a lone wolf online job would be a dream come true.
If you had a two hour daily commute and were just as efficient working at home most days would you be in a rush to head back to the office?
How many former fulltime employees are going to become freelancers building their own small businesses they work on directly while augmenting it with platform work on other services like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Upwork, Fiverr, 99 Designs, or even influencer platforms like Intellifluence?
If big publishers are getting disintermediated by monopoly platforms & ad networks are offering crumbs of crumbs there’s no harm in selling custom ads directly or having your early publishing efforts subsidized through custom side deals as you build market awareness and invest into building other products and services to sell.
Wordpress keeps adding more features. Many technology services like Shopify, Stripe & Twilio are making most parts of the tech stack outside of marketing cheaper & easier to scale.
Some universities are preparing for the fall semester being entirely online. As technology improves, we spend more time online, more activities happen online, and more work becomes remote. All this leads to the distinction between online and offline losing meaning other than perhaps in terms of cost structure & likelihood of bankruptcy.
Before Panda / After Panda
Before the Panda update each additional page which was created was another lotto ticket and a chance to win. If users had a crappy user experience on a page or site maybe you didn’t make the sale, but if the goal of the page was to have the content so crappy that ads were more appealing that could lead to fantastic monetization while it lasted.
That strategy worked well for eHow, fueling the pump-n-dump Demand Media IPO.
Demand Media had to analyze eHow and pay to delete over a million articles which they deemed to have a negative economic value in the post-Panda world.
After the Panda update having many thin pages laying around and creating more thin pages was layering risk on top of risk. It made sense to shift to a smaller, tighter, deeper & more differentiated publishing model.
Entropy & Decay
The web goes through a constant state of reinvention.
Old YouTube Flash embeds break.
HTTP content calls in sites that were upgraded to HTTPS break.
Software which is not updated has security exploits.
If you have a large website and do not regularly update where you are linking to your site is almost certainly linking to porn and malware sites somewhere.
As users shifted to mobile websites that ignored mobile interfaces became relatively less appealing.
Changing web browser behaviors can break website logins and how data is shared across websites dependent on third party services.
Competition improves.
Algorithms change.
Ads eat a growing share of real estate on dominant platforms while organic reach slides.
Everything on the web is constantly dying as competition improves, technology changes and language gets redefined.
Staying Relevant
Even if a change in user intent is transitory, in some cases it can make sense to re-work a page to address a sudden surge of interest to improve time on site, user engagement metrics & make the content on your page more citation-worthy. If news writers are still chasing a trend then having an in-depth background piece of content with more depth gives them something they may want to link at.
Since the Covid-19 implosion of the global economy came into effect I’ve seen two different clients have a sort of sudden surge in traffic which would make little to no sense unless one considered currently spreading news stories.
News coverage creates interest in topics, shapes perspectives of topics, and creates demand for solutions.
If you read the right people on Twitter sometimes you can be days, weeks or even months ahead of the broader news narrative. Some people are great at spotting the second, third and fourth order effects of changes. You can spot stories bubbling up and participate in the trends.
An Accelerating Rate of Change
When the web was slower & easier you could find an affiliate niche and succeed in it sometimes for years before solid competition would arrive. One of the things I was most floored about this year from a marketing perspective was how quickly spammers ramped up a full court press amplifying the fear the news media was pitching. I think I get something like a hundred spam emails a day pitching facemasks and other COVID-19 solutions. I probably see 50+ other daily ads from services like Outbrain & similar.
The web moves so much faster that the SEC is already taking COVID-19 related actions against dozens of companies. Google banned advertising protective masks and recently announced they are rolling out advertiser ID verification to increase transparency.
If Google is looking at their advertisers with a greater degree of suspicion even into an economic downturn when Expedia is pulling $4 billion from their ad budget & Amazon is cutting back on their Google ad budget and Google decides to freeze hiring then it makes far more sense to keep reinvesting into improving any page which is getting a solid stream of organic search traffic.
Company Town
After Amazon cut their Google ad budget in March Google decided to expand Google Shopping to include free listings. When any of the platforms is losing badly they can afford to subsidize that area and operate it at a loss to try to gain marketshare while making the dominant player in that category look more extreme.
When a player is dominant in a category they can squeeze down on partners. Amazon once again cut affiliate payouts and the Wall Street Journal published an article citing 20 current and former Amazon insiders who stated Amazon uses third party merchant sales data to determine which products to clone:
Amazon employees accessed documents and data about a bestselling car-trunk organizer sold by a third-party vendor. The information included total sales, how much the vendor paid Amazon for marketing and shipping, and how much Amazon made on each sale. Amazon’s private-label arm later introduced its own car-trunk organizers. … Amazon’s private-label business encompasses more than 45 brands with some 243,000 products, from AmazonBasics batteries to Stone & Beam furniture. Amazon says those brands account for 1% of its $158 billion in annual retail sales, not counting Amazon’s devices such as its Echo speakers, Kindle e-readers and Ring doorbell cameras.
Amazon does not even need to sell their private label products to shift their economics. As Amazon clones products they force the branded ad buy for a company to show up for their own branded terms, taking another bite out of the partner: “Fortem spends as much as $60,000 a month on Amazon advertisements for its items to come up at the top of searches, said Mr. Maslakou.”
Amazon has grown so dominant they’ve not only cut their affiliate & search advertising while hiring hundreds of thousands of employees, but they’ve also dramatically slowed down shipping times while pulling back on their on-site people also purchase promotions to get users to order less.
While they are growing stronger department stores and other legacy retailers are careening toward bankruptcy.
Multiple Ways to Improve
If you have a page which is ranking that gets a sudden spike in traffic it makes a lot of sense to consider current news & try to consider if the intent of the searcher has changed. If it has, address it as best you can in the most relevant way possible, even if the change is temporary, then consider switching back to the old version of the page or reorganizing your content if/when/as the trend has passed.
One of the pages mentioned above was a pre-Panda “me too” type page which was suddenly flooded with thousands of user visitors. A quality inbound link can easily cost $100 to multiples of that. If a page is already getting thousands of visitors, why not invest a couple hundred dollars into dramatically improving it, knowing that some of those drive by users will likely eventually share it? Make the page an in-depth guide with great graphics and some of those 10,000’s of visitors will eventually link to it, as they were already interested in the topic, the page already gets a great stream of traffic, and the content quality is solid.
Last week a client had a big spike from a news topic that changed the intent of a keyword. Their time on site from those visitors was under a minute. After the page was re-created to reflect changing consumer intent their time on site jumped to over 3 minutes for users entering that page. Those users had a far lower bounce rate, a far better user experience, are going to be more likely to trust the site enough to seek it out again, and this sends a signal to Google that the site is still maintained & relevant to the modern search market.
There are many ways to chase the traffic stream
- create new content on new pages
- gut the old page & publish entirely new content
- re-arrange the old page while publishing new relevant breaking news at the top
In general I think the third option is often the best approach because you are aligning the page which already sees the traffic stream with the content they are looking for, while also ensuring any users from the prior intent can still access what they are looking for.
If the trend is huge, or the change in intent is permanent then you could also move the old content to a legacy URL archived page while making the high-traffic page focus on the spiking news topic.
The above advice applies to pages which rank for keywords that change in intent, but it can also apply to any web page which has a strong flow of user traffic. Keep improving the things people see most because improvements there have the biggest returns. How can you make a page deeper, better, more differentiated from the rest of the web?
Does Usage Data Matter?
Objectively, if people visit your website and do not find what they were looking for they are going to click the back button and be done with you.
Outdated content that has become irrelevant due to changing user tastes is only marginally better than outright spam.
While Google suggests they largely do not use bounce rate or user data in their rankings, they have also claimed end user data was the best way they could determine if the user was satisfied with a particular search result. Five years ago Bill Slawski wrote a blog post about long clicks which quoted Steven Levy’s In The Plex book:
“On the most basic level, Google could see how satisfied users were. To paraphrase Tolstoy, happy users were all the same. The best sign of their happiness was the “Long Click” — This occurred when someone went to a search result, ideally the top one, and did not return. That meant Google has successfully fulfilled the query.”
Think of how many people use the Chrome web browser or have Android tracking devices on them all hours of the day. There is no way Google would be able to track those billions of users every single day without finding a whole lot of signal in the noise.
Categories:
Increasing Time on Site
Changing User Intents
Google’s search quality rater document highlights how the intent of searches can change over time for a specific keyword.
A generic search for [iPhone] is likely to be related to the most recent model. A search for [President Bush] likely was related to the 41st president until his son was elected & then it was most likely to be related to 43.
Faster Ranking Shifts
About 17 years ago when Google was young they did monthly updates where most of any ranking signal shift that would happen would get folded into the rankings. The web today is much faster in terms of the rate of change, amount of news consumption, increasing political polarization, social media channels that amplify outrage and how quickly any cultural snippet can be taken out of context.
Yesterday President Trump had some interesting stuff to say about bleach. In spite of there being an anime series by the same name, news coverage of the presser has driven great interest in the topic.
And that interest is already folded into the organic search results through Google News insertion, Twitter tweet insertion, and the query deserves freshness (QDF) algorithm driving insertion of news stories in other organic search ranking slots.
If a lot of people are searching for something and many trusted news organizations are publishing information about a topic then there is little risk in folding fresh information into the result set.
Temporary Versus Permanent Change
When the intent of a keyword changes sometimes the change is transitory & sometimes it is not.
One of the most common ad-driven business models online is to take something that was once paid, make it free, and then layer ads or some other premium features on top to monetize a different part of the value chain. TripAdvisor democratized hotel reviews. Zillow made foreclosure information easily accessible for free, etc.
The success of remote working & communication services like Skype, Zoom, Basecamp, Slack, Trello, and the ongoing remote work experiment the world is going through will permanently change some consumer behaviors & how businesses operate.
A Pew survey mentioned 43% of Americans stated someone in their house recently lost their job, had their hours reduced, and/or took pay cuts. Hundreds of thousands of people are applying to work in Amazon’s grueling fulfillment centers.
To many of these people a lone wolf online job would be a dream come true.
If you had a two hour daily commute and were just as efficient working at home most days would you be in a rush to head back to the office?
How many former fulltime employees are going to become freelancers building their own small businesses they work on directly while augmenting it with platform work on other services like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Upwork, Fiverr, 99 Designs, or even influencer platforms like Intellifluence?
If big publishers are getting disintermediated by monopoly platforms & ad networks are offering crumbs of crumbs there’s no harm in selling custom ads directly or having your early publishing efforts subsidized through custom side deals as you build market awareness and invest into building other products and services to sell.
Wordpress keeps adding more features. Many technology services like Shopify, Stripe & Twilio are making most parts of the tech stack outside of marketing cheaper & easier to scale.
Some universities are preparing for the fall semester being entirely online. As technology improves, we spend more time online, more activities happen online, and more work becomes remote. All this leads to the distinction between online and offline losing meaning other than perhaps in terms of cost structure & likelihood of bankruptcy.
Before Panda / After Panda
Before the Panda update each additional page which was created was another lotto ticket and a chance to win. If users had a crappy user experience on a page or site maybe you didn’t make the sale, but if the goal of the page was to have the content so crappy that ads were more appealing that could lead to fantastic monetization while it lasted.
That strategy worked well for eHow, fueling the pump-n-dump Demand Media IPO.
Demand Media had to analyze eHow and pay to delete over a million articles which they deemed to have a negative economic value in the post-Panda world.
After the Panda update having many thin pages laying around and creating more thin pages was layering risk on top of risk. It made sense to shift to a smaller, tighter, deeper & more differentiated publishing model.
Entropy & Decay
The web goes through a constant state of reinvention.
Old YouTube Flash embeds break.
HTTP content calls in sites that were upgraded to HTTPS break.
Software which is not updated has security exploits.
If you have a large website and do not regularly update where you are linking to your site is almost certainly linking to porn and malware sites somewhere.
As users shifted to mobile websites that ignored mobile interfaces became relatively less appealing.
Changing web browser behaviors can break website logins and how data is shared across websites dependent on third party services.
Competition improves.
Algorithms change.
Ads eat a growing share of real estate on dominant platforms while organic reach slides.
Everything on the web is constantly dying as competition improves, technology changes and language gets redefined.
Staying Relevant
Even if a change in user intent is transitory, in some cases it can make sense to re-work a page to address a sudden surge of interest to improve time on site, user engagement metrics & make the content on your page more citation-worthy. If news writers are still chasing a trend then having an in-depth background piece of content with more depth gives them something they may want to link at.
Since the Covid-19 implosion of the global economy came into effect I’ve seen two different clients have a sort of sudden surge in traffic which would make little to no sense unless one considered currently spreading news stories.
News coverage creates interest in topics, shapes perspectives of topics, and creates demand for solutions.
If you read the right people on Twitter sometimes you can be days, weeks or even months ahead of the broader news narrative. Some people are great at spotting the second, third and fourth order effects of changes. You can spot stories bubbling up and participate in the trends.
An Accelerating Rate of Change
When the web was slower & easier you could find an affiliate niche and succeed in it sometimes for years before solid competition would arrive. One of the things I was most floored about this year from a marketing perspective was how quickly spammers ramped up a full court press amplifying the fear the news media was pitching. I think I get something like a hundred spam emails a day pitching facemasks and other COVID-19 solutions. I probably see 50+ other daily ads from services like Outbrain & similar.
The web moves so much faster that the SEC is already taking COVID-19 related actions against dozens of companies. Google banned advertising protective masks and recently announced they are rolling out advertiser ID verification to increase transparency.
If Google is looking at their advertisers with a greater degree of suspicion even into an economic downturn when Expedia is pulling $4 billion from their ad budget & Amazon is cutting back on their Google ad budget and Google decides to freeze hiring then it makes far more sense to keep reinvesting into improving any page which is getting a solid stream of organic search traffic.
Company Town
After Amazon cut their Google ad budget in March Google decided to expand Google Shopping to include free listings. When any of the platforms is losing badly they can afford to subsidize that area and operate it at a loss to try to gain marketshare while making the dominant player in that category look more extreme.
When a player is dominant in a category they can squeeze down on partners. Amazon once again cut affiliate payouts and the Wall Street Journal published an article citing 20 current and former Amazon insiders who stated Amazon uses third party merchant sales data to determine which products to clone:
Amazon employees accessed documents and data about a bestselling car-trunk organizer sold by a third-party vendor. The information included total sales, how much the vendor paid Amazon for marketing and shipping, and how much Amazon made on each sale. Amazon’s private-label arm later introduced its own car-trunk organizers. … Amazon’s private-label business encompasses more than 45 brands with some 243,000 products, from AmazonBasics batteries to Stone & Beam furniture. Amazon says those brands account for 1% of its $158 billion in annual retail sales, not counting Amazon’s devices such as its Echo speakers, Kindle e-readers and Ring doorbell cameras.
Amazon does not even need to sell their private label products to shift their economics. As Amazon clones products they force the branded ad buy for a company to show up for their own branded terms, taking another bite out of the partner: “Fortem spends as much as $60,000 a month on Amazon advertisements for its items to come up at the top of searches, said Mr. Maslakou.”
Amazon has grown so dominant they’ve not only cut their affiliate & search advertising while hiring hundreds of thousands of employees, but they’ve also dramatically slowed down shipping times while pulling back on their on-site people also purchase promotions to get users to order less.
While they are growing stronger department stores and other legacy retailers are careening toward bankruptcy.
Multiple Ways to Improve
If you have a page which is ranking that gets a sudden spike in traffic it makes a lot of sense to consider current news & try to consider if the intent of the searcher has changed. If it has, address it as best you can in the most relevant way possible, even if the change is temporary, then consider switching back to the old version of the page or reorganizing your content if/when/as the trend has passed.
One of the pages mentioned above was a pre-Panda “me too” type page which was suddenly flooded with thousands of user visitors. A quality inbound link can easily cost $100 to multiples of that. If a page is already getting thousands of visitors, why not invest a couple hundred dollars into dramatically improving it, knowing that some of those drive by users will likely eventually share it? Make the page an in-depth guide with great graphics and some of those 10,000’s of visitors will eventually link to it, as they were already interested in the topic, the page already gets a great stream of traffic, and the content quality is solid.
Last week a client had a big spike from a news topic that changed the intent of a keyword. Their time on site from those visitors was under a minute. After the page was re-created to reflect changing consumer intent their time on site jumped to over 3 minutes for users entering that page. Those users had a far lower bounce rate, a far better user experience, are going to be more likely to trust the site enough to seek it out again, and this sends a signal to Google that the site is still maintained & relevant to the modern search market.
There are many ways to chase the traffic stream
- create new content on new pages
- gut the old page & publish entirely new content
- re-arrange the old page while publishing new relevant breaking news at the top
In general I think the third option is often the best approach because you are aligning the page which already sees the traffic stream with the content they are looking for, while also ensuring any users from the prior intent can still access what they are looking for.
If the trend is huge, or the change in intent is permanent then you could also move the old content to a legacy URL archived page while making the high-traffic page focus on the spiking news topic.
The above advice applies to pages which rank for keywords that change in intent, but it can also apply to any web page which has a strong flow of user traffic. Keep improving the things people see most because improvements there have the biggest returns. How can you make a page deeper, better, more differentiated from the rest of the web?
Does Usage Data Matter?
Objectively, if people visit your website and do not find what they were looking for they are going to click the back button and be done with you.
Outdated content that has become irrelevant due to changing user tastes is only marginally better than outright spam.
While Google suggests they largely do not use bounce rate or user data in their rankings, they have also claimed end user data was the best way they could determine if the user was satisfied with a particular search result. Five years ago Bill Slawski wrote a blog post about long clicks which quoted Steven Levy’s In The Plex book:
“On the most basic level, Google could see how satisfied users were. To paraphrase Tolstoy, happy users were all the same. The best sign of their happiness was the “Long Click” — This occurred when someone went to a search result, ideally the top one, and did not return. That meant Google has successfully fulfilled the query.”
Think of how many people use the Chrome web browser or have Android tracking devices on them all hours of the day. There is no way Google would be able to track those billions of users every single day without finding a whole lot of signal in the noise.
Categories:
Revenue Quality & Leverage
The coronavirus issue is likely to linger for some time.
GERMANY PUBLIC HEALTH AGENCY PRESIDENT SAYS OUR ASSUMPTION IS THAT IT WILL TAKE ABOUT TWO YEARS FOR THIS PANDEMIC TO RUN ITS COURSE— Quantitative Trading (@fiquant) March 17, 2020
Up to 70% of Germany could become infected & some countries like the UK are even considering herd immunity as a strategy:
“I’m an epidemiologist. When I heard about Britain’s ‘herd immunity’ coronavirus plan, I thought it was satire”
– William Hanage
What if their models are broken?
Many companies like WeWork or Oyo have been fast and loose chasing growth while slower growing companies have been levering up to fund share buybacks. Airlines spent 96% of free cash flow on share buybacks. The airlines seek a $50 billion bailout package.
There are knock-on effects from Boeing to TripAdvisor to Google all the way down to travel affiliate blogger, local restaurants closing, the over-levered bus company going through bankruptcy & bondholders eating a loss on the debt.
Companies are going to let a lot of skeletons out of the closet as literally anything and everything bad gets attributed to coronavirus. Layoffs, renegotiating contracts, pausing ad budgets, renegotiating debts, requesting bailouts, etc. The Philippine stock market was recently trading at 2012 levels & closed indefinitely.
Brad Geddes mentioned advertisers have been aggressively pulling PPC budgets over the past week: “If you have to leave the house to engage in the service, it just seems like it’s not converting right now.”
During the prior recession Google repriced employee options to retain talent.
More time online might mean search engines & social networks capture a greater share of overall ad spend, but if large swaths of the economy do not convert & how people live changes for an extended period of time it will take time for the new categories to create the economic engines replacing the old out-of-favor categories.
[IMPORTANT: insert affiliate ad for cruise vacations here]
As Google sees advertisers pause ad budgets Google will get more aggressive with keeping users on their site & displacing organic click flows with additional ad clicks on the remaining advertisers.
When Google or Facebook see a 5% or 10% pullback other industry players might see a 30% to 50% decline as the industry pulls back broadly, focuses more resources on the core, and the big attention merchants offset their losses by clamping down on other players.
At its peak TripAdvisor was valued at about $14 billion & it is now valued at about $2 billion.
TripAdvisor announced layoffs. As did Expedia. As did Booking.com. As did many hotels. And airlines. etc. etc. etc.
I am not suggesting people should be fearful or dominated by negative emotions. Rather one should live as though many other will be living that way.
In times of elevated uncertainty, in business it is best to not be led by emotions unless they are positive ones. Spend a bit more time playing if you can afford to & work more on things you love.
Right now we might be living through the flu pandemic of 1918 and the Great Depression of 1929 while having constant access to social media updates. And that’s awful.
Consume less but deeper. Less Twitter, less news, fewer big decisions, read more books.
It is better to be more pragmatic & logic-based in determining opportunity cost & the best strategy to use than to be led by extreme fear.
- If you have sustainable high-margin revenue treasure it.
- If you have low-margin revenue it might quickly turn into negative margin revenues unless something changes quickly.
- If you have low-margin revenue which is sustainable but under-performed less stable high-margin revenues you might want to put a bit more effort into those sorts of projects as they are more likely to endure.
On a positive note, we might soon get a huge wave of innovation…
“Take the Great Depression. Economist Alexander Field writes that “the years 1929–1941 were, in the aggregate, the most technologically progressive of any comparable period in U.S. economic history.” Productivity growth was twice as fast in the 1930s as it was in the decade prior. The 1920s were the era of leisure because people could afford to relax. The 1930s were the era of frantic problem solving because people had no other choice. The Great Depression brought unimaginable financial pain. It also brought us supermarkets, microwaves, sunscreen, jets, rockets, electron microscopes, magnetic recording, nylon, photocopying, teflon, helicopters, color TV, plexiglass, commercial aviation, most forms of plastic, synthetic rubber, laundromats, and countless other discoveries.”
The prior recession led to trends like Groupon. The McJobs recovery led to services like Uber & DoorDash. Food delivery has been trending south recently, though perhaps the stay-at-home economy will give it a boost.
I have been amazed at how fast affiliates moved with pushing N95 face masks online over the past couple months. Seeing how fast that stuff spun up really increases the perceived value of any sustainable high-margin businesses.
Amazon.com is hiring another 100,000 warehouse workers as people shop from home. Amazon banned new face masks and hand sanitizer listings. One guy had to donate around 18,000 cleaning products he couldn’t sell.
I could see online education becoming far more popular as people aim to retrain while stuck at home.
What sorts of new industries will current & new technologies lead to as more people spend time working from home?
Categories:
Revenue Quality & Leverage
The coronavirus issue is likely to linger for some time.
GERMANY PUBLIC HEALTH AGENCY PRESIDENT SAYS OUR ASSUMPTION IS THAT IT WILL TAKE ABOUT TWO YEARS FOR THIS PANDEMIC TO RUN ITS COURSE— Quantitative Trading (@fiquant) March 17, 2020
Up to 70% of Germany could become infected & some countries like the UK are even considering herd immunity as a strategy:
“I’m an epidemiologist. When I heard about Britain’s ‘herd immunity’ coronavirus plan, I thought it was satire”
– William Hanage
What if their models are broken?
Many companies like WeWork or Oyo have been fast and loose chasing growth while slower growing companies have been levering up to fund share buybacks. Airlines spent 96% of free cash flow on share buybacks. The airlines seek a $50 billion bailout package.
There are knock-on effects from Boeing to TripAdvisor to Google all the way down to travel affiliate blogger, local restaurants closing, the over-levered bus company going through bankruptcy & bondholders eating a loss on the debt.
Companies are going to let a lot of skeletons out of the closet as literally anything and everything bad gets attributed to coronavirus. Layoffs, renegotiating contracts, pausing ad budgets, renegotiating debts, requesting bailouts, etc. The Philippine stock market was recently trading at 2012 levels & closed indefinitely.
Brad Geddes mentioned advertisers have been aggressively pulling PPC budgets over the past week: “If you have to leave the house to engage in the service, it just seems like it’s not converting right now.”
During the prior recession Google repriced employee options to retain talent.
In spite of consumers being glued to the news, tier one news publishers are anticipating large ad revenue declines:
Some of the largest advertisers, including Procter & Gamble Unilever, Apple, Microsoft, Danone, AB InBev, Burberry and Aston Martin, made cuts to sales forecasts for the year. With the outlook for the spread of the virus changing by day, many companies are caught in a spiral of uncertainty. That tends to gum up decisions, and ad spending is an easy expenditure to put on pause. The New York Times has warned that it expects advertising revenue to decline “in the mid-teens” in the current quarter as a result of coronavirus.
More time online might mean search engines & social networks capture a greater share of overall ad spend, but if large swaths of the economy do not convert & how people live changes for an extended period of time it will take time for the new categories to create the economic engines replacing the old out-of-favor categories.
[IMPORTANT: insert affiliate ad for cruise vacations here]
As Google sees advertisers pause ad budgets Google will get more aggressive with keeping users on their site & displacing organic click flows with additional ad clicks on the remaining advertisers.
When Google or Facebook see a 5% or 10% pullback other industry players might see a 30% to 50% decline as the industry pulls back broadly, focuses more resources on the core, and the big attention merchants offset their losses by clamping down on other players.
At its peak TripAdvisor was valued at about $14 billion & it is now valued at about $2 billion.
TripAdvisor announced layoffs. As did Expedia. As did Booking.com. As did many hotels. And airlines. etc. etc. etc.
I am not suggesting people should be fearful or dominated by negative emotions. Rather one should live as though many other will be living that way.
In times of elevated uncertainty, in business it is best to not be led by emotions unless they are positive ones. Spend a bit more time playing if you can afford to & work more on things you love.
Right now we might be living through the flu pandemic of 1918 and the Great Depression of 1929 while having constant access to social media updates. And that’s awful.
Consume less but deeper. Less Twitter, less news, fewer big decisions, read more books.
It is better to be more pragmatic & logic-based in determining opportunity cost & the best strategy to use than to be led by extreme fear.
- If you have sustainable high-margin revenue treasure it.
- If you have low-margin revenue it might quickly turn into negative margin revenues unless something changes quickly.
- If you have low-margin revenue which is sustainable but under-performed less stable high-margin revenues you might want to put a bit more effort into those sorts of projects as they are more likely to endure.
On a positive note, we might soon get a huge wave of innovation…
“Take the Great Depression. Economist Alexander Field writes that “the years 1929–1941 were, in the aggregate, the most technologically progressive of any comparable period in U.S. economic history.” Productivity growth was twice as fast in the 1930s as it was in the decade prior. The 1920s were the era of leisure because people could afford to relax. The 1930s were the era of frantic problem solving because people had no other choice. The Great Depression brought unimaginable financial pain. It also brought us supermarkets, microwaves, sunscreen, jets, rockets, electron microscopes, magnetic recording, nylon, photocopying, teflon, helicopters, color TV, plexiglass, commercial aviation, most forms of plastic, synthetic rubber, laundromats, and countless other discoveries.”
The prior recession led to trends like Groupon. The McJobs recovery led to services like Uber & DoorDash. Food delivery has been trending south recently, though perhaps the stay-at-home economy will give it a boost.
I have been amazed at how fast affiliates moved with pushing N95 face masks online over the past couple months. Seeing how fast that stuff spun up really increases the perceived value of any sustainable high-margin businesses.
Amazon.com is hiring another 100,000 warehouse workers as people shop from home. Amazon banned new face masks and hand sanitizer listings. One guy had to donate around 18,000 cleaning products he couldn’t sell.
I could see online education becoming far more popular as people aim to retrain while stuck at home.
What sorts of new industries will current & new technologies lead to as more people spend time working from home?
Categories:
Subscription Fatigue
Subscription Management
I have active subscriptions with about a half-dozen different news & finance sites along with about a half dozen software tools, but sometimes using a VPN or web proxy across different web browsers makes logging in to all of them & clearing cookies for some paywall sites a real pain.
If you don’t subscribe to any outlets then subscribing to an aggregator like Apple News+ can make a lot of sense, but it is very easy to end up with dozens of forgotten subscriptions.
Subscription fatigue is turning into subscription stress. Something alarming, guilt inducing about having 40+ reoccurring charges each month. Financial death by a thousand cuts.— Tom Goodwin (@tomfgoodwin) January 28, 2020
Winner-take-most Market Stratification
The news business is coming to resemble other tech-enabled businesses where a winner takes most. The New York Times stock, for instance, is trading at 15 year highs & they recently announced they are raising subscription prices:
The New York Times is raising the price of its digital subscription for the first time, from $15 every four weeks to $17 — from about $195 to $221 a year.
With a Trump re-election all but assured after the Russsia, Russia, Russia garbage, the party-line impeachment (less private equity plunderer Mitt Romney) & the ridiculous Iowa primary, many NYT readers will pledge their #NeverTrumpTwice dollars with the New York Times.
If you think politics looks ridiculous today, wait until you see some of the China-related ads in a half-year as the novel coronavirus spreads around the world.
Outside of a few core winners, the news business online has been so brutal that even Warren Buffett is now a seller. As the economics get uglier news sites get more extreme with ad placements, user data sales, and pushing subscriptions. Some of these aggressive monetization efforts make otherwise respectable news outlets look like part of a very downmarket subset of the web.
Users Fight Back
Users have thus adopted to blocking ads & are also starting to ramp up blocking paywall notifications.
- Some of the most popular browser extensions are ad blockers & tracking blockers like Adblock Plus, Ghostery & Privacy Badger.
- Apple has made tracking their users across sites harder with their Intelligent Tracking Prevention, causing iPhone ad rates to plummet: “The allure of a Safari user in an auction has plummeted,” Rubicon Project CEO Michael Barrett told the publication. “There’s no easy ability to ID a user.”
- The Opera web browser comes with an ad blocker baked in.
- Mozilla is also pushing to protect user privacy in Firefox.
- Google recently announced they will stop supporting third party cookies in Chrome in the next couple years. Those who invested into adopting AMP will have to invest into making yet more technical changes to manage paywalls on AMP pages.
Each additional layer of technological complexity is another cost center publishers have to fund, often through making the user experience of their sites worse, which in turn makes their own sites less differentiated & inferior to the copies they have left across the web (via AMP, via Facebook Instant Articles, syndication in Apple News or on various portal sites like MSN or Yahoo!).
A Web Browser For Every Season
Google Chrome is spyware, so I won’t recommend installing that.
Not good enough for you? Not a direct enough corollary? How about this?Also out today: https://t.co/6dUWCCEyii Google has a backdoor to track individual Chrome users by installation ID.Even GG’s denial admits pieces of the same complaints y’all had about Jumpshot last week! pic.twitter.com/Km2mQfOgbJ— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) February 4, 2020
Here Google’s official guide on how to remove the spyware.
The easiest & most basic solution which works across many sites using metered paywalls is to have multiple web browsers installed on your computer. Have a couple browsers which are used exclusively for reading news articles when they won’t show up in your main browser & set those web browsers to delete cookies on close. Or open the browsers in private mode and search for the URL of the page from Google to see if that allows access.
- If you like Firefox there are other iterations from other players like Pale Moon, Comodo IceDragon or Waterfox using their core.
- If you like Google Chrome then Chromium is the parallel version of it without the spyware baked in. The Chromium project is also the underlying source used to build about a dozen other web browsers including: Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, Cilqz, Blisk, Comodo Dragon, SRWare Iron, Yandex Browser & many others. Even Microsoft recently switched their Edge browser to being powered by the Chromium project. The browsers based on the Chromium store allow you to install extensions from the Chrome web store.
- Some web browsers monetize users by setting affiliate links on the home screen and/or by selling the default search engine recommendation. You can change those once and they’ll typically stick with whatever settings you use.
- For some browsers I use for regular day to day web use I set them up to continue session on restart, and I have a session manager plugin like this one for Firefox or this one for Chromium-based browsers. For browsers which are used exclusively for reading paywall blocked articles I set them up to clear cookies on restart.
Bypassing Paywalls
There are a couple solid web browser plugins built specifically for bypassing paywalls.
Academic Journals
Unpaywall is an open database of around 25,000,000 free scholarly articles. They provide extensions for Firefox and Chromium based web browsers on their website.
News Articles
There is also one for news publications called bypass paywalls.
- Mozilla Firefox: To install the Firefox version go here.
- Chrome-like web browsers: To install the Chrome version of the extension in Opera or Chromium or Microsoft Edge you can download the extension here, enter developer mode inside the extensions area of your web browser & install extension. To turn developer mode on, open up the drop down menu for the browser, click on extensions to go to the extension management area, and then slide the “Developer mode” button to the right so it is blue.
Regional Blocking
If you travel internationally some websites like YouTube or Twitter or news sites will have portions of their content restricted to only showing in some geographic regions. This can be especially true for new sports content and some music.
These can be bypassed by using a VPN service like NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Witopia or IPVanish. Some VPN providers also sell pre-configured routers. If you buy a pre-configured router you can use an ethernet switch or wifi to switch back and forth between the regular router and the VPN router.
You can also buy web proxies & enter them into the Foxy Proxy web browser extension (Firefox or Chromium-compatible) with different browsers set to default to different country locations, making it easier to see what the search results show in different countries & cities quickly.
If you use a variety of web proxies you can configure some of them to work automatically in an open source rank tracking tool like Serposcope.
The Future of Journalism
I think the future of news is going to be a lot more sites like Ben Thompson’s Stratechery or Jessica Lessin’s TheInformation & far fewer broad/horizontal news organizations. Things are moving toward the 1,000 true fans or perhaps 100 true fans model:
This represents a move away from the traditional donation model—in which users pay to benefit the creator—to a value model, in which users are willing to pay more for something that benefits themselves. What was traditionally dubbed “self-help” now exists under the umbrella of “wellness.” People are willing to pay more for exclusive, ROI-positive services that are constructive in their lives, whether it’s related to health, finances, education, or work. In the offline world, people are accustomed to hiring experts across verticals
A friend of mine named Terry Godier launched a conversion-oriented email newsletter named Conversion Gold which has done quite well right out of the gate, leading him to launch IndieMailer, a community for paid newsletter creators.
The model which seems to be working well for those sorts of news sites is…
- stick to a tight topic range
- publish regularly at a somewhat decent frequency like daily or weekly, though have a strong preference to quality & originality over quantity
- have a single author or a small core team which does most the writing and expand editorial hiring slowly
- offer original insights & much more depth of coverage than you would typically find in the mainstream news
- Rely on Wordpress or a low-cost CMS & billing technology partner like Substack, Memberful, sell on a marketplace like Udemy, Podia or Teachable, or if they have a bit more technical chops they can install aMember on their own server. One of the biggest mistakes I made when I opened up a membership site about a decade back was hand rolling custom code for memberhsip management. At one point we shut down the membership site for a while in order to allow us to rip out all that custom code & replace it with aMember.
- Accept user comments on pieces or integrate a user forum using something like Discord on a subdomain or a custom Slack channel. Highlight or feature the best comments. Update readers to new features via email.
- Invest much more into obtaining unique data & sources to deliver new insights without spending aggressively to syndicate onto other platforms using graphical content layouts which would require significant design, maintenance & updating expenses
- Heavily differentiate your perspective from other sources
- maintain a low technological maintenance overhead
- low cost monthly subscription with a solid discount for annual pre-payment
- instead of using a metered paywall, set some content to require payment to read & periodically publish full-feature free content (perhaps weekly) to keep up awareness of the offering in the broader public to help offset churn.
Some also work across multiple formats with complimentary offerings. The Ringer has done well with podcasts & Stratechery also has the Exponent podcast.
There are a number of other successful online-only news subscription sites like TheAthletic & Bill Bishop’s Sinocism newsletter about China, but I haven’t subscribed to them yet. Many people support a wide range of projects on platforms like Patreon & sites like MasterClass with an all-you-can-eat subscription will also make paying for online content far more common..
Categories:
Subscription Fatigue
Subscription Management
I have active subscriptions with about a half-dozen different news & finance sites along with about a half dozen software tools, but sometimes using a VPN or web proxy across different web browsers makes logging in to all of them & clearing cookies for some paywall sites a real pain.
If you don’t subscribe to any outlets then subscribing to an aggregator like Apple News+ can make a lot of sense, but it is very easy to end up with dozens of forgotten subscriptions.
Subscription fatigue is turning into subscription stress. Something alarming, guilt inducing about having 40+ reoccurring charges each month.
Financial death by a thousand cuts.— Tom Goodwin (@tomfgoodwin) January 28, 2020
Winner-take-most Market Stratification
The news business is coming to resemble other tech-enabled businesses where a winner takes most. The New York Times stock, for instance, is trading at 15 year highs & they recently announced they are raising subscription prices:
The New York Times is raising the price of its digital subscription for the first time, from $15 every four weeks to $17 — from about $195 to $221 a year.
With a Trump re-election all but assured after the Russsia, Russia, Russia garbage, the party-line impeachment (less private equity plunderer Mitt Romney) & the ridiculous Iowa primary, many NYT readers will pledge their #NeverTrumpTwice dollars with the New York Times.
If you think politics looks ridiculous today, wait until you see some of the China-related ads in a half-year as the 2019 novel coronavirus spreads around the world.
Police in Central China’s Wuhan arrested 8 people spreading rumors about local outbreak of unidentifiable #pneumonia. Previous online posts said it was SARS. https://t.co/oVpk4EIYM7 pic.twitter.com/JXbK9pmq8v— Global Times (@globaltimesnews) January 1, 2020
Arresting a doctor who warned about the outbreak doesn’t have good optics, particularly after hundreds of other deaths piled up from it & when he later died from from the virus.
The optics keep getting worse.
Somewhere in Wuhan, three unknown people are wearing protective clothing but holding guns @SolomonYue #China_is_terrorist pic.twitter.com/cq28z0sPiF— 港英漁業 (@lym104_hker) February 1, 2020
How does a broad-based news site compete with the user generated Tweets in such a zone?
WATCH: Chinese authorities are now WELDING DOORS SHUT to whole apartment buildings, as well as residents inside – to impose #Coronavirus quarantine. #Wuhan pic.twitter.com/feclKG90pC— AS-Source News (@ASBreakingNews) February 8, 2020
And any widely known individual journalist who builds a large audience might get disappeared.
Twitter recently surpassed $1 billion in quarterly revenues, but time spent on Twitter is time not spent on other news websites.
McClatchy filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. Outside of a few core winners, the news business online has been so brutal that even Warren Buffett is now a seller. As the economics get uglier news sites get more extreme with ad placements, user data sales, and pushing subscriptions. Some of these aggressive monetization efforts make otherwise respectable news outlets look like part of a very downmarket subset of the web.
Users Fight Back
Users have thus adopted to blocking ads & are also starting to ramp up blocking paywall notifications.
- Some of the most popular browser extensions are ad blockers & tracking blockers like Adblock Plus, Ghostery & Privacy Badger.
- Apple has made tracking their users across sites harder with their Intelligent Tracking Prevention, causing iPhone ad rates to plummet: “The allure of a Safari user in an auction has plummeted,” Rubicon Project CEO Michael Barrett told the publication. “There’s no easy ability to ID a user.”
- The Opera web browser comes with an ad blocker baked in.
- Mozilla is also pushing to protect user privacy in Firefox.
- Google recently announced they will stop supporting third party cookies in Chrome in the next couple years. Those who invested into adopting AMP will have to invest into making yet more technical changes to manage paywalls on AMP pages.
Each additional layer of technological complexity is another cost center publishers have to fund, often through making the user experience of their sites worse, which in turn makes their own sites less differentiated & inferior to the copies they have left across the web (via AMP, via Facebook Instant Articles, syndication in Apple News or on various portal sites like MSN or Yahoo!).
A Web Browser For Every Season
Google Chrome is spyware, so I won’t recommend installing that.
Not good enough for you? Not a direct enough corollary? How about this?
Also out today: https://t.co/6dUWCCEyii Google has a backdoor to track individual Chrome users by installation ID.
Even GG’s denial admits pieces of the same complaints y’all had about Jumpshot last week! pic.twitter.com/Km2mQfOgbJ— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) February 4, 2020
Here Google’s official guide on how to remove the spyware.
The easiest & most basic solution which works across many sites using metered paywalls is to have multiple web browsers installed on your computer. Have a couple browsers which are used exclusively for reading news articles when they won’t show up in your main browser & set those web browsers to delete cookies on close. Or open the browsers in private mode and search for the URL of the page from Google to see if that allows access.
- If you like Firefox there are other iterations from other players like Pale Moon, Comodo IceDragon or Waterfox using their core.
- If you like Google Chrome then Chromium is the parallel version of it without the spyware baked in. The Chromium project is also the underlying source used to build about a dozen other web browsers including: Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, Cilqz, Blisk, Comodo Dragon, SRWare Iron, Yandex Browser & many others. Even Microsoft recently switched their Edge browser to being powered by the Chromium project. The browsers based on the Chromium store allow you to install extensions from the Chrome web store.
- Some web browsers monetize users by setting affiliate links on the home screen and/or by selling the default search engine recommendation. You can change those once and they’ll typically stick with whatever settings you use.
- For some browsers I use for regular day to day web use I set them up to continue session on restart, and I have a session manager plugin like this one for Firefox or this one for Chromium-based browsers. For browsers which are used exclusively for reading paywall blocked articles I set them up to clear cookies on restart.
Bypassing Paywalls
There are a couple solid web browser plugins built specifically for bypassing paywalls.
Academic Journals
Unpaywall is an open database of around 25,000,000 free scholarly articles. They provide extensions for Firefox and Chromium based web browsers on their website.
News Articles
There is also one for news publications called bypass paywalls.
- Mozilla Firefox: To install the Firefox version go here.
- Chrome-like web browsers: To install the Chrome version of the extension in Opera or Chromium or Microsoft Edge you can download the extension here, enter developer mode inside the extensions area of your web browser & install extension. To turn developer mode on, open up the drop down menu for the browser, click on extensions to go to the extension management area, and then slide the “Developer mode” button to the right so it is blue.
Regional Blocking
If you travel internationally some websites like YouTube or Twitter or news sites will have portions of their content restricted to only showing in some geographic regions. This can be especially true for new sports content and some music.
These can be bypassed by using a VPN service like NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Witopia or IPVanish. Some VPN providers also sell pre-configured routers. If you buy a pre-configured router you can use an ethernet switch or wifi to switch back and forth between the regular router and the VPN router.
You can also buy web proxies & enter them into the Foxy Proxy web browser extension (Firefox or Chromium-compatible) with different browsers set to default to different country locations, making it easier to see what the search results show in different countries & cities quickly.
If you use a variety of web proxies you can configure some of them to work automatically in an open source rank tracking tool like Serposcope.
The Future of Journalism
I think the future of news is going to be a lot more sites like Ben Thompson’s Stratechery or Jessica Lessin’s TheInformation & far fewer broad/horizontal news organizations. Things are moving toward the 1,000 true fans or perhaps 100 true fans model:
This represents a move away from the traditional donation model—in which users pay to benefit the creator—to a value model, in which users are willing to pay more for something that benefits themselves. What was traditionally dubbed “self-help” now exists under the umbrella of “wellness.” People are willing to pay more for exclusive, ROI-positive services that are constructive in their lives, whether it’s related to health, finances, education, or work. In the offline world, people are accustomed to hiring experts across verticals
A friend of mine named Terry Godier launched a conversion-oriented email newsletter named Conversion Gold which has done quite well right out of the gate, leading him to launch IndieMailer, a community for paid newsletter creators.
The model which seems to be working well for those sorts of news sites is…
- stick to a tight topic range
- publish regularly at a somewhat decent frequency like daily or weekly, though have a strong preference to quality & originality over quantity
- have a single author or a small core team which does most the writing and expand editorial hiring slowly
- offer original insights & much more depth of coverage than you would typically find in the mainstream news
- Rely on Wordpress or a low-cost CMS & billing technology partner like Substack, Memberful, sell on a marketplace like Udemy, Podia or Teachable, or if they have a bit more technical chops they can install aMember on their own server. One of the biggest mistakes I made when I opened up a membership site about a decade back was hand rolling custom code for memberhsip management. At one point we shut down the membership site for a while in order to allow us to rip out all that custom code & replace it with aMember.
- Accept user comments on pieces or integrate a user forum using something like Discord on a subdomain or a custom Slack channel. Highlight or feature the best comments. Update readers to new features via email.
- Invest much more into obtaining unique data & sources to deliver new insights without spending aggressively to syndicate onto other platforms using graphical content layouts which would require significant design, maintenance & updating expenses
- Heavily differentiate your perspective from other sources
- maintain a low technological maintenance overhead
- low cost monthly subscription with a solid discount for annual pre-payment
- instead of using a metered paywall, set some content to require payment to read & periodically publish full-feature free content (perhaps weekly) to keep up awareness of the offering in the broader public to help offset churn.
Some also work across multiple formats with complimentary offerings. The Ringer has done well with podcasts & Stratechery also has the Exponent podcast.
There are a number of other successful online-only news subscription sites like TheAthletic & Bill Bishop’s Sinocism newsletter about China, but I haven’t subscribed to them yet. Many people support a wide range of projects on platforms like Patreon & sites like MasterClass with an all-you-can-eat subscription will also make paying for online content far more common.
Categories:
Favicon SEO
Google recently copied their mobile result layout over to desktop search results. The three big pieces which changed as part of that update were
- URLs: In many cases Google will now show breadcrumbs in the search results rather than showing the full URL. The layout no longer differentiates between HTTP and HTTPS. And the URLs shifted from an easily visible green color to a much easier to miss black.
- Favicons: All listings now show a favicon next to them.
- Ad labeling: ad labeling is in the same spot as favicons are for organic search results, but the ad labels are a black which sort of blends in to the URL line. Over time expect the black ad label to become a lighter color in a way that parallels how Google made ad background colors lighter over time.
Last year, our search results on mobile gained a new look. That’s now rolling out to desktop results this week, presenting site domain names and brand icons prominently, along with a bolded “Ad” label for ads. Here’s a mockup: pic.twitter.com/aM9UAbSKtv— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) January 13, 2020
One could expect this change to boost the CTR on ads while lowering the CTR on organic search results, at least up until users get used to seeing favicons and not thinking of them as being ads.
The Verge panned the SERP layout update. Some folks on Reddit hate this new layout as it is visually distracting, the contrast on the URLs is worse, and many people think the organic results are ads.
Conspiracy Theory: The REAL reason icons are in SERPs is to encourage “banner blindness” for the “Ad” text. Once people see the icons over and over, they will learn to mentally ignore the top left. pic.twitter.com/LaXdZjNLK1— Rishi Lakhani (@rishil) January 17, 2020
I suspect a lot of phishing sites will use subdomains patterned off the brand they are arbitraging coupled with bogus favicons to try to look authentic. I wouldn’t reconstruct an existing site’s structure based on the current search result layout, but if I were building a brand new site I might prefer to put it at the root instead of on www so the words were that much closer to the logo.
Google provides the following guidelines for favicons
- Both the favicon file and the home page must be crawlable by Google (that is, they cannot be blocked to Google).
- Your favicon should be a visual representation of your website’s brand, in order to help users quickly identify your site when they scan through search results.
- Your favicon should be a multiple of 48px square, for example: 48x48px, 96x96px, 144x144px and so on. SVG files, of course, do not have a specific size. Any valid favicon format is supported. Google will rescale your image to 16x16px for use in search results, so make sure that it looks good at that resolution. Note: do not provide a 16x16px favicon.
- The favicon URL should be stable (don’t change the URL frequently).
- Google will not show any favicon that it deems inappropriate, including pornography or hate symbols (for example, swastikas). If this type of imagery is discovered within a favicon, Google will replace it with a default icon.
In addition to the above, I thought it would make sense to provide a few other tips for optimizing favicons.
- Keep your favicons consistent across sections of your site if you are trying to offer a consistent brand perception.
- In general, less is more. 16×16 is a tiny space, so if you try to convey a lot of information inside of it, you’ll likely end up creating a blob that almost nobody but you recognizes.
- It can make sense to include the first letter from a site’s name or a simplified logo widget as the favicon, but it is hard to include both in a single favicon without it looking overdone & cluttered.
- A colored favicon on a white background generally looks better than a white icon on a colored background, as having a colored background means you are eating into some of the scarce pixel space for a border.
- Using a square shape versus a circle gives you more surface area to work with.
- Even if your logo has italics on it, it might make sense to avoid using italics in the favicon to make the letter look cleaner.
Here are a few favicons I like & why I like them:
Citigroup – manages to get the word Citi in there while looking memorable & distinctive without looking overly cluttered
Nerdwallet – the N makes a great use of space, the colors are sharp, and it almost feels like an arrow that is pointing right
Inc – the bold I with a period is strong.
LinkedIn – very memorable using a small part of the word from their logo & good color usage.
Some of the other memorable ones that I like include: 
Twitter, 
Amazon, 
eBay, 
Paypal, 
Google Play & 
CNBC.
Here are a few favicons I dislike & why
Wikipedia – the W is hard to read.
USAA – they included both the logo widget and the 4 letters in a tiny space. 
Yahoo! – they used inconsistent favicons across their sites & use italics on them. Some of the favicons have the whole word Yahoo in them while the others are the Y! in italics.
If you do not have a favicon Google will show a dull globe 
next to your listing. Real Favicon Generator is a good tool for creating favicons in various sizes.
What favicons do you really like? Which big sites do you see that are doing it wrong?
Categories:
Favicon SEO
Google recently copied their mobile result layout over to desktop search results. The three big pieces which changed as part of that update were
- URLs: In many cases Google will now show breadcrumbs in the search results rather than showing the full URL. The layout no longer differentiates between HTTP and HTTPS. And the URLs shifted from an easily visible green color to a much easier to miss black.
- Favicons: All listings now show a favicon next to them.
- Ad labeling: ad labeling is in the same spot as favicons are for organic search results, but the ad labels are a black which sort of blends in to the URL line. Over time expect the black ad label to become a lighter color in a way that parallels how Google made ad background colors lighter over time.
Last year, our search results on mobile gained a new look. That’s now rolling out to desktop results this week, presenting site domain names and brand icons prominently, along with a bolded “Ad” label for ads. Here’s a mockup: pic.twitter.com/aM9UAbSKtv— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) January 13, 2020
One could expect this change to boost the CTR on ads while lowering the CTR on organic search results, at least up until users get used to seeing favicons and not thinking of them as being ads.
The Verge panned the SERP layout update. Some folks on Reddit hate this new layout as it is visually distracting, the contrast on the URLs is worse, and many people think the organic results are ads.
Conspiracy Theory: The REAL reason icons are in SERPs is to encourage “banner blindness” for the “Ad” text. Once people see the icons over and over, they will learn to mentally ignore the top left. pic.twitter.com/LaXdZjNLK1— Rishi Lakhani (@rishil) January 17, 2020
I suspect a lot of phishing sites will use subdomains patterned off the brand they are arbitraging coupled with bogus favicons to try to look authentic. I wouldn’t reconstruct an existing site’s structure based on the current search result layout, but if I were building a brand new site I might prefer to put it at the root instead of on www so the words were that much closer to the logo.
Google provides the following guidelines for favicons
- Both the favicon file and the home page must be crawlable by Google (that is, they cannot be blocked to Google).
- Your favicon should be a visual representation of your website’s brand, in order to help users quickly identify your site when they scan through search results.
- Your favicon should be a multiple of 48px square, for example: 48x48px, 96x96px, 144x144px and so on. SVG files, of course, do not have a specific size. Any valid favicon format is supported. Google will rescale your image to 16x16px for use in search results, so make sure that it looks good at that resolution. Note: do not provide a 16x16px favicon.
- The favicon URL should be stable (don’t change the URL frequently).
- Google will not show any favicon that it deems inappropriate, including pornography or hate symbols (for example, swastikas). If this type of imagery is discovered within a favicon, Google will replace it with a default icon.
In addition to the above, I thought it would make sense to provide a few other tips for optimizing favicons.
- Keep your favicons consistent across sections of your site if you are trying to offer a consistent brand perception.
- In general, less is more. 16×16 is a tiny space, so if you try to convey a lot of information inside of it, you’ll likely end up creating a blob that almost nobody but you recognizes.
- It can make sense to include the first letter from a site’s name or a simplified logo widget as the favicon, but it is hard to include both in a single favicon without it looking overdone & cluttered.
- A colored favicon on a white background generally looks better than a white icon on a colored background, as having a colored background means you are eating into some of the scarce pixel space for a border.
- Using a square shape versus a circle gives you more surface area to work with.
- Even if your logo has italics on it, it might make sense to avoid using italics in the favicon to make the letter look cleaner.
Here are a few favicons I like & why I like them:
- Citigroup – manages to get the word Citi in there while looking memorable & distinctive without looking overly cluttered
- Nerdwallet – the N makes a great use of space, the colors are sharp, and it almost feels like an arrow that is pointing right
- Inc – the bold I with a period is strong.
- LinkedIn – very memorable using a small part of the word from their logo & good color usage.
Some of the other memorable ones that I like include: Twitter, Amazon, eBay, Paypal, Google Play & CNBC.
Here are a few favicons I dislike & why
- Wikipedia – the W is hard to read.
- USAA – they included both the logo widget and the 4 letters in a tiny space.
- Yahoo! – they used inconsistent favicons across their sites & use italics on them. Some of the favicons have the whole word Yahoo in them while the others are the Y! in italics.
If you do not have a favicon Google will show a dull globe next to your listing. Real Favicon Generator is a good tool for creating favicons in various sizes.
What favicons do you really like? Which big sites do you see that are doing it wrong?
Categories:
Brands vs Ads
About 7 years ago I wrote about how the search relevancy algorithms were placing heavy weighting on brand-related signals after Vince & Panda on the (half correct!) presumption that this would lead to excessive industry consolidation which in turn would force Google to turn the dials in the other direction.
My thesis was Google would need to increasingly promote some smaller niche sites to make general web search differentiated from other web channels & minimize the market power of vertical leading providers.
The reason my thesis was only half correct (and ultimately led to the absolutely wrong conclusion) is Google has the ability to provide the illusion of diversity while using sort of eye candy displacement efforts to shift an increasing share of searches from organic to paid results.
As long as any market has at least 2 competitors in it Google can create a “me too” offering that they hard code front & center and force the other 2 players (along with other players along the value chain) to bid for marketshare. If competitors are likely to complain about the thinness of the me too offering & it being built upon scraping other websites, Google can buy out a brand like Zagat or a data supplier like ITA Software to undermine criticism until the artificially promoted vertical service has enough usage that it is nearly on par with other players in the ecosystem.
Google need not win every market. They only need to ensure there are at least 2 competing bids left in the marketplace while dialing back SEO exposure. They can then run other services to redirect user flow and force the ad buy. They can insert their own bid as a sort of shill floor bid in their auction. If you bid below that amount they’ll collect the profit through serving the customer directly, if you bid above that they’ll let you buy the customer vs doing a direct booking.
Where this gets more than a bit tricky is if you are a supplier of third party goods & services where you buy in bulk to get preferential pricing for resale. If you buy 100 rooms a night from a particular hotel based on the presumption of prior market performance & certain channels effectively disappear you have to bid above market to sell some portion of the rooms because getting anything for them is better than leaving them unsold.
Dipping a bit back into history here, but after Groupon said no to Google’s acquisition offer Google promptly partnered with players 2 through n to ensure Groupon did not have a lasting competitive advantage. In the fullness of time most those companies died, LivingSocial was acquired by Groupon for nothing & Groupon is today worth less than the amount they raised in VC & IPO funding.
Most large markets will ultimately consolidate down to a couple players (e.g. Booking vs Expedia) while smaller players lack the scale needed to have the economic leverage to pay Google’s increasing rents.
This sort of consolidation was happening even when the search results were mostly organic & relevancy was driven primarily by links. As Google has folded in usage data & increased ad load on the search results it becomes harder for a generically descriptive domain name to build brand-related signals.
It is not only generically descriptive sorts of sites that have faded though. Many brand investments turned out to be money losers after the search result set was displaced by more ads (& many brand-related search result pages also carry ads above the organic results).
The ill informed might write something like this:
Since the Motorola debacle, it was Google’s largest acquisition after the $676 million purchase of ITA Software, which became Google Flights. (Uh, remember that? Does anyone use that instead of Travelocity or one of the many others? Neither do I.)
The reality is brands lose value as the organic result set is displaced. To make the margins work they might desperately outsource just about everything but marketing to a competitor / partner, which will then latter acquire them for a song.
Travelocity had roughly 3,000 people on the payroll globally as recently as a couple of years ago, but the Travelocity workforce has been whittled to around 50 employees in North America with many based in the Dallas area.
The best relevancy algorithm in the world is trumped by preferential placement of inferior results which bypasses the algorithm. If inferior results are hard coded in placements which violate net neutrality for an extended period of time, they can starve other players in the market from the vital user data & revenues needed to reinvest into growth and differentiation.
Value plays see their stocks crash as growth slows or goes in reverse. With the exception of startups frunded by Softbank, growth plays are locked out of receiving further investment rounds as their growth rate slides.
Startups like Hipmunk disappear. Even an Orbitz or Travelocity become bolt on acquisitions.
The viability of TripAdvisor as a stand alone business becomes questioned, leading them to partner with Ctrip.
TripAdvisor has one of the best link profiles of any commercially oriented website outside of perhaps Amazon.com. But ranking #1 doesn’t count for much if that #1 ranking is below the fold.
TripAdvisor shifted their business model to allow direct booking to better monetize mobile web users, but as Google has ate screen real estate and grew Google Travel into a $100 billion business other players have seen their stocks sag.
Google sits at the top of the funnel & all other parts of the value chain are compliments to be commoditized.
- Buy premium domain names? Google’s SERPs test replacing domain names with words & make the domain name gray.
- Improve conversion rates? Your competitor almost certainly did as well, now you both can bid more & hand over an increasing economic rent to Google.
- Invest in brand awareness? Google shows ads for competitors on your brand terms, forcing you to buy to protect the brand equity you paid to build.
Search Metrics mentioned Hotels.com was one of the biggest losers during the recent algorithm updates: “I’m going to keep on this same theme there, and I’m not going to say overall numbers, the biggest loser, but for my loser I’m going to pick Hotels.com, because they were literally like neck and neck, like one and two with Booking, as far as how close together they were, and the last four weeks, they’ve really increased that separation.”
As Google ate the travel category the value of hotel-related domain names has fallen through the floor.
Most of the top selling hotel-related domain names were sold about a decade ago:
On August 8th HongKongHotels.com sold for $4,038. And the buyer may have overpaid for it!
Google consistently grows their ad revenues 20% a year in a global economy growing at under 4%.
There are only about 6 ways they can do that
- growth of web usage (though many of those who are getting online today have a far lower disposable income than those who got on a decade or two ago did)
- gain marketshare (very hard in search given that they effectively are the market in most markets outside of China & Russia)
- create new inventory (new ad types on Google Maps & YouTube)
- charge more for clicks
- improve at targeting by better surveillance of web users (getting harder after GDPR & similar efforts from some states in the next year or two)
- shift click streams away from organic toward paid channels (through larger ads, more interactive ad units, less appealing organic result formatting, etc.)
Wednesday both Expedia and TripAdvisor reported earnings after hours & both fell off a cliff: “Both Okerstrom and Kaufer complained that their organic, or free, links are ending up further down the page in Google search results as Google prioritizes its own travel businesses.”
Losing 20% to 25% of your market cap in a single day is an extreme move for a company worth billions of dollars.
Thursday Google hit fresh all time highs.
“Google’s old motto was ‘Don’t Be Evil’, but you can’t be this big and profitable and not be evil. Evil and all-time highs pretty much go hand in hand.” – Howard Lindzon
Booking held up much better than TripAdvisor & Expedia as they have a bigger footprint in Europe (where antitrust is a thing) and they have a higher reliance on paid search versus organic.
The broader SEO industry is to some degree frozen by fear. Roughly half of SEOs claim to have not bought *ANY* links in a half-decade.
Anonymous survey: have you (or your company) purchased backlinks – of ANY quality – for your own site, or any of your clients’ sites, at any point in the past ~5 years?— Lily Ray (@lilyraynyc) October 24, 2019
Long after most of the industry has stopped buying links some people still run the “paid links are a potential FTC violation guideline” line as though it is insightful and/or useful.
Some people may be violating FTC rules by purchasing links that are not labeled as sponsored. This includes “content marketers” who publish articles with paid links on sites they curate. It’s a ticking time bomb because it’s illegal.— Roger Montti (@martinibuster) October 24, 2019
Ask the people carrying Google’s water what they think of the official FTC guidance on poor ad labeling in search results and you will hear the beautiful sound of crickets chirping.
Where is the ad labeling in this unit?
Does small gray text in the upper right corner stating “about these results” count as legitimate ad labeling?
And then when you scroll over that gray text and click on it you get “Some of these hotel search results may be personalized based on your browsing activity and recent searches on Google, as well as travel confirmations sent to your Gmail. Hotel prices come from Google’s partners.”
Zooming out a bit further on the above ad unit to look at the entire search result page, we can now see the following:
- 4 text ad units above the map
- huge map which segments demand by price tier, current sales, luxury, average review, geographic location
- organic results below the above wall of ads, and the number of organic search results has been reduced from 10 to 7
How many scrolls does one need to do to get past the above wall of ads?
If one clicks on one of the hotel prices the follow up page is … more ads.
Check out how the ad label is visually overwhelmed by a bright blue pop over.
Worth noting Google Chrome has a built-in ad blocking feature which allows them to strip all ads from displaying on third party websites if they follow Google’s best practices layout used in the search results.
You won’t see ads on websites that have poor ad experiences, like:
- Too many ads
- Annoying ads with flashing graphics or autoplaying audio
- Ad walls before you can see content
When these ads are blocked, you’ll see an “Intrusive ads blocked” message. Intrusive ads will be removed from the page.
The following 4 are all true:
- Google buys entire businesses, guts them & sells them for parts.
- Google’s core business model is selling paid links with ever lighter disclosure.
- Some SEOs suggest selling links or exposure is beneath them.
- Ex-Google employees leverage their past gains to buy well linked sites like Money.com.
And, as a bonus, to some paid links are a crime but Google can sponsor academic conferences for market regulators while requesting the payments not be disclosed.
Hotels have been at the forefront of SEO for many years. They drive massive revenues & were perhaps the only vertical ever referenced in the Google rater guidelines which stated all affiliate sites should be labeled as spam even if they are helpful to users.
Google has won most of the profits in the travel market & so they’ll need to eat other markets to continue their 20% annual growth.
Some people who market themselves as SEO experts not only recognize this trend but even encourage this sort of behavior:
Zoopla, Rightmove and On The Market are all dominant players in the industry, and many of their house and apartment listings are duplicated across the different property portals. This represents a very real reason for Google to step in and create a more streamlined service that will help users make a more informed decision. … The launch of Google Jobs should not have come as a surprise to anyone, and neither should its potential foray into real estate. Google will want to diversify its revenue channels as much as possible, and any market that allows it to do so will be in its sights. It is no longer a matter of if they succeed, but when.
The dominance Google has in core profitable vertical markets also exists in the news & general publishing categories. Some publishers get more traffic from Google Discover than from Google search. Inclusion in Google Discover requires using Google’s proprietary AMP format.
Publishers which try to turn off Google’s programmatic ads find their display ad revenues fall off a cliff:
“Nexstar Media Group Inc., the largest local news company in the U.S., recently tested what would happen if it stopped using Google’s technology to place ads on its websites. Over several days, the company’s video ad sales plummeted. “That’s a huge revenue hit,” said Tony Katsur, senior vice president at Nexstar. After its brief test, Nexstar switched back to Google.” … “Regulators who approved that $3.1 billion deal warned they would step in if the company tied together its offerings in anticompetitive ways. In interviews, dozens of publishing and advertising executives said Google is doing just that with an array of interwoven products.”
News is operating like many other (broken) markets. The Salt Lake Tribune converted to a nonprofit organization.
Many local markets have been consolidated down to ownership by a couple private equity shop roll ups looking to further consolidate the market. Gatehouse Media is acquiring Gannett.
The Washington Post – owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos – is creating an ad tech stack which serves other publishers & brands, though they also believe a reliance on advertiser & subscription revenue is unsustainable: “We are too beholden to just advertiser and subscriber revenue, and we’re completely out of our minds if we think that’s what’s going to be what carries us through the next generation of publishing. That’s very clear.”
We are nearing many inflection points in many markets where markets that seemed somewhat disconnected from search will still end up being dominated by Google. Gmail, Android, Web Analytics, Play Store, YouTube, Maps, Waze … are all additional points of leverage beyond the core search & ads products.
Google is investing heavily in quantum computing. Google Fiber was a nothingburger to force competing ISPs into accelerating expensive network upgrades, but beaming in internet services from satellites will allow Google to bypass local politics, local regulations & heavy network infrastructure construction costs. A startup named Kepler recently provided high-bandwidth connectivity to the Arctic. When Google launches a free ISP there will be many knock on effects causing partners to long for the day where Google was only as predatory as they are today.
Categories:
Brands vs Ads
Brand, Brand, Brand
About 7 years ago I wrote about how the search relevancy algorithms were placing heavy weighting on brand-related signals after Vince & Panda on the (half correct!) presumption that this would lead to excessive industry consolidation which in turn would force Google to turn the dials in the other direction.
My thesis was Google would need to increasingly promote some smaller niche sites to make general web search differentiated from other web channels & minimize the market power of vertical leading providers.
The reason my thesis was only half correct (and ultimately led to the absolutely wrong conclusion) is Google has the ability to provide the illusion of diversity while using sort of eye candy displacement efforts to shift an increasing share of searches from organic to paid results.
Shallow Verticals With a Shill Bid
As long as any market has at least 2 competitors in it Google can create a “me too” offering that they hard code front & center and force the other 2 players (along with other players along the value chain) to bid for marketshare. If competitors are likely to complain about the thinness of the me too offering & it being built upon scraping other websites, Google can buy out a brand like Zagat or a data supplier like ITA Software to undermine criticism until the artificially promoted vertical service has enough usage that it is nearly on par with other players in the ecosystem.
Google need not win every market. They only need to ensure there are at least 2 competing bids left in the marketplace while dialing back SEO exposure. They can then run other services to redirect user flow and force the ad buy. They can insert their own bid as a sort of shill floor bid in their auction. If you bid below that amount they’ll collect the profit through serving the customer directly, if you bid above that they’ll let you buy the customer vs doing a direct booking.
Adding Volatility to Economies of Scale
Where this gets more than a bit tricky is if you are a supplier of third party goods & services where you buy in bulk to get preferential pricing for resale. If you buy 100 rooms a night from a particular hotel based on the presumption of prior market performance & certain channels effectively disappear you have to bid above market to sell some portion of the rooms because getting anything for them is better than leaving them unsold.
“Well I am not in hotels, so thankfully this won’t impact me” is an incomplete thought. Google Ads now offer a lead generation extension.
Dipping a bit back into history here, but after Groupon said no to Google’s acquisition offer Google promptly partnered with players 2 through n to ensure Groupon did not have a lasting competitive advantage. In the fullness of time most those companies died, LivingSocial was acquired by Groupon for nothing & Groupon is today worth less than the amount they raised in VC & IPO funding.
Markets Naturally Evolve Toward Promoting Brands
When a vertical is new a player can compete just by showing up. Then over time as the verticals become established consumers develop habits, brands beat out generics & the markets get consolidated down to being heavily influenced & controlled by a couple strong players.
In the offline world of atoms there are real world costs tied to local regulations, shipping, sourcing, supply chains, inventory management, etc. The structure of the web & the lack of marginal distribution cost causes online markets to be even more consolidated than their offline analogs.
When Travelocity outsourced their backend infrastructure to Expedia most people visiting their website were unaware of the change. After Expedia acquired the site, longtime Travelocity customers likely remained unaware. In some businesses the only significant difference in the user experience is the logo at the top of the page.
Most large markets will ultimately consolidate down to a couple players (e.g. Booking vs Expedia) while smaller players lack the scale needed to have the economic leverage to pay Google’s increasing rents.
This sort of consolidation was happening even when the search results were mostly organic & relevancy was driven primarily by links. As Google has folded in usage data & increased ad load on the search results it becomes harder for a generically descriptive domain name to build brand-related signals.
Re-sorting the Markets Once More
It is not only generically descriptive sorts of sites that have faded though. Many brand investments turned out to be money losers after the search result set was displaced by more ads (& many brand-related search result pages also carry ads above the organic results).
The ill informed might write something like this:
Since the Motorola debacle, it was Google’s largest acquisition after the $676 million purchase of ITA Software, which became Google Flights. (Uh, remember that? Does anyone use that instead of Travelocity or one of the many others? Neither do I.)
The reality is brands lose value as the organic result set is displaced. To make the margins work they might desperately outsource just about everything but marketing to a competitor / partner, which will then latter acquire them for a song.
Travelocity had roughly 3,000 people on the payroll globally as recently as a couple of years ago, but the Travelocity workforce has been whittled to around 50 employees in North America with many based in the Dallas area.
The best relevancy algorithm in the world is trumped by preferential placement of inferior results which bypasses the algorithm. If inferior results are hard coded in placements which violate net neutrality for an extended period of time, they can starve other players in the market from the vital user data & revenues needed to reinvest into growth and differentiation.
Value plays see their stocks crash as growth slows or goes in reverse. With the exception of startups funded by Softbank, growth plays are locked out of receiving further investment rounds as their growth rate slides.
Startups like Hipmunk disappear. Even an Orbitz or Travelocity become bolt on acquisitions.
The viability of TripAdvisor as a stand alone business becomes questioned, leading them to partner with Ctrip.
TripAdvisor has one of the best link profiles of any commercially oriented website outside of perhaps Amazon.com. But ranking #1 doesn’t count for much if that #1 ranking is below the fold. Or, even worse, if Google literally hides the organic search results.
TripAdvisor shifted their business model to allow direct booking to better monetize mobile web users, but as Google has ate screen real estate and grew Google Travel into a $100 billion business other players have seen their stocks sag.
Top of The Funnel
Google sits at the top of the funnel & all other parts of the value chain are compliments to be commoditized.
- Buy premium domain names? Google’s SERPs test replacing domain names with words & make the words associated with the domain name gray.
- Improve conversion rates? Your competitor almost certainly did as well, now you both can bid more & hand over an increasing economic rent to Google.
- Invest in brand awareness? Google shows ads for competitors on your brand terms, forcing you to buy to protect the brand equity you paid to build.
Search Metrics mentioned Hotels.com was one of the biggest losers during the recent algorithm updates: “I’m going to keep on this same theme there, and I’m not going to say overall numbers, the biggest loser, but for my loser I’m going to pick Hotels.com, because they were literally like neck and neck, like one and two with Booking, as far as how close together they were, and the last four weeks, they’ve really increased that separation.”
As Google ate the travel category the value of hotel-related domain names has fallen through the floor.
Most of the top selling hotel-related domain names were sold about a decade ago:
On August 8th HongKongHotels.com sold for $4,038. A decade ago that name likely would have sold for around $100,000.
And the new buyer may have overpaid for it!
Growing Faster Than the Market
Google consistently grows their ad revenues 20% a year in a global economy growing at under 4%.
There are only about 6 ways they can do that
- growth of web usage (though many of those who are getting online today have a far lower disposable income than those who got on a decade or two ago did)
- gain marketshare (very hard in search, given that they effectively are the market in most markets outside of a few countries like China & Russia)
- create new inventory (new ad types on image search results, Google Maps & YouTube)
- charge more for clicks
- improve at targeting through better surveillance of web users (getting harder after GDPR & similar efforts from some states in the next year or two)
- shift click streams away from organic toward paid channels (through larger ads, more interactive ad units, less appealing organic result formatting, pushing organic results below the fold, hiding organic results, etc.)
Six of One, Half-dozen of the Other
Wednesday both Expedia and TripAdvisor reported earnings after hours & both fell off a cliff: “Both Okerstrom and Kaufer complained that their organic, or free, links are ending up further down the page in Google search results as Google prioritizes its own travel businesses.”
Losing 20% to 25% of your market cap in a single day is an extreme move for a company worth billions of dollars.
Thursday Google hit fresh all time highs.
“Google’s old motto was ‘Don’t Be Evil’, but you can’t be this big and profitable and not be evil. Evil and all-time highs pretty much go hand in hand.” – Howard Lindzon
Booking held up much better than TripAdvisor & Expedia as they have a bigger footprint in Europe (where antitrust is a thing) and they have a higher reliance on paid search versus organic.
Frozen in Fear vs Fearless
The broader SEO industry is to some degree frozen by fear. Roughly half of SEOs claim to have not bought *ANY* links in a half-decade.
Anonymous survey: have you (or your company) purchased backlinks – of ANY quality – for your own site, or any of your clients’ sites, at any point in the past ~5 years?— Lily Ray (@lilyraynyc) October 24, 2019
Long after most of the industry has stopped buying links some people still run the “paid links are a potential FTC violation guideline” line as though it is insightful and/or useful.
Some people may be violating FTC rules by purchasing links that are not labeled as sponsored. This includes “content marketers” who publish articles with paid links on sites they curate.
It’s a ticking time bomb because it’s illegal.— Roger Montti (@martinibuster) October 24, 2019
Ask the people carrying Google’s water what they think of the official FTC guidance on poor ad labeling in search results and you will hear the beautiful sound of crickets chirping.
Where is the ad labeling in this unit?
Does small gray text in the upper right corner stating “about these results” count as legitimate ad labeling?
And then when you scroll over that gray text and click on it you get “Some of these hotel search results may be personalized based on your browsing activity and recent searches on Google, as well as travel confirmations sent to your Gmail. Hotel prices come from Google’s partners.”
Ads, Scroll, Ads, Scroll, Ads…
Zooming out a bit further on the above ad unit to look at the entire search result page, we can now see the following:
- 4 text ad units above the map
- huge map which segments demand by price tier, current sales, luxury, average review, geographic location
- organic results below the above wall of ads, and the number of organic search results has been reduced from 10 to 7
How many scrolls does one need to do to get past the above wall of ads?
If one clicks on one of the hotel prices the follow up page is … more ads.
Check out how the ad label is visually overwhelmed by a bright blue pop over.
Defund
It is worth noting Google Chrome has a built-in ad blocking feature which allows them to strip all ads from displaying on third party websites if they follow Google’s best practices layout used in the search results.
You won’t see ads on websites that have poor ad experiences, like:
- Too many ads
- Annoying ads with flashing graphics or autoplaying audio
- Ad walls before you can see content
When these ads are blocked, you’ll see an “Intrusive ads blocked” message. Intrusive ads will be removed from the page.
The following 4 are all true:
- Google buys entire businesses, guts them & sells them for parts.
- Google’s core business model is selling paid links with ever lighter disclosure.
- Some SEOs suggest selling links or exposure is beneath them.
- Ex-Google employees leverage their past gains to buy well linked sites like Money.com.
And, as a bonus, to some paid links are a crime but Google can sponsor academic conferences for market regulators while requesting the payments not be disclosed.
Excessive Profits = Spam
Hotels have been at the forefront of SEO for many years. They drive massive revenues & were perhaps the only vertical ever referenced in the Google rater guidelines which explicitly stated all affiliate sites should be labeled as spam even if they are helpful to users.
Google has won most of the profits in the travel market & so they’ll need to eat other markets to continue their 20% annual growth.
As they grow, other markets disappear.
“It’s a bug that you could rank highly in Google without buying ads, and Google is trying to fix the bug.” – Googler John Rockway, January 31, 2012
Some people who market themselves as SEO experts not only recognize this trend but even encourage this sort of behavior:
Zoopla, Rightmove and On The Market are all dominant players in the industry, and many of their house and apartment listings are duplicated across the different property portals. This represents a very real reason for Google to step in and create a more streamlined service that will help users make a more informed decision. … The launch of Google Jobs should not have come as a surprise to anyone, and neither should its potential foray into real estate. Google will want to diversify its revenue channels as much as possible, and any market that allows it to do so will be in its sights. It is no longer a matter of if they succeed, but when.
If nobody is serving a market that is justification for entering it. If a market has many diverse players that is justification for entering it. If a market is dominated by a few strong players that is justification for entering it. All roads lead to the pile of money. :)
Extracting information from the ecosystem & diverting attention from other players while charging rising rents does not make the ecosystem stronger. Doing so does not help users make a more informed decision.
Information as a Vertical
The dominance Google has in core profitable vertical markets also exists in the news & general publishing categories. Some publishers get more traffic from Google Discover than from Google search. Publishers which try to turn off Google’s programmatic ads find their display ad revenues fall off a cliff:
“Nexstar Media Group Inc., the largest local news company in the U.S., recently tested what would happen if it stopped using Google’s technology to place ads on its websites. Over several days, the company’s video ad sales plummeted. “That’s a huge revenue hit,” said Tony Katsur, senior vice president at Nexstar. After its brief test, Nexstar switched back to Google.” … “Regulators who approved that $3.1 billion deal warned they would step in if the company tied together its offerings in anticompetitive ways. In interviews, dozens of publishing and advertising executives said Google is doing just that with an array of interwoven products.”
News is operating like many other (broken) markets. The Salt Lake Tribune converted to a nonprofit organization.
Many local markets have been consolidated down to ownership by a couple private equity shop roll ups looking to further consolidate the market. Gatehouse Media acquired Gannett & has a $1.8 billion mountain of debt to pay off.
McClatchy – the second largest domestic newspaper chain – may soon file for bankruptcy:
there’s some nuance in this new drama — one of many to come from the past decade’s conversion of news companies into financial instruments stripped of civic responsibility by waves of outside money men. After all, when we talk about newspaper companies, we typically use their corporate names — Gannett, GateHouse, McClatchy, MNG, Lee. But it’s at least as appropriate to use the names of the hedge funds, private equity companies, and other investment vehicles that own and control them.
The Washington Post – owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos – is creating an ad tech stack which serves other publishers & brands, though they also believe a reliance on advertiser & subscription revenue is unsustainable: “We are too beholden to just advertiser and subscriber revenue, and we’re completely out of our minds if we think that’s what’s going to be what carries us through the next generation of publishing. That’s very clear.”
Future Prospects
We are nearing inflection points in many markets where markets that seemed somewhat disconnected from search will still end up being dominated by Google. Gmail, Android, Web Analytics, Play Store, YouTube, Maps, Waze … are all additional points of leverage beyond the core search & ads products.
If all roads lead to money one can’t skip healthcare – now roughly 20% of the United States GDP.
Google scrubbed many alternative health sites from the search results. Some of them may have deserved it. Others were perhaps false positives.
Google wants to get into the healthcare market in a meaningful way. Google bought Fitbit and partnered with Ascension on a secret project gathering health information on over 50 million Americans.
Google is investing heavily in quantum computing. Google Fiber was a nothingburger to force competing ISPs into accelerating expensive network upgrades, but beaming in internet services from satellites will allow Google to bypass local politics, local regulations & heavy network infrastructure construction costs. A startup named Kepler recently provided high-bandwidth connectivity to the Arctic. When Google launches a free ISP there will be many knock on effects causing partners to long for the day where Google was only as predatory as they are today.
“Capitalism is an efficient system for surfacing and addressing the needs of consumers. But once it veers toward control over markets by a single entity, those benefits disappear.” – Seth Godin
Categories:
Internet Wayback Machine Adds Historical TextDiff
The Wayback Machine has a cool new feature for looking at the historical changes of a web page.
The color scale shows how much a page has changed since it was last cached & you can select between any two documents to see how a page has changed ove…